Book Review: God, Science, and a Really Dumb Experiment

Reviewed by Eric Mayrhofer

Funny, casually progressive, and unafraid to be weird as hell, Sasha DeVore’s sci-fi adventure delivers one cozy apocalypse.

What if God came to Earth? One pretty famous book already deals with that. As for the others—from Left Behind to The Leftovers—they all paint a pretty dour picture of what might happen if the Almighty made a sudden return to mortal affairs. That’s why Sasha DeVore’s take on the second coming is so refreshing.

Following Alex, a teacher trying to hang on to her last remaining neurons after a burnout-inducing school year, God, Science, and a Really Dumb Experiment catches up with her right as God makes a grand, dramatic entrance that upends life as humanity knows it. 

As Alex navigates a new, divine normal and tries to save the world, readers get to delight in a cozy adventure that mixes all the trippy-ness from the Book of Revelations with a dash of pulpy, weird science to make something wholly original.

The most obvious deviation from traditional, doom-and-gloom second-coming stories is how cozy DeVore’s book is. That’s partly due to the easy, breezy writing style that makes the book such a page turner. DeVore makes everything feel blessedly low-stakes. It helps Alex feel indomitable, giving her a little edge when she needs it. For example, Alex starts revealing the littlest bit of insecurity and resentment when dwelling on her relationship with her mother: “Nothing I did was good enough for her. Wearing flannel wasn’t girly enough. The music I listened to wasn’t classy enough. My career choice wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t have enough money. Not enough friends. Not enough grit. Not enough.” Just as quickly, though, DeVore’s writing helps Alex swoop out of any threat of doldrums. When deciding between the end of days and her mother’s wrath, she says, “I much preferred the apocalypse.”

Speaking of the apocalypse, that light humor is a great counterbalance to what is some truly bizarre spectacle. When God arrives on Earth, courtesy of a science experiment gone wrong (God’s presence explored through the lens of science is great, by the way), reality warps like a Dali painting. Alex describes a lake that suddenly becomes home to “mermaids and a giant lion-turtle, and a more elusive creature I’m sure was supposed to be a Loch Ness monster.” Those are far from the weirdest wonders DeVore offers in her vision of the end of days, though—readers can expect everything from hallucinated cats to giant kaiju ants, but it’s all too fun to spoil here.

And that’s the word to sum up the whole book: Fun. God, Science, and a Really Dumb Experiment is a breezy escape and a fresh take on apocalypse stories that readers will eat up, never regretting they spent a little time having an adventure at the end of the world.       

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