THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS

THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS is a Romeo and Juliet narrative set amid an epic church-state battle on the Texas plains, inspired by true events from the debacle in Waco that happened 1993.

A charismatic, but also very odd figure known as the Lamb gathers his flock to await the fulfillment of God's prophesy for the last days. "In olden days, when somebody said you've gone to Texas, that meant you'd lost your marbles," the Lamb told his followers. "But we're heading to Texas because we ain't crazy."

The novel follows a teenage girl named Jaye and her mother as they leave their California home for the Lamb's compound. Jaye is a smartass kid who doesn't care for rules much less religion, and couldn't understand what her mother saw in the Lamb - whom she calls by his birth name, "Perry" - a landscaper who wanted to be a guitar god and somehow became an actual god instead (to many). But Jaye is looking for something, and when she meets Roy, the sheriff's son, the two teenagers are drawn to each other, even as they careen toward the fulfillment of the Lamb's final, violent visions.

Johnston has written an unforgettable love story but also a profound exploration of the realm between the rational world and the world of belief, between the prerogatives of the religious mind and the demands of human society, between hell and the eternal stirrings of the spirit, set deep in the heart of Johnston's home state of Texas.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally bestselling novel REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize as well as the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and Virginia Quarterly among others. A writer of both local and national prominence, Johnston spent 11 years as the director of Harvard University's creative writing program before becoming the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.