Bad Company: The Horror, The Horror; or, America Is God and Dictel Is Cthulhu

In my previous entry on political horror, I said that in Bad Company and other entries in the Spanner cycle I would depict governments as gods and corporations as hostile alien lifeforms. But then I read this blog post on how government has annihilated privacy (and, just as important, the comments), and I realized: my political horror scenario is real! It is our reality. So the horror elements of BadCo are in fact realistic!

In the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, I'm giving out the big spoiler even before the novel is published. Here it is:

• The United States Federal Government is the Second Coming of Christ, but only in the sense that the cruel and vengeful Old Testament God is returning as the merciless Christ of the Book of Revelation.
• Dictel Corporation is the vessel of Cthulhu; in fact, the world's largest military conglomerate is the ideal form in which the dread god can reincarnate.

Why am I doing this? Because BadCo's big shock revelation will shock you anyway, even if you know it's coming.

But now I know that when I unmask the US government as Jehovah and Dictel as Cthulhu, I'm being perfectly realistic. We live in an animistic world more terrifying than we can currently imagine. My job in the Dictel trilogy is to show it to you and make you believe it. Is this one objective justification for Karl Marx's theory? Sure, and some people will interpret it that way. But now you will know why libertarians and anarchists believe government is evil, and why Marxists and other socialists believe capitalism is evil.

Now my next task is to figure out exactly where in BadCo to put this big revelation...