The crowded menagerie includes, among dozens of others, Hitler and Stalin, Satan’s primary lapdogs, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Virgil, Jezebel, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Billy Graham, Ernest Hemingway, Dan Rather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Maurice and Robin Gibb, Snoop Dogg, Al Gore, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanley Kubrick, Celine Dion, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert Redford.
It’s the type of wickedly humorous world where George W. Bush is staked out outside the “House of Virgins’’ as he hunts for Osama bin Laden; atheist writer Christopher Hitchens is caught making out with Mother Teresa; Bill Clinton drops his pants as a standard greeting for all new female arrivals; and the “Evening News’’ is followed by a “Barbara Walters-Oprah Winfrey boiling-tar-pit wrestling match.’’
Of course, Dubya crony Dick Cheney makes multiple appearances, expounding on his political philosophy: “The stupider the president - or any leader - the more power you arrange for him. And the more secretive you make him. Don’t disclose a thing. The insular, unitary leader. Finally he’s got so much in front of him but at the same time he’s so cozily private that even the stupid man who’s too stupid to realize he’s stupid will realize two things. He needs somebody to do the real work for him, and nobody will know the difference.’’
Hatcher also interviews hell’s No. 2 man, J. Edgar Hoover, and Satan himself, “a classic, middle-height, middle-age man with a squarish, slightly pasty, faintly jowly, smarm-ready, white-guy-in-power face.’’
Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winner and creative-writing professor at Florida State University, creates a series of punchy, fiercely written, often hilarious scenes. There are few sacred cows in these pages, and the concept of free will even makes a brief appearance toward the end.
