book review

If a new subgenre could be coined for John Kolchak's book, Next Year in Jerusalem, "grim gospel" would be more than satisfactory. Set somewhere in the arid wastelands between Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Gore Vidal's Julian, Kolchak weaves a Hobbesian Palestine where the life of a man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short, especially