By John Schertzer

What Kurt Baumeister might be asking us to consider in Twilight of the Gods is that even if the gods existed, we might be best off without them. We get a muted taste of that conclusion in Baumeister’s previous novel, Pax Americana, in which an obsessive evangelical spy ends up confounded by the very forces with whom he had allied himself.

Twilight of the Gods is narrated by the Norse trickster god, Loki, who continually claims that he’s been the good guy all along, while it was his father, the great All-father, Odin, who had often set about, whether purposely or not, to ravage human lives throughout history. It was Odin, after all, who had, during recent decades, allied the gods with Hitler, and only out of vanity, simply because Nazism promised to bring their influence back to the world stage, and, most of all, the attention of human beings, after centuries of being neglected by them.

The gods, who have been purged of their powers, perhaps because of their consistently bad behavior, have been brought together by the Norns, the keepers of fate, to bring about Ragnarök. In this version of Ragnarök, however, the gods and the world in its entirety will not be completely destroyed, but will leave us poor humans finally freed of the presence of the gods, who likely never had our best interests in mind at all, anyway.

Loki is skeptical, as he ought to be, since Ragnarök is supposed to be the end of everything including himself. It doesn’t help, either, that he is likely in love with one of the Norns, Sunshine, who to some degree has roped him into this mess to begin with. Meanwhile, Odin wrings tears out of him with sweet memories of old, the adventures they took on together. Family love, at its bloodcurdling best.

There is, however, something else Odin needs him to do first: to foil an assassination plot that Odin himself had initiated. The problem is that the Norns are willing to grant the gods’ powers back to their full capacity as long as they resist their compulsion to meddle in human affairs. But Odin, up to his old tricks and affinities, decides to kill off Greta Bruder, the political adversary of Vekk, his favored German neo-fascist candidate.

Meanwhile, Sunshine goes missing, and Loki is jealous of his human friend, Kurt, who is both an accountant and runs the sex addiction clinic where Loki had bumped into Sunshine after hundreds of years of pining in her absence. Kurt has no idea of Loki’s true identity, only knows him as some black guy named Gustav, who is maybe a bit too old for Sunshine, or Sunshine’s true identity, for that matter, knowing her only as a much younger Sabrina. Yes, Loki’s appearance had changed, fairly radically over the centuries, but Sunshine spots him because of his eyes.

Kurt and Sunshine seemed to have developed some sort of special thing between them, which seemingly vexes Loki, especially since Kurt accompanies her to Europe as she follows Loki and his punk-teenish and Gauloises-smoking daughter Hel (also goddess of death), who has been called to a new version of Valhalla by his father.

As we follow these divinities around, we are reminded of our shared comic foibles and vulnerabilities. This is not Neil Gaiman’s American Gods since we are laughing at ourselves as much as at these monstrous projections we make, how, in our ambitions to improve ourselves and gain fortune, we blind our eyes to the obliteration of others, and how we are, at bottom, lonely and sad, in need of warmth and love, and how even the most amoral and nihilistic trickster in us may exist as a countermeasure to the awful things we let ourselves do in pursuit of our desires.

Baumeister is therefore perhaps more our Aristophanes to Gaiman’s Sophocles or Aeschylus, and poignantly so. Even the Norse gods—the only true gods according to Loki—are beset with limited powers, have their ambitions trumped by fates beyond their comprehension. Things never turn out exactly as planned, and they are often not even on the same page (though they love each other). Odin and Thor might be empowering Hitler’s armies, but the trickster god—not the actual but adopted son—joins the resistance, or so he says.

Even a thwarted assassination attempt may result in unexpected outcomes. Loki insists that these are the only gods, that all others, from Yahweh and Allah to the Hindu pantheon, are mere inventions of humans. Yet, as we can see, they are not in any way to be relied on. The world is as chaotic for them as they are for us. In Loki’s words:

You’re always searching for the alexandrine masterstroke, the one variable that explains many, if not everything in the Universe. Why do you think you’ve wound up following so many nonexistent gods and kooky demagogues? You’re looking for the Universe to give you something it simply can’t. You’re looking for the answer that doesn’t exist.

Those few sentences could be the point of Twilight of the Gods, have in some ways been the point of countless other novels, though rarely given so succinctly. But for Baumeister, it’s just another quip among many, amid his campaign to haunt and entertain you. And entertain, he does. At no point does the reader feel as though they are not spending time with the best and most amusing company, from the wolf-dog-god Fen to gamer giants Surtur and Thyrm. For divinities, they are quite a motley crew, but always good and welcoming, even if they do kidnap Kurt—a possible stand-in for the author himself—and leave him to rot in a dungeon. But only until Loki arrives to straighten things out, to reveal what they’ve been up to all along.

Let me correct myself: Kurt Baumeister may be more our contemporary François Rabelais than Aristophanes, in part because Twilight of the Gods, for all its play at being dauntingly nihilistic, is also a sweet and rollicking adventure story, but one with a moral sense and metaphysics that might mirror our own.