“…the voice of a man holding a door shut against a thing that is already in the room with him.” From the manuscript
For forty years the Rev. Ambrose Mortimer, D.D., catalogued other men's certainties. For twenty-seven of them, at night, behind a door his family knew not to open, he was setting down his own.
The God of This World is the book he never published and never quite disavowed — a learned, patient, and increasingly alarming inquiry into the office of the Forerunner in the present age, built verse by verse and number by number toward a conclusion its author went on re-checking for the rest of his life, in the hope that the arithmetic would change its mind.
He did not write it alone. In the margins stands his wife, Cassandra — a copy-editor by trade — correcting his figures, answering his revisions, right on very nearly every page. They are printed here as they were found, the argument and the answers together, because after thirty-one years there was no honest way to publish one hand without the other.
They left us a tribute that became a reckoning, a work of scholarship that reads like a haunting, and a marriage conducted in the footnotes of the end of the world.
A lifelong archivist who spends twenty-seven private years reading a living public figure into the end of the world — and keeps checking the sums, hoping they will fail.
“That was not scholarship. That was hope wearing a scholar's gown, and it held the pen more often than I did.”
His wife, a copy-editor, answering him in the margins for thirty-one years — unpersuaded, precise, funny, and right on nearly every page. Her half is the book's heart.
“Read this one gently. It is the chapter where it begins to cost him.”
Their grandson, an estate-sale flipper, who opens a locked box after they die eight days apart, finds both manuscripts, and chooses to publish hers — the marked-up one.
“If you read this for one thing, read it for her.”
The Rev. Ambrose Mortimer, D.D. (d. 2026), spent forty years as the anonymous special-collections archivist of a library of religious antiquities, cataloguing other men's certainties and writing the calm official descriptions of them that scholars still quote without wondering whose hand set them down. He held degrees from institutions that have since grown embarrassed by him. He was the author of a great many finding-aids and of one book: this one, assembled privately over twenty-seven years, in love, as a tribute.
Cassandra Mortimer (d. 2026) was a copy-editor, and would have wanted that set down first, ahead of everything else she set down. For thirty-one years she corrected her husband, in the margins of his work and in the margins of his life, and was right, by her own tally and in the end by his, on very nearly every page. Her half of this book is those margins: a second voice running the length of the first, unpersuaded, precise, and funny, letting no conclusion pass without comment. She remained, against the whole weight of the evidence assembled here, married to the author.
Ambrose “Trey” Mortimer III was born in 1986 and raised in his grandparents' house, which he has never left. Under a name that is not this one he has spent a decade making things go viral on the internet, at which he is genuinely good and has never once made money, which is why he still lives where he was raised. His aboveboard work is a channel devoted to the contents of dead strangers' houses, which he values, films, and resells. Clearing out his own grandparents' house, he found the locked box that held this book, and edited it, introduced it, and published it. It is the first thing he has published under his real name.
Calder Ayres is the editor who prepared this manuscript for the press: the last hand to touch it before yours. The role is an old one and a quiet one, older than printing, the work of carrying a text intact from the people who made it to the people who will read it, and adding nothing to it on the way across. Ayres holds that a book is a thing handed down a line rather than issued by an author, and that this one came down a longer and stranger line than most. The name appears here at the family's request, so that the relay would be complete.
Available August 4, 2026 — in paperback and for Kindle.
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