A BookPage Notable Title
Winner - 2004 National Book Award for Youth
Minnesota Book Award Winner - 2005 Young Adult Fiction & Poetry
As a joke, agnostic-going-on-atheist Jason Bock invents his own religion: theworship of his town's water tower. But what starts as a loose congregation of Jason's friend Shin and some classmates soon takes on a power of its own.

Worshipping a water tower

Review by Dean Schneider

In a simply written, swift-moving narrative that won the 2004 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Pete Hautman's Godless explores the nature of religion, belief, power, obsession and corruption. This is heady stuff for a short, young adult novel, but Hautman uses humor and snappy dialogue to leaven his weighty plot.

Teenager Jason Bock has started a new religion. He and his followers worship the Ten-legged One and call themselves Chutengodians, a word created out of Church of the Ten-legged God. Their god is the local water tower.

Why not worship a water tower? Jason reasons. What's more important to the life of the town? What is a more essential compound than water? Chutengodians have an immediate feeling of power and grace when they climb the tower and look down upon creation—the lights of the town, the glow of the horizon, the night sky all around.

What starts as a whacko idea gathers momentum. A new religion calls for a bible, commandments, a High Priest, a Grand Kahuna, a Keeper of the Sacred Text and devotees. But when local bully Henry Stagg is admitted into the inner circle of the Chutengodians, the seeds of dissension are sown and the potential for evil unleashed.

Hautman's funny interludes include Jason's fumbling phone conversation with the beautiful Magda, where Jason, leader of the religion, is reduced to Neanderthal grunts and silences. "I'm glad I'm not trying to have a conversation with me," he thinks. "It must be boring as hell."

A late-night swim in the water tower, a near-fatal fall, arrests and a schism within the church shake up the members, and readers are left to wonder at the appeal of such an unlikely organization. What does each member get out of belonging to it? For Jason, it's the chance to be a leader. For Henry, it's an insidious opportunity for power. For Magda, it's an attraction to tough-guy Henry. By novel's end, Jason has changed only in an envy of other people's beliefs. "I have a religion, but I have no faith," he says. "Maybe one day I'll find a deity I can believe in. Until then, my god is made of steel and rust."

© 2004, All rights reserved, BookPage

Publisher Comments

""I refuse to speak further of the Ten-legged One...but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Why mess around with Catholicism when you can have your own customized religion? All you need is a disciple or two...and a god.""

Fed up with his parents' boring old religion, agnostic-going-on-atheist Jason Bock invents a new god -- the town's water tower. He recruits an unlikely group of worshippers: his snail-farming best friend, Shin, cute-as-a-button (whatever "that" means) Magda Price, and the violent and unpredictable Henry Stagg. As their religion grows, it takes on a life of its own. While Jason struggles to keep the faith pure, Shin obsesses over writing their bible, and the explosive Henry schemes to make the new faith even more exciting -- and dangerous.

When the Chutengodians hold their first ceremony high atop the dome of the water tower, things quickly go from merely dangerous to terrifying and deadly. Jason soon realizes that inventing a religion is a lot easier than controlling it, but control it he must, before his creation destroys both his friends and himself.

Pete Hautman, author of "Sweetblood" and "Mr. Was," has written a compelling novel about the power of religion on those who believe, and on those who don't.