MATTHEW
BY JAMES FREY
An excerpt from The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, ©2011 James Frey
Below is the world’s first and only sneak peek of James Frey’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, which will be released through myriad digital, print, and artistic formats on Good Friday, April 22.
The book takes place in modern-day New York City and is sectioned like the Gospel. Chapters are named after their respective narrators, individuals whose lives have been drastically changed by the protagonist and supposed modern-day Messiah Ben Zion Avrohom. Ben’s speech appears in red type throughout the book, a nod toward red-letter Bibles made popular in the early 20th century that printed Jesus’s spoken words the same way.
Early in the story, Ben is working as a security guard at a skyscraper construction site when a very large and heavy plate of exterior glass falls and flattens him. Against all odds and physical limitations, he survives and awakes from a deep coma to discover that he possesses preternatural abilities and may be fulfilling prophecies foretold in his youth. He proceeds to roam the city and surrounding areas, reuniting with estranged family members, shooting buckets of miracle cum into the orifices of a wide variety of women and men who afterward will be happy forever, denounces the Bible and other organized religion, speaks to the entity humans understand to be God and tells them that He isn’t going to save them, warns that the end is nigh, generally has a good time doing whatever he fancies, and advises others to do so as long as nobody gets hurt.
If you’ve made it this far chances are you are going to keep reading regardless of your predisposition to The Final Testament’s subject matter or how you feel about its author. Lots of media outlets have already made and will continue to make a big, predictable fuss about the book’s release. For now we’re just going to shut up, step back, and let you judge for yourself. We’ll have more to say about James next Monday, the 18th, when we publish an exclusive interview with him and a corresponding episode of VBS Meets… James Frey.
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ome people just ain’t made for the world. Can’t fucking take it. Can’t deal with Momma and Dadda and school teaching you nothing and a fucking job with some motherfucking boss going blah blah blah and bills and neighbors and some kind of bullshit church and having a good credit score and a mortgage and getting married with kids and some kind of mysterious motherfucking retirement plan that don’t ever let you do nothing but put more in and get none back. Lotta people ain’t made for it. They the people you see on the streets, in dirty clothes, talking to themselves, screaming on the corner like they demonized, mumbling and crying, they the ones in your family and your town you always scared of and feeling sorry for and making excuses about, the ones you don’t even thinks is fucking human. They is, they just ain’t made like the rest of you and they can’t deal with it so they go to drinking and getting fucking high and being criminal and getting locked-the-fuck-up and just saying who gives a fuck to all of it. People be thinking they’re crazy and be needing some kind of fucking help, but the help ain’t nothing ’cause a motherfucking soup kitchen or some kind of shelter that can’t hold enough or a nuthouse where we get beat or some charity that’s really about motherfuckers’ friends knowing how good they is and how much they care ain’t nothing but bullshit. And don’t even bring up that made-up motherfucker people be calling God, ’cause that motherfucker don’t even exist, and don’t be bringing up all these so-called houses of God, ’cause they more about killing and hating than they is about helping and loving. Sorry to break the motherfucking news if you ain’t heard it, but that’s it motherfucker, that’s the fucking news.
I been living underground for a long-ass motherfucking time. Living underneath New York fucking City, where there’s tunnels, and there’s tunnels underneath the tunnels, and there’s some more fucking tunnels under those tunnels. Some of ’em empty, some still got trains rolling through ’em, some of ’em gots the subways and some of ’em gots peoples. And then there’s some so dark, so goddamn dark, darker than the darkest night, and blacker than what you see when your eyes closed, that most peoples, even underground peoples, won’t go into ’em. And those are the tunnels where miracles happen, where people like Yahya and Ben go and come back something different, where motherfuckers who got the gift go and in the blackness they see. I know it be sounding crazy, but the ones with gifts got to go into blackness, ’cause that’s where they learn to see.
Read the rest at Vice Magazine: MATTHEW – Vice Magazine