In God is Dead’s title story, God is searching — for unapparent reasons — for a boy named Thomas Mawien. In order to find him, God dresses as an injured young Dinka woman, and wanders into a refugee camp in Darfur, Sudan, where Mawien may be. God employs former US secretary of state Colin Powell, on a diplomatic mission and talking like a street pimp, to assist him, but the effort is in vein, and God is presumably murdered by a Janjaweed militia.

The rest of Waterville resident Ron Currie Jr.’s debut short-story collection explores the potential aftershocks of God’s death. Young boys loot, drink, and put each other out of their misery. Masses of people begin worshipping children as their deity. Postmodern Anthropologists and Evolutionary Psychologists start what looks to be the next world war. Throughout this surprising, funny, and often provocative book, Currie imbues his characters with a sobriety that allows his audacious concepts to take root. He’ll read from and speak about God is Dead at Longfellow Books in Portland on Thursday, September 13. What follows is an edited transcript of our e-mail conversation.

What are audience members saying at your readings?
In a lot of ways it’s great — there’s nothing better than having the opportunity to talk directly with someone who’s read and enjoyed and maybe even been affected in some way by your writing. It makes the whole thing real, in a manner of speaking, and insanely gratifying. On the other hand, there’s nothing worse than standing in front of a crowd at some random Borders and realizing that most of them are there not to hear you read but simply because there are seats for them to park their lazy asses. One guy in particular, at a reading I did in Boston, was sitting directly in front of me, thumbing through a guidebook to China. Right in the front row. Which would have been fine, except that he decided that wasn’t quite rude enough and so stood up in the middle of my reading, went to the stacks, and returned with a different book. The only way this prick could have been any more indifferent to me was if I hadn’t been there at all. But, you know, I made a point of remembering his face.

How did your once-“rabid” atheism play a role in writing the book?
The role my atheism played in the writing of the book seems to me, in retrospect, to be at most indirect. The more I read God is Dead, and the more I ruminate on it, the more I realize that my intention, if I can be said to have one (always be suspicious of fiction writers with intentions more ambitious than finishing their work and making it not suck) was really to test the opinions and preconceptions I’ve been carrying around unexamined for so long. Also an effort to figure out where I stand in the world, spiritually speaking, as an atheist. Because even atheists have spiritual lives and, maybe more to the point, spiritual urges. A lot of times I feel like when I’m writing what I’m really doing is transcribing a conversation between several different aspects of my own personality, all of which are at odds with one another. This duality is just one of the many many attributes which make for a good fiction writer but a shitty human being.