GODSTUFF:

EVIL GENIUS? JESUS’ S GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDAUTHOR WRITES A NOVEL(ISH)

After three full years of Dan Brown overload, a few months back I swore I’d never again voluntarily type the words MARY MAGDALENE.

Not even if Jesus (aka Mr. Magdalene) appeared to me himself and begged me to give the old gal another chance.

But this was just too good for my inner cynic to resist.

The Expected One, which is billed as fiction (more or less), is sure to be the talk of the town in the days and weeks to come.

At least, that appears to be the evil plan.

Released Tuesday [July 25], the novel, written by Kathleen McGowan and published by Touchstone Fireside (an imprint of publishing giant Simon & Schuster) is another in a long line of Mary-Magdalene-And-Jesus-Were-Friends-With-Benefits books, in the tradition of Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

But unlike the hundreds of other Mary Magdalene books already on the market, McGowan has dreamed up a practically fail-safe marketing hook, one-upping the master himself.

While Brown strongly hints that his novel about Jesus’ relationship with Magdalene is more fact than fiction, McGowan claims to be an actual descendant of the alleged holy couple.

“I don’t want people to think I’m claiming to be some elitist figure in the (Jesus) bloodline,” McGowan told the London Sunday Times last week. “What I’m saying is that Mary and Jesus had children, and after 2,000 years of procreation there are probably millions of descendants around the world. I believe I’m one.”

Sweet fancy Moses, it’s brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?

McGowan says her novel is the result of her 20 years of research about Mary Magdalene and claims to have never-before revealed “source material.”

“Those guarding the tradition of Mary Magdalene opened their doors to her because of her connections to an ancient French family that traces its roots to Mary Magdalene, her birth date, and her possession of a special ring,” the book’s publicity material reads.

McGowan’s author photo on the book’s dust jacket shows her wearing the ring in question.

In the novel, the protagonist, Maureen Pascal, acquires the ring under mysterious circumstances from a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, setting in motion her encounter with the keepers of the “truth” about the Magdalene and the discovery of her familial connections to the alleged holy couple.

While The Expected One is fiction, it’s largely autobiographical, the author says. (Kind of like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces in reverse.)

McGowan can’t “prove” her story because, she says, she has to protect her sources from unidentified persons who would want to suppress, perhaps through violent means, the “greatest story never told.”

Sounds familiar, right?

But lest she be called a copy cat, McGowan and her Touchstone editor, Trish Todd, are quick to point out that the author began working on her manuscript years before Brown published his Code.

“You’ve got to give her credit, it’s a very creative approach,” said Lynn Garrett, religion editor for Publisher’s Weekly, the Bible of the book world. “The whole thing sounds just like a massive marketing ploy. But in publishing, nothing succeeds like success, and if you have a book like The Da Vinci Code there’s going to be tons of imitators, and she’s just put a creative twist on it.”

Publisher’s Weekly gave The Expected One a lukewarm review.

McGowan is no Flannery O’Connor. But then again, Brown is no Dostoyevsky, and he still managed to sell 60 million copies of Da Vinci.

McGowan self-published her novel last year, selling about 2,500 copies before Touchstone bought it and two sequels for a staggering seven-figure advance. “It doesn’t happen very often, when you start reading something and you just know it’ll be huge, and your hands start to tremble,” Todd said. “The hook was there, but if the book hadn’t delivered the hook would have been meaningless.”

Touchstone has sunk another $200,000 into marketing the novel.

“If you can’t have a good book, you can at least have a great marketing plan,” Garrett said.

What’s next in the increasingly Machiavellian world of book marketing? An author who claims to be Jesus Christ, perhaps?

The Second Coming: He’s back and he’s written a tell-all book. Inside the hidden life of the savior, yours for $24.95 in hardback.

“I will not apologize for the fact that I have opposed accepted scholarly practices in telling this story,” McGowan says of her novel. “It is, in fact, irresponsible to accept what was written down.”

Her readers might want to keep that in mind.