In his second novel Twilight of the Gods, Kurt Buameister uses Norse mythology and the figure of the Loki the trickster God to tell a story about the resurgence of fascism across the world. Whereas Baumeister’s first novel, the satirical thriller Pax Americana, insightfully critiqued George W. Bush’s America with a madcap story about Christian fundamentalists, in Twilight of the Gods, Baumeister employs a more earnest tone as he tackles the brutal politics of the present. Loki is an entertaining and comic narrator, true to his identity as the trickster of the Norse pantheon, but beneath that garrulous and ironic charm, there is genuine feeling, not just in his love for Sunshine, one of the three Norns who in Norse mythology are the servants of fate, but also in his genuine love and fear for humankind. “I couldn’t give up on humanity back in the Thirties and Forties,” he says. “It’s the same now. I love you guys too much to watch you fail.”
The events of World War II and the rise of Hitler make up a large part of the worldbuilding of the novel. In Baumeister’s retelling, the Norse gods, led by Odin, championed Hitler and helped him come to power in an attempt to reassert their dominance of the world. This linking of traditional Norse mythology to fascism works not just because of the obvious cultural connection but also because it feels like a conscious rebuke of the Marvel superhero vision of the Norse Gods. Baumeister seems to recognize the inherent fascism in the hero worship of the Marvel version of Norse mythology, and thus he consciously inverts everything, making Loki the postmodern hero whose trickster punk identity becomes an antidote to authoritarianism, while Thor is reimagined as a buffoonish fascistic bro, “perpetually shitfaced on cheap lager, crushing aluminum cans against his head, biting holes in them with his teeth.”
Loki himself, meanwhile, comments on humanity’s misguided desire for a savior: “You guys—and I include myself in this, now—spend so much of your lives hoping for someone or something to save you from death…You want someone or something that can take care of all your problems, wipe away every tear.” Humanity’s desire for a superhero, Loki seems to suggest, ends up leading us to fascism.
Stylistically, Twilight of the Gods is written like a comedic thriller—lots of rapid dialogue and a plot that builds to key action set pieces, including a wonderfully taut and tense scene at the end of the novel in the Boston snow. In this way, the novel is somewhat reminiscent of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, and one can see the influence of the Pynchonesque style—that combination of somewhat goofy satire with an honest assessment of a spreading darkness. In Inherent Vice, Pynchon explored the way fascism slowly and secretly triumphed over the counterculture of the 1960s, and here, Baumeister explores a similar theme through a more mythological and epic lens.
The majority of the novel is set in Germany, but ultimately, Twilight of the Gods is really a story about America. As Loki puts it in one of his somber reflections, “I think about how America won the Second World War and the Cold War; but now it seems like, actually, she wound up losing both, even if we know that can’t be true. Maybe the problem is that war is eternal; that there never really is a beginning or an end, so there can never truly be winners and losers.” Beneath the slapstick humor and the comic buffoonery of the novel’s main narrative, this dark assessment of America’s future lingers. And given the way the last American election went, it’s hard not to feel that Baumeister’s Loki was correct.
