Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome

Winner of the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, the Southern philosophical author Walker Percy wrote two vividly imagined satirical novels of America's future featuring deeply flawed psychiatrist and spiritual seeker Tom More. Love in the Ruins: The great experiment of the American dream has failed. The United States is on the brink of catastrophe. Can an alcoholic, womanizing, lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist really save a society speeding toward inevitable collapse? Dr. Thomas More certainly thinks so. He has invented the lapsometer, a machine capable of diagnosing and curing the country's spiritual afflictions. If used correctly, the lapsometer could make anxiety, depression, alienation, and racism things of the past. But in the wrong hands, it could rapidly propel the nation into chaos. The Thanatos Syndrome: In Percy's sequel, Dr. Tom More, fresh out of prison after getting caught selling uppers to truck drivers, returns home to Louisiana, determined to live a simpler life. But when everyone in town starts acting strangely-from losing their sexual inhibitions to speaking only in blunt, truncated sentences-More, with help from his cousin, epidemiologist Lucy Lipscomb, takes it upon himself to investigate. Together, they uncover a government conspiracy poised to rob its citizens of their selves, their free will, and ultimately their humanity.