Synopsis

Heaven is in chaos. The Department of the Apocalypse is a shambles, overheads are rocketing and the lead time on mortality isn't cost-efficient. Some consultants have suggested God shakes things up a bit by swapping the roles of the Horsemen - or, rather, Horsepeople - of the Apocalypse. But that only brings its own set of problems. Famine has serious anger management issues, Death creates famine in unpopulated areas where no-one really notices anyway; War uses common-or-garden herbivores and slow-moving mammals to create pestilence; and Plague thinks good wardrobe sense, rather than guns, is a more constructive approach to settling one's differences

To end their misery the Horsepeople call on Satan to stage a coup and return to the way things have always been done. Only Satan, who has always fallen some way short of his mother's high expectations when it comes to being evil, has been grounded and a misunderstanding sees the future of Christianity put instead into the hands of a cleaner. Meanwhile, it becomes clear there's more to God than meets the eye. Just who is Great Aunt Gertie? And what, exactly, was her role in The Creation?

Faced with a plot that's about to implode, Satan slips into Heaven to oversee the coup himself. But he's reckoned without some remote-controlled Lladro, a non-existent metaphorical Trojan horse and some quite dangerous high-heeled shoes.

In the end, God is faces a troubling self-examination. Did He create Man in his image? Or was it really the other way round?

Characters

(7m, 3f, 3m/f)