A novel so plainly metafictional that it hardly qualifies as such, The Afterword takes the form of a paperback addendum to a recent bestseller that never existed. Playing the part of the newly famous author, real-life first-time novelist Mike Bryan mulls over the before-and-after effects of writing The Deity Next Door, a hypothetical hit whose second-coming premise struck readers with its wry and earnest look at religion in the modern world. In Deity, an unwitting, unreligious Manhattanite slowly realizes that he's a divine figure along the lines of Jesus. While at work crafting the story, similarly unreligious author Bryan envisioned a lightly entertaining way to pose faith-based questions both to frothing Christians and to "the secular market, which doubts whether it's possible to believe The Bible and chew gum at the same time." He goes on to describe Deity as "a real book for readers inclined more to thinking than to either believing or disdaining"; notwithstanding its book-about-a-book-within-a-book premise, that's what The Afterword mostly amounts to. The slim novel's twisty approach proves incidental to its occasionally distracting ends, but Bryan's mix of dry humor and sharp observation makes it more serviceable than flashy. Funny passages drift in surprisingly searching directions, so that a riff on granting a deity the ambiguous name "Blaine" saddles up to the ramifications of angling him as either Catholic or Protestant. Equal parts inspired diversion and wily cop-out, The Afterword's framing device offers nice ways to thread meditations on writing and creation with ideas about surviving and Creation. Providing background on a moment when Blaine levitates a lamp in front of a priest, the author reveals how the crucial scene's theatrical potential almost made him redraft Deity for the stage. Fourth-wall demolition plays a sizable role in The Afterword, but most of it focuses on real questions of how a real-deal deity would be received in an "age of unbelief." Even Blaine is suspicious of his divine lineage, questioning his motivations for miracle-working and wondering whether to tell his wife about his newfound grace. The Afterword is a bit too breezy and frivolous to provide anything approaching real answers, but Bryan poses questions in promisingly inventive ways.