In this novel, DryCo is facing problems from a mass religious movement centered on the premise that Elvis Presley was a semi divine figure, who performed miracles for believers in his sect.

It turns out to be that of Terraplane, the previous novel in the DryCo quartet, where Abraham Lincoln was prematurely assassinated in early 1861, the American Civil War never took place, and slavery was only abolished by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907.

In Terraplane (1989), it was hinted that the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933, Winston Churchill's death in a car accident in 1931, and the abduction of Joseph Stalin would lead to a Nazi victory in its World War II.

In the Pacific theater, the United States defeats Japan in 1946, but they do so through dropping fourteen atomic bombs on the Home Islands, which reduces the nation to an irradiated wasteland.

This was noted in passing in Terraplane, with mention of an Albigensian Bible and a Valentinian House of God as background detail, alerting aware readers to the survival of Gnosticism in this timeline.

However, Elvis is relatively psychologically healthy and morally sane compared to the intense anti-human pathology of DryCo's world; in the end he risks everything to escape it.