The Second Coming (Percy novel)

It tells the story of middle-aged Will Barrett and his relationship with Allison, a young woman who has escaped from a mental hospital.

[2] The novel spends much of its content in unspoken but printed dialog of Will Barrett (the principal character) with himself and/or people he has dealt with in his past.

He talks his way through his memories and realizes he is a character who suffers from the affliction that his father had: the belief that life – as most people (including him) live it – is worse than death.

After a literal dark night of the soul at the end of which he is brought out of his drugged stupor by shooting pain from an abscessed tooth, he is figuratively reborn, falling out of the cavern and into the care of a woman who is a refugee from an insane asylum.

This work contains Percy's musings on "ravening particles," a reference to the alienation and anomie the individual feels from both within and without in the absence of faith.