Hank Jones isn’t kidnapped by aliens. He goes voluntarily. What does he have to lose? It’s spring break, 2007. His freshman comp students have taken their bad grammar and bad attitudes to Florida. His dissertation, a semiotic study of package labeling in the 40s and 50s, is going nowhere. And his ex is sleeping with his dissertation director. So when two aliens walk into a bar in Bloomington, Indiana, looking for directions, he’s their man. And they need help, that’s clear. It’s 2007, and they haven’t visited Earth since the 1950s, so their cultural information, like their clothing and their language, is sadly outdated. The android who’s had an Elvis makeover doesn’t even know that his idol is dead. Hank finds himself riding shotgun to Washington and acting as consultant on a mission to save the Earth from annihilation. SECOND COMING is not so much about space aliens but about celebrity in 21st-century America, the seductiveness of consumer culture, the self-destructiveness of the human race, and the very human pleasures of friendship, dogs, and rock ‘n roll.