Close your eyes, Christianity. This is gonna hurt a little.

On June 6, 1982, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, two friends are killed on the site of an Ancient Roman temple. Mackland and his best buddy Rafferty make a deal with the god of the place — the madly gay Antinuous, deified boy friend of the emperor Hadrian — that in exchange for continued existence, they’ll go back in time to the Roman Empire and prevent Christianity from becoming ascendant.. To aid Mack in his efforts, he is given the power to summon seven individual pagan gods to help him.

But Gregory Flood isn’t content using the tired old Graeco-Roman gods that everybody knows. He draws his deities from the indigenous — and bat crap crazy — Roman religion and in doing so he goes where no fantasy writer has gone before. You’ll meet Laverna, goddess of thieves and imposters; Soranus, the mediator between gods and mortals; Bellona, goddess of war; Mamurius Veturius, the old man of March; Terminus, the god of boundaries; Mania the Grandmother of Ghosts; the deified Julius Caesar and many more. And you’ll see cameos by Furrina, the goddess of highway bandits; Picus the woodpecker god; Fascinus, the god who protects against black magic; Volta the fire-breather; Caca, goddess of shit (Yes. Really. There was.) and many, many others.

After escaping several near-death experiences, things start to go well for the time-traveling pair: they ally themselves with the pagan emperor Maxentius, they each take brilliant lovers and Constantine’s assault on Italy is rendered impossible (with Olympian assistance). But the devil is in the details. After they suffer separate traumas, the seamless partnership cracks and splinters. And Mack stands alone, with only one Roman deity left in his arsenal, in the final confrontation with the demon-thing our world calls God.