Rot syncs

On December 20, I finished reading Paul Quarrington's novel Whale Music and started reading Laeth's novel The Rot.

Near the end of Whale Music, the Brian Wilson character encounters a stray dog and buys it some food, after which it follows him around, becomes "his" dog, and is very loyal.

Later, very near the end, record-company executive Kenneth Sexstone threatens a police detective by quoting Leviticus to him while phoning his lawyers.

Kenneth begins to dial. "Are you a religious man, detective?"

Hogan considers this briefly, pushing out his lower lip. "Yup."

"Leviticus, chapter 26, verse 21. And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me, I will bring seven times more plagues upon you. Hello, Sexstone here. Legal department, please. I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number. And your high ways shall be desolate."

Then I started reading The Rot. In the second chapter, the narrator also feeds a stray dog which then becomes "her" dog and is very loyal. Then in the next chapter, we read of a priest whose mother, in a state of feverish delirium during the last weeks of her life, "kept repeating what sounded like a passage from scripture, but which no one could identify":

And Israel will not be free from uncleanness, for there will be plague upon plague, and curse upon curse, and every judgment and plague and curse will come upon him who is unclean, or hides his eyes from those who commit uncleanness, or those who defile the sanctuary of the Lord, or those who profane his holy name, then will the whole nation together be judged for all the uncleanness and profanation of this man, and there will be no respect of persons and no receiving at his hands of fruits and offerings and burnt offerings and fat, nor the fragrance of sweet savor, so as to accept it, and so fares every man or woman in Israel who defiles the sanctuary.

The threat of "plague upon plague" is obviously conceptually similar to the verse Kenneth Sexstone quotes, threatening to "bring seven times more plagues upon you." Later, it is discovered that the priest's mother had been quoting the apocryphal Book of Jubilees. Looking up the passage in question in my copy of Jubilees (the 1917 translation by R. H. Charles, which is the version quoted in the novel), I found footnotes saying it was inspired by the Book of Leviticus.

The Rot is about a condition called "the rot," invisible to most people, which spreads until almost everything and everyone in the world is infected. I finished the novel last night, December 28, and then checked the Anonymous Conservative blog. Every post on that blog ends with a link to americanstasi.com, saying "Send people to AmericanStasi.com because . . .," with a different reason given each time. Yesterday's post -- the one I read just after finishing The Rot -- ends with ". . . because the rot has infected everywhere."