Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Publishing

Publishing update

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The Gunderson House, Kenyon, Minnesota, which I borrowed for my new book.

[Thousand Ills That Flesh Is Heir To Dept.: My cold continues pretty much unchanged, like a visitor you expected to come for dinner, who means to stay a month. I still have no voice. It’s a little disturbing to realize that I can actually get through 99% of my day without needing a voice.]

Some of you seem to be interested in the new book, which I’m planning to publish digitally. I thought the process would take a while, but I sent the document file to Ori Pomerantz one day, and he got it back to me, tentatively formatted for Kindle, the following night. I think he’s formatted it for Nook too. The big slow-down may be the read-through I’m doing now myself, and the time it takes for me to whip some cover art together.

I can’t promise a release date, and no doubt there will be delays, but as far as I understand what’s going on (not much), it looks to be available soon.

Eventually, if I sell enough electronic copies, I may be able to get some dead tree books printed.

What’s the novel about?

Well, it’s called Troll Valley (you may recall the name of the place from Wolf Time). It’s set at the turn of the twentieth century, in my default literary locality of Epsom, Minnesota, a small town based on my home town.

The main character is Christian Anderson, a boy from a wealthy family, who has a deformed arm and a fairy godmother.

Major themes include Lutheran pietism, the goodness of God, grace, and the Evangelical-Progressive political alliance of that time.

I’m rather surprised to find, doing my read-through, that I quite like the book. I’m prejudiced, of course, but I think it holds together pretty well.

More as the situation unfolds.

Authors, Fiction

The Offensive Stories of O'Connor

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Jonathan Rogers has written a spiritual biography of Flannery O’Connor. He writes about it here, saying, “People are offended by Flannery O’Connor’s stories, and they ought to be. They’re offensive… [They are] startling figures drawn for the almost-blind… If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe even as he called the self-righteous a brood of vipers.”

Fiction, Religion

Making Culture Courageously

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Filmmaker Anthony Parisi makes some good points in his overly negative review of the movie, Courageous. He writes:

Films like this reinforce the unfortunate impulse that anything we create must be explicitly “Christianized” or evangelistic. Churches are to spread the kingdom not by some sort of cultural revival but by the unglamorous life of local ministry God has founded on Word and sacrament. Making movies falls far outside the bounds of what the church has been called to do.

I sympathize with that first sentence. I chafe at the notion of seeing every cultural good in terms its value for evangelism. But I can’t agree with his next two sentences. Perhaps he means the institutional church should not make movies, and he’s probably right, but the church, as in the whole body of Christ or all Christians, should make movies if they have the skills and talent to do so. That’s what Mr. Parisi does himself or a variation of it.

Andy Crouch argues in his book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, that the only way to change culture is to make culture. Criticizing and boycotting the cultural goods others have made doesn’t go far enough, because we aren’t making anything to take the place of what we don’t like. With Sherwood Pictures, we have a group of people making movies (and movie tie-in material), and I wonder if they haven’t climbed up to a level where the Chesterton maxim applies: Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.

Movies are not teaching illustrations. I felt that strain while watching Fireproof. Clearly, Mr. Parisi would make different movies, perhaps even better ones. Showing more of what Christ did for us and less of our moral lifestyle, as he says, would improve the story, but I think Courageous is a respectable story in its own right. It isn’t a bad film. I don’t say anything worth doing is worthy doing badly to say Courageous is a terrible movie. I mean it’s good movie which could be a lot better, if the producers had pushed toward the things Mr. Parisi describes. “The gospel,” he observes, “pulls us out of our fragile self-worth built on performance and centers our identity on God’s love for us in Christ.” If one of the Courageous movie characters had been shown blowing it repeated and asking his wife and children’s forgiveness, pointing to the grace of Christ in his life despite his sin, that would have been powerful. Perhaps something like that can make it into the next film. I wish them the best on it.

Speaking of movie tie-in material, I encourage you to look into this four-week study on fatherhood issues produced as a follow-up to the movie.

Fiction, Reviews

Redcoat, by David Crookes

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Here’s another book I uploaded to my Kindle for nothing, and it was well worth the price. Not a great novel, Redcoat was certainly entertaining, and it held my interest.

The time is the 1870s. The hero is Jeffrey Guest, a young British officer in South Africa. The son of a poor Cornish farmer who sacrificed to purchase a commission for him, Jeffrey encounters the condescension of a senior officer, the sadistic Spencer Shackerly. When Shackerly is paralyzed and left comatose by a mine cave-in, Jeffrey, also injured, is sent home, where he proposes to his sweetheart.

But Shackerly regains consciousness, and blames Jeffrey for causing the accident. When soldiers come to arrest him, Jeffrey flees, first to America, then to Canada (where he joins the Mounties), and then to Australia. Wherever Jeffrey goes, Shackerly’s agents, sometimes assisted by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, are dogging him.

The story is acted out on a broad stage, and there’s plenty of action. Unfortunately, the author, David Crookes, doesn’t develop his hero as a hero deserves. Again and again, the really decisive actions are taken by Jeffrey’s friends and family, while his uniform response (until the very end) is merely to run away. He’s likeable, but he’s one of the least interesting personalities in the book.

Crookes also shows great weaknesses as a stylist. He falls back on clichés again and again (“mind like a steel trap,” “scarcer than hen’s teeth”), and his prose can be highly infelicitous:

“Angered and hurt, Lucy glowered contemptibly at her daughter.” (The word he wants is “contemptuously,” and “glowered” by itself would have been even better.)

“French showed his rash impatience once again….”

“…a lengthy article exulting the new force of brave young men who were to bring law and order to the untamed Canadian west.” (The word he wants is “exalting.”)

“The most contributing factor to their malaise was the rapidly dwindling supply of food….”

That’s just lazy writing. Such a thing is not uncommon among self-published writers, and Crookes is one of those.

Still, the story moved along and delivered plenty of spectacle and action. I recommend it as an entertainment for readers with a tolerance for mediocre prose. Profanity and adult themes are minimal.

Fiction

Coming to TV: The Adjustment Bureau Series

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The SyFy Channel has announced its intentions to adapt the movie The Adjustment Bureau into a series. The movie was based on Philip K. Dick’s “Adjustment Team”, which was more nihilistic than the movie, and I hope the series doesn’t return to the author’s original intent either. It could gain more attention and viewership by holding their adjustment team members and their chairman to an inscrutable nobility, never doing anything outright evil, but acting in ways the characters misread, even worry that they are good for them.

Fiction

Stretching, Breaking a Genre

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Loren reviews Falling Glass: “Tropes are simultaneously the biggest strength and weakness of genre fiction… Crime writer Adrian McKinty has regularly folded stream-of-consciousness into his hardboiled thrillers, adding a literary tang to bad-men-with-guns tales.”

Fiction

The Initial Outrage at "The Lottery"

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Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery,” begins like this:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

It’s a chilling tale, you may remember, and if you don’t, you can read it all here. I didn’t remember the first outrage to it back in 1948. “‘The Lottery’ was met with much negativity which surprised both the author and The New Yorker, and ultimately caused many subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and send hate mail.”

Nowadays, they tell the same moral in children’s movies. I remember Rabbit in one of the clumsier Winnie the Pooh movies singing about following the map over your own eyes. Ignore your senses; follow tradition and the book–which was to say how ridiculous it is to follow anything but your own senses. But Miss Jackson may have intended far more than that in “The Lottery.” Her NY Times obit states:

“Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.

In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story’s mood.”

Fiction, Reviews

Blind Pursuit, by Michael Prescott

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I found Blind Pursuit by Michael Prescott a very satisfying thriller. It’s one of those out-of-print novels that has begun to show up cheap in e-book format. I’ve had some good surprises with those.

The main characters are twin sisters, Erin and Annie Reilly, one a psychologist and the other a flower shop owner, who live in Tucson. The action starts fast with Erin’s abduction in the night.

Because the author follows her in the car trunk after she is taken, I was worried I was going to have to watch her murder, and I was ready to drop the book if that happened (I have a low tolerance for the on-stage killing of women). But the kidnapper’s plans for Erin are much more complicated than a simple sex killing. His plot is almost (not quite) beneficent and admirable, and his motives are a complex tangle that gets sorted out strategically for the reader, the enlightenment increasing with the dramatic tension.

The characters intrigue, the suspense is genuine, and there’s even a nice twist at the end. Also there’s romance for the ladies.

I enjoyed Blind Pursuit, and recommend it for adult readers.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Book Reviews from The Christian Manifesto

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We got a bit of praise on Twitter today when The Christian Manifesto (tagline “Jesus. Culture. Sarcasm.”) asked its over 1,400 followers where they would go to read honest reviews of Christian materials, if they didn’t have The Christian Manifesto to read? Thank you very much, Tim Motte and Dr. Hunter Baker, for recommending us.

I hadn’t heard of The Christian Manifesto before, and they appear to have a number of music, film, and book reviews. Take for example this negative double-take on Dekker and Lee’s joint novel, Forbidden. “For those of you who thought that Ted Dekker could do no wrong, I urge you to stay away from this book. Live in your land of bliss and read the other countless books he’s put out. If you are a fan of fantasy fiction, this message goes double for you,” one reviewer writes. The second reviewer observes, “Telling but not showing was a problem throughout this novel. I was told Saric was evil, but I didn’t feel his evil. The people lived in fear, but they didn’t seem to be motivated by that fear.”

Here’s another double-take on Robert Whitlow’s Water’s Edge. Sara says, “I have mixed feelings about this book. For the most part, it was very well written. The characters developed at a good pace, with only one major exception.” Fernando notes, “It’s a fairly solid mystery premise, hindered some by having too many uninteresting characters and embracing melodrama too often. It doesn’t help that it chooses the wrong things to be melodramatic about.”

This site appears to be another good reading resource. I should add it to our sidebar.