The Rabbit Room has announced that the great Walter Wangerin, Jr. passed into glory yesterday, after a long battle with cancer. Article here; I haven’t been able to find much other information.
In my humble opinion, Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow is one of the truly great works, not only of Christian fantasy, but of any fiction of any kind. I never loved any of Wangerin’s other works as well as I loved TBOTDC, but that book is so wonderful all by itself that it ought to secure its author’s standing as a great master until Our Lord returns.
He was a Lutheran, by the way.
I see we were thinking on the same things.
I would amend that, to say “the Dun Cow duology,” as the first book only tells half of the story. The sequel, The Book of Sorrows is not quite as good as the first, on its own, but together they are greater than the sum of themselves alone.
Each to his own, but I just didn’t care for The Book of Sorrows. The suffering went over the top, in my opinion, and just unbalanced the plot.