Fiction, Reviews

Re:raptured, Better Have Clean Underwear On

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Ted Kluck has written and collaborated on a number of books, but his name isn’t on the book I heard him recommend last month and consequently purchased. That book comes from Ted’s media empire, Gut Check Press. It’s re:raptured by Committee (link updated with new edition). Exactly who wrote it is being withheld, no doubt pending Congressional subpoena, but I think Ted had a hand in it. Maybe even a foot.

The story begins with a young Episcopal priest getting his lights dashed by Tim Van Shrimpy, “Bible Scholar.” The reason Van Shrimpy is rampaging around beating up people is still unclear to me, but realism was sold out when this tale was typed up. Ted Strongbow is a football superstar with few real skills (wait, is this part straight-up parody of actual people?). Rev. Lewis Ironsides has written the book Exactly How to Look and Exactly What to Say If You Want to Marry My Daughter Carol-Anne, which, he says, isn’t exactly arranging her marriage, but it’s a hot item among controlling homeschool moms with eligible sons.

It takes place in a world that has The Honorable Philip Yancey Hospital housed within the Dynex/Lifeway/Excellence in Christian Publishing Kilometer High Stadium, home to the Denver Values football team (Strongbow’s team). The story takes up a whole handful of characters in short, often choppy, scenes that flow together just like the end-times thrillers it intends to skewer. What is bringing all these people together? Their loyalty of dispensational end-times teaching and the belief that they need to be in place before the rapture occurs. But are they mobilizing to be in place to usher in or ward off the rapture?

Continue reading Re:raptured, Better Have Clean Underwear On →
Coffee, Tea, Drinks

The Most Expensive Coffee Anywhere

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I found a new-to-me coffee retailer this morning while casually browsing for coffee-related sites and was surprised to notice a price category for $350.00 – $400.00. What do they offer in that price range? Ten pound bags of Jamaican Blue Mountain? No, this site, named Coffee for Less, offers one pound bags of whole Kopi Luwak beans for $350.00.

You may not think you’re the type to drop over three Franklins on a bag of coffee beans, but wait ’til you hear the reason for the price. Kopi Luwak beans are personally processed by luwaks, small mammals in Southeast Asia, who eat coffee berries off the plant and pass them neatly into a farmer’s poop-scooper, giving them a can-u-believe-it, yowza-yowza flavor!

I mean, who wouldn’t want to eat something preciously prepared by this cute, little guy? Don’t look at me like that. You know you would.

Naturally, knowing you like I do, you may have already gone out for another variety of poop coffee blend from Thailand called Black Ivory Coffee. These beans have been especially excreted by elephants, which produces a reportedly smoother flavor than the Luwak variety. There is a difference, and it may be in the animals’ diets. Luwaks are omnivores; elephants are herbivores. Theoretically, your Kopi Luwak could brush up against some squirrel carcass on its way to your Best Part of Waking Up, whereas your Black Ivory beans may be fondled by foliage. Plus, every cup of Black Ivory comes out looking like this:

Waiter, there's an elephant in my coffee...

That’s straight from the elephant’s mouth, as they say. Who wouldn’t pay $$$$ for that?

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Death of an Avenger

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Yesterday was notable, aside from a Supreme Court decision with which I strongly disagree, in seeing the death of a man who has been a major influence on my life (and who probably wouldn’t have been at all pleased to know it, from what I know of his social views).

Patrick Macnee (1922-2015) is best remembered as the only permanent star of what I consider one of the greatest TV series ever produced, the BBC series The Avengers (not to be confused with the Marvel Comics books and movies). The Avengers appeared on American TV just as I was entering an uncomfortable adolescence, and left me with an enduring love for slender, auburn-haired women (Diana Rigg), and three-piece suits (Macnee).

Yes, it was a breakthrough show for a trope I’m now thoroughly sick of – the delicate little woman who beats up 200-lb men in groups – but it was new and interesting back then, and hey, it was Diana Rigg. I was desperately in love with her.

The show was not intended to be what it eventually became, the spritely, half-comic show we remember. It started in 1961 as a gritty, realistic program. It was a spin-off of a series called Police Surgeon, starring actor Ian Hendry. In the first episode of The Avengers, his character, Dr. David Keel, loses his fiancée, murdered by drug dealers. He is recruited by a shadowy semi-official character named John Steed (Macnee) to help him apprehend the criminals. Keel signs on enthusiastically (it’s his way to “avenge” the woman he loved), but is often put off by the ruthless methods of Steed, who at this stage was as much a thug as a charmer, and had no distinctive style of dress. Continue reading Death of an Avenger →

Authors, Fiction

S.A. Hunt Blends Genres Naturally

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Fantasy author S.A. Hunt is interviewed here on his path as an indie writer.

“With Outlaw King, I was intentionally trying to write a straight-faced fantasy, but as usual my old love, horror, came sneaking in the back door and put its two cents’ worth in. . . . And to me, an engaging fantasy is a story that can effectively leverage well-written horror elements: the Jabberwocky of Alice in Wonderland, the Others of G.R.R. Martin’s books, the totemic Taheen of King’s Dark Tower books and his iconic Man in Black. When a fantasy story has an antagonist that’s almost prohibitively dark and monstrous, a fresh weird monster you love to hate, it really ups the stakes. Weirdness is what gives the creative world its addictive edge, I think.”

He talks about the fact that he chose self-publishing like most people, with the clueless hope for wild success, and he continues to struggle now. “It’s strange. I’ve felt like I was trapped in this bulletproof bubble for the first two years or so, hermetically sealed off from the world, screaming silently for someone to notice me…and now I get the occasional comment from other indie authors to the effect of, ‘You’re an inspiration to the rest of us indies,’ or ‘Thanks to you, I’ve decided to finally push myself and write that book I’ve been wanting to write,’ both of which are something I have a lot of trouble internalizing, but they feel incredible to hear.”

Hunt says the interview went long, so he posted several more questions on his site.

Authors, Religion, The Press

Cheerful, Intelligent Rebuke

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“The ‘Benedict Option’ isn’t the only way for Christians to confront the reality of an increasingly hostile and secular culture,” Andrew Walker writes. A better approach could be called “the Buckley Option.”

If the Benedict Option is about developing a “thicker” Christian community that grows more deliberate about sustaining and catechizing itself, count me in. But if the only result of the Benedict Option is a more aesthetic and intellectual homeschooling movement, then I have concerns about its long-term viability. A Christianity that isn’t simultaneously attentive to both its own institutions and its public witness simply cannot fulfill the robust demands of orthodoxy.

Walker recommends a different approach named after William F. Buckley.

The Buckley Option will sacrifice no space in the social or civil arena. It will believe, as the church always has, that its gospel brings with it good news for society, regardless of whether society believes its message is good or not.

[And it] will recognize that in a fallen world marked by self-interest, democracy is the preferred method for government order. While imperfect, it allows self-interest to be dealt with in the sphere of persuasion, not coercion. Eschewing theocracy, a Buckley Option approach will recognize that the moral ecology of any nation is dependent on a public morality, not a government morality. While the Benedict Option implies that democracy sowed the seeds of its own destruction, a Buckley Option approach recognizes that the seeds of destruction are not unique to any one political system. The moral breakdown that ensues when free people act freely is not caused by democracy, but by the besetting effects of sin that taint all human civilizations.

(via Hunter Baker)

William F. Buckley

Authors, Fiction

What Did Ray Bradbury Believe?

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Gregory Wolfe observes how many tributes to Ray Bradbury praise his humane vision of the world, and he asks, “In order to have a humane vision, do you have to have an understanding of what constitutes humanness?” He says he did. From one of Bradbury’s stories, “We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.” (via Prufrock)

I wonder what the author would have said about Faber’s book of loss and strange new things, in which a missionary to an alien world called Oasis discovers another missionary has preceded him. The Book of Strange New Things is World Magazine’s fiction book of the year.

Below is the Ray Bradbury Tree in Disneyland’s Frontierland, inspired by his novel, The Halloween Tree, and decorated for the season. Bradbury loved Disneyland and even helped design some of the attractions, notably Spaceship Earth in Epcot.

The Ray Bradbury Tree

Fiction, Reviews

‘Monster Hunter International,’ by Larry Correia

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I hadn’t noticed until tonight, but our friend Loren Eaton reviewed Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International over at I Saw Lightning Fall, just the other day.

And here I am, reviewing it now.

I recently reviewed Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles books, so I thought I’d try the Monster Hunter series too.

In brief, not bad. But I think it’s not for me.

Owen Z. Pitt is the hero of the series. When we meet him he’s an accountant, albeit a large and vigorous variety of the breed. One night he’s attacked in his office by a werewolf, and manages to throw the monster out of a window to its death. He’s badly injured, though.

During his recovery, he learns that such attacks are more common than the public is permitted to know. A whole government agency is devoted to dealing with the threat – secretly – and there’s a secret government bounty for each monster killed. The agency has competition – the private Monster Hunter International group, which recruits Owen, who realizes his heart wasn’t really in accountancy after all. Fortunately his soldier father raised him with fighting skills and arms proficiency.

Also there’s a beautiful monster hunter, a member of the group’s founding family, with whom Owen falls promptly in love.

What follows is basically a written version of a CGI-intense Hollywood summer movie. With very short hiatuses in between, one monster attack follows another, each one involving more terrible – and numerous – monsters.

And Owen, it seems, is the key to the destruction or salvation of the space-time universe, because of a series of visions he’s been having.

It’s all pretty overwhelming. I can see why the Monster Hunter books have acquired such a large, loyal following. Many of you are probably among them, and many others of you will enjoy the books if you try them.

But it’s frankly too much for me. I’ve decided I like my books a little quieter, a little more introspective.

There are occasional references to religion, and it’s stated as a fact that faith has efficacy against monsters. Any faith will do, however – the faith itself, not its object, is what counts.

Cautions for violence, language, and not very explicit sexual situations.

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If I smell strangely of herring today…

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It’s because I got a mention at Tony Sacramone’s Strange Herring blog.

Needless to say, I bought it, along with a pristine copy of Wolf Time, as mine is a mess from frequent use. I announced proudly that I “knew” the author, Lars Walker. Gary seemed impressed, and added that the books were now long out of print, betokening some knowledge of Lars’s work.

Read the rest here.

Fiction, Religion

The Great Moby Dick

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R.C. Sproul recommends again the novel he calls the greatest ever written, Moby Dick.

In a personal letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne upon completing this novel, Melville said, “I have written an evil book.” What is it about the book that Melville considered evil? I think the answer to that question lies in the meaning of the central symbolic character of the novel, Moby Dick, the great white whale.

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Book Reviews, Creative Culture