“Fathers and sons, I don’t think they ever know how to be with one another. My own dad is over there in that room, dying, maybe dead by now, and for the last week I couldn’t even figure out what I’d say to him if he came back for one minute. It’s been a long time since we’ve known how to speak to each other. We never fought, or rarely anyway, not like your dad and grandpa, but . . . I don’t know, I wonder if fathers and sons ever know how to be to each other.”
If you like Christian urban fantasy, and good writing, you don’t have a lot of options out there (aside from some of my own books, of course). But I can highly recommend Shawn Smucker’s’ Light from Distant Stars.
Cohen Marah (whose name, unusual for a Christian, is Hebrew for “priest bitter”) is a haunted man, literally in some respects. Long ago, his father was the pastor of a thriving evangelical church. But a moral failing and scandal lost him that post, as well as his wife and daughter, so that he was left alone with Cohen. That was the end of Cohen’s happiness in life, not least because he himself contributed to the tragedy. They left their idyllic small town for Philadelphia, where his father became an undertaker and they lived in an apartment over the mortuary. His father sank into alcoholism, Cohen into depression.
When Cohen finds his father on the mortuary floor one morning in a pool of blood, he fears he’ll be blamed for killing him, as they were overheard arguing the night before. When he learns that his father is not yet dead, but dying in a hospital, and that the accident is being investigated by a detective who happens to be a girl who was his youthful friend, he’s wracked with guilt. Through flashbacks and his confessions to his Episcopal priest, we learn the story of his past, his sins, his resentments, and his shame. Including the time he went questing with ghosts and killed a man.
Light from Distant Stars is a rococo book, fecund with detail that animates the narrative. It’s moving and lovely. (Though I’m unsure how to understand the fantasy subplot.) It’s a book I’d have been proud to write myself. I look forward to more superior work from Shawn Smucker.
Cautions for mature content.