First, the news item, via the BBC.

Last Thursday, a pack of hungry, killer squirrels (yes, that’s right — squirrels) descended from from on high to terminate with extreme prejudice a stray dog. The stray was, admittedly, annoying the hungry squirrels: loitering around their tree, barking at them with short-lived temerity. When the black squirrels finally had enough, they swarmed down the tree like ninja rodents, attacked the dog and literally eviscerated him.

When some human-folk came to investigate, they scampered off … some of them still clamping dog-meat in their jowls. Read about it here:

Russian squirrel pack “kills dog”

Next, a couple years ago, I was a member of a small ceative writing group at Christianity Today. One of our assignments required creating “hook” paragraphs to grab a reader’s attention and pull them in for a longer story. One hook I submitted (shown below) got a chuckle. Please, enjoy my little exercise in fun. And … remember ….

Life is more creative than fiction.

Subject: Albino Squirrel
Genre: Spiritual Life/Devotional

God enrolled me in a new class on humility yesterday. My schoomaster was a rodent.

As it happens, a delightful little neighbor moved into our backyard recently: A cute little albino squirrel. Sitting at our kitchen table, we’ve all admired his acrobatic prowess, twitchy grace, and near-paranoid awareness of his surroundings.

So, I thought I would be a hero to my daughter by showing her how to befriend a squirrel. Armed with a pocketful of walnuts I brought my little girl out to the yard: “Watch Daddy feed the squirrel a nut!”

The next thirty seconds were a blur. When it was over, the pocket from my jeans was missing, as were — in fact — my pants themselves. I found myself bleeding from my right hand, the lobe on my right ear was nearly bitten off, and I had claw marks running from the side of my face to the top of my head where the “cute” squirrel finally launched itself over the wall. With my pants. Turns out I was the “nut” the squirrel ate.

Somewhere, in the distance, I can hear my daughter’s screams.

(The BBC news story is true. My fake “devotional” is not.)

I had been secretly glad that I’d never been tagged. And I also wondered, just how are you supposed to find out you’re on the hook?

Well. Never mind. There I was ego-surfing my blog, checking out the incoming referrers, wondering who’s linked to me lately, and there I find that Travis Johnson, fellow PneumaBlogger, has done gone and tagged me with the One Book meme.

An enterprising Ben Fernström, with way too much time on his hands, tracked down the beginnings of the One Book meme, wrote an entertaining narrative, and positioned himself as belonging to the 14th generation of this meme’s recipients.

Thus, ultimately, we have Benjamin Myers to blame for this post. I’m the 18th generation of this particular meme, but by a different route (see the note at the end).

:: sigh ::

Well, at least I’m one of the cool kids now!

So, here goes:

• One book that changed your life:
  
  Watership Down, by Richard Adams.
  
  Yes. It’s a book about furry rodents. Yes, the rabbits talk. There is prophecy, a quest for home, games, fights, puzzles and more. All in only 400+ pages. This book, though a children’s story in many respects, changed my life because it initiated me into the realm of addicted reading. I’d already read a lot as a child, sneaking books into my bedroom to read at night, but this was the first book I ever bought with saved-up lunch money from the Scholastic Books program at school. I was in the sixth grade.
  
  I still remember receiving it that day in class. It was a monster of a book — easily 20 times thicker than anything else my peers had bought. And I also still remember the first things most of my friends would say upon seeing it: “What? There’s no pictures!”
  
  First thing I did that day was go down to the school library and ask the librarian to put a protective cover on it for me. Completing that book felt like an initiation. After 400 pages, I truly felt like a reader, and I felt like I had truly entered into another realm and come out changed. I wasn’t just being entertained, I was experiencing a new reality.
  
  And for that I will ever be grateful.
• One book that you’ve read more than once:
  
  Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.
  
  Card is a Mormon writer who successfully integrates his faith with his writing without ever making the work feel preachy, doctrinal, or “religious.” He is, in many respects, my writing hero, and if I ever try my hand at fiction, I hope to follow in his footsteps.
  
  I remember picking up this book off the 7-11 book rack on my way home from school one day, and buying it on impulse because I liked the cover. The fact that the cover has absolutely nothing to do with the story never occurred to me until much later. By then it was too late.
  
  Card’s ability to write a character-driven plot-line that feels like a plot-driven thriller is amazing, and forever changed my view on what good fiction is all about. His books are eminently re-readable, and the child-heroes in his story inspired me as a child and still do today.
• One book that you’d want on a desert island:
  
  Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt (audiobook).
  
  Again, a book I’ve never read, but this time I listened to it. And let me tell you, even if you didn’t like the movie, you really owe it to yourself to listen to this book. It’s read by the author, Frank McCourt, and there’s just something about his Irish lilt reading his memoir that is so evocative, that you totally forget it’s a grown man telling stories about his childhood. McCourt is such a masterful storyteller that he transports you to his childhood. And his story is so touching, that, if you listen just right, even hardened men will cry.

  “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

• One book that you wish had been written:
  
  “Psych! Fooled ya!” (Or, I only meant to illustrate the beauty of Heaven by talking about this place called Hell, which doesn’t really exist. You all should just lighten up.), by Jesus.
  
  C.S. Lewis has said that if there was any one doctrine he would rewrite in Scripture, it would be the doctrine of Hell, but he cannot, because the scriptures are plain. A debate has been raging in my post on Carlton Pearson’s universalism heresy about this issue, and it seems to be as unending as the worm that dies not. Yet, I suspect no amount of arguing is ever going to change Jesus’ actual words.
• One book you wish had never been written:
  
  The Bible.
  
  For me, this is the only possible candidate for this question. The only way the Bible could never have been written is if we didn’t need God to communicate his will through intermediaries — if, instead, he still walked with Man in the Garden, and talked with us face-to-face. Instead, Adam and Even sinned, and we feel from natural grace. I’m glad, though, he has revealed himself to us, and that we do have the Bible.
  
  But it would definitely be a better world had it never been needed.
• One book you are currently reading:
  
  On Writing Well, by William K. Zinsser.
  
  This is, apparently, a must-read for anybody who wants to write well, especially non-fiction. Zinsser is all about paring down writing so that all unnecessary, weak, irrelevant words and phrases are cut from your prose. That doesn’t mean writing has to be curt. Just that every word and phrase must serve a useful purpose.
  
  A lesson I could learn.
• One book you’ve been meaning to read:
  
  The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God, by Dallas Willard.
  
  Ever since I wrote a book summary for ChristianBookSummaries.com on Willard’s Renovation of the Heart, I’ve been a huge fan. I have a couple other books of his on my shelf now, waiting to be read, and this is the first on my list. Willard is brilliant, though a bit meandering in his prose. But every paragraph is worth savoring, and every paragraph promises riches more to be learned and to be changed by. He’s not always easy to read or absorb, but it’s well worth the time to try.

There, that’s it! And now … drum-roll please … I hereby nominate five others. You’re all on the hook to answer the One Book meme, and to nominate five others. The meme has already reached ’round the globe. Will you send it even further? (Yeah, like that’s possible. What are you gonna do now, tag Paul the Apostle?)

• Dan Edelen: Cerulean Sanctum
• Jim Filer: Brainwaves
• Bethany Pledge: Mentionables
• Rob Wilkerson: Miscellanies on the Gospel
• Marc Velazquez: Spudlets

Footnote:

If you’re looking for something interesting to read, Kevin Stilley over at RighteousJudgment, has done some tedious research for you and has distilled the responses of 275 recipients to come up with the top recommended books for your reading pleasure. Head on over and stand in awe of his gold-digging tendencies:

Tales from the Script — The Book Meme Revisited

If you want even more, see his compilation of the books that never got written, but should have:

Publisher’s Take Note ! Here are the books we want…

Finally, to trace the genealogy of this particular post, one simply needs to follow the links back in time to their source. If you’d like to see how we got all the way over here from Ben Myers’ blog, follow the links below. The most recent link in this chain is at the top, and the genesis is at the bottom. Enjoy!

• Travis Johnson
• Dan Ohlerking
• Ben Abu Saada
• Rich Kirkpatrick
• Mark Waltz
• Tim Stevens
• Perry Noble
• Bob Franquiz
• Michael Foster
• Drew Goodmanson
• Steve McCoy
• Garrett Craw
• John Barach
• Steven Wedgeworth
• Barbara Harvey
• Alastair Roberts
• Benjamin Myers

“I finished the novel with the sense of moral contamination that some books leave us with.”

But he doesn’t end there. He concludes his analyses by recounting a review of the 1997 anthology, The Anne Rice Reader: Writers Explore the Universe of Anne Rice, edited by Katharine Ramsland. In his review (never published, unfortunately), Wilson writes, presciently:

In short, there was a profound contradiction at the heart of Rice’s work. And so I concluded that review in 1997 by recalling Simone Weil—”Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating”—and wondering if, having taken imaginary evil to its limits, Rice might be poised to taste the intoxicating waters of grace.

It seems he was right, and the Kingdom of God is better off for it!

See also:

• Anne Rice’s “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” is in hand…
• Anne Rice channels the Jesus you never knew…

I will follow up with a review as soon as I can make it through the book. Assuming it’s not so laborious that it worsens my illness, that is.

So far, the reviews on Amazon are lightweight and glowing.

See my previous post: “Anne Rice channels the Jesus you never knew…”

I was clued-in to this only a few hours ago (October 25), but already the blogosphere is heating up over her latest book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and the print media is not far behind. Sadly, the print outlets are exploring neither Rice’s 1998 conversion (“return”) to Catholic Christianity, nor the depths of her change—if any. If you’re up to the lackluster press, check out Newsweek|MSNBC’s “The Gospel According to Anne,” Canada.com’s review, “Christ the Lord: Anne Rice,” Dallas Morning News’ “Queen of darkness sees the light in new book on Jesus,” and TIME’s “Junior Jesus.”

The Closet?

Many will view this book as Rice’s nicely-timed “coming out” premier because, after all, where’s the evidence of genuine conversion in her work output? I knew when John Grisham converted: his writing dramatically changed. But what about Anne Rice? Is she simply trying to profit from the latest media-circuit bandwagon bearing Jesus’ name, a la The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown, his imitative minions, and a soon-to-be-released major blockbuster film?

Though low-key, Rice has been honest and up-front about her conversion for several years at her website: AnneRice.com. Rice has been planning to write this story about Jesus for several years. In a pre-conversion phone message to fans dated March 3, 1997, she hinted, “I’m working on a new novel about Jesus Christ.” That piqued curiosity—fans wanted to know more. She promptly satisfied their queries one week later, on March 10, 1997:

“The book I have planned on Jesus Christ is a very, very serious book. It’s nothing trifling, it’s nothing disrespectful and it’s nothing satirical. There’s nothing meant to be comic, though I think there’s going to be comedy involved. There had to be some comic aspects in Christ’s life that were expunged by early writers.

And I am going to draw very heavily on a great deal of material, both canonical material, that means gospels that are accepted by the churches, and also non-canonical material, gospels that were long ago rejected by one church or another or accepted by one and rejected by another.”

But that was 1997, when still a pagan. Maybe a seeking pagan, but a pagan nonetheless. Then, late in 1998 Rice re-committed to the Catholic faith of her childhood. Her commitment was deep enough that she remarried her husband of nearly 40 years, and—there’s a hint of irony in Rice’s report—within two weeks of her re-commitment and remarriage, she nearly died from a diabetic coma. Within four years, in 2002, her husband, poet Stan Rice, died of a brain tumor. Two years later (2004), Anne again nearly died again due to intestinal blockage. Finally, earlier this year she abandoned her beloved and iconic New Orleans home for California. (And those are only the travails Rice’s been public about.)

Through it all, she has worked on this book (with the majority of her research occupying the last three years), wrote the closing chapters of her Vampire Chronicles, and attended Mass and Communion every Sunday—though often at different churches.

The Metamorphosis

So, for the last six months she’s been dropping hints on her website, and warning her fans: “You may not want what I’m doing next,” because since coming back to faith, her thinking and source of creativity have been tainted. Or purified, if you will. She told her fans on July 4, 2002:

I went back to the church in 1998. I was reconciled with the church and I did a kind of violence to my mind. Maybe a blessed violence, maybe a divine violence, but definitely a violence. I did a violence to my creativity. I have written two books since then, three books actually, Merrick, Blood and Gold and Blackwood Farm. But my mind is still undergoing some sort of Synthesis.

I work all day on my book and then I go out and read the Bible on the deck and I know what many of you are thinking that probably this is the end of me as a sensuous writer and the end of me as a transgressive writer but I don’t think that is true. I do think I will come out of the closet as a Catholic writer. But I think I’ll come out as a radical Catholic writer and I am not sure yet what all that will mean.

A year later, Rice has firmed-up her process of “Synthesis,” and has come to a decision. The Dallas Morning News reports:

“I was sitting in church talking to … [God] about it and I finally realized there was no holding back anymore. … I just said, ‘From now on it’s all going to be for you.’ And the book I felt I had to write was the life of Christ. … When my faith was given back to me by God, redemption became a part of the world in which I lived. And I wasn’t going to write any more books where that wasn’t the case. You do not have to be transgressive in order to achieve great art.”

And this is what she told her fan base on January 13, 2003:

I feel a great change coming in my career. In fact, I know it’s coming. The book I’ve written, the book that will appear in 2003 in the fall. It will be the last of the vampires and the witches. It will be the very end. …

That book at the end of 2003 will be the last one with which I approach the altar of God in convolution. There will be no more after that one … there will be no more. There may be life for Lestat, my vampire hero, there may be life for the Mayfair witches; there may be life for them, but they’ll be on television or in the movies. I have great hopes for television, and what might do. But the books won’t come from me anymore. Something entirely different will come. Something much more direct. But that last book will be published in October.

The Book

So, how have this return to faith and subsequent trials shaped Christ the Lord?

Pro:

The skepticism, so far, has been limited to the blogosphere. But Canada.com assures us, “Rice starts from a position of absolute faith in the divinity of Jesus,” and TIME knowingly remarks, “The orthodoxy shouldn’t be surprising.” (Here, I want to put “queer quotes” around “orthodoxy,” as if secular media would ever recognize such a thing. My snide comments will suffice.)

Naturally, the most fulsome praise is found on Rice’s own website. In a personal note to Rice, the Rev. Joseph Cocucci, Director of Priestly and Religious Vocations in the Diocese of Wilmington, wrote:

As to the potential effect of Christ the Lord on readers: those who already know and love Jesus will find images and scenes to feed and deepen their prayer; those who know little of Jesus may be attracted and enticed to draw closer to him; those who do not know him at all or who up to this point have resisted him may find themselves wanting to learn more about him. No matter where one stands in relationship to Jesus, he or she will not stand in exactly that same space after reading your book.

You’ve actually done some great work for the Kingdom! I find the possibility of your fan-base becoming more acquainted with Jesus Christ a tremendously good thing, and most likely the reason God gave you such prodigious talent in the first place.

Anne Rice agrees: “My life has led to this book.”

Add to that, faint praise from the theologically slippery Emergent church leader, Brian McClaren:

Throughout history—from the DaVinci Code and the work of Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor, back through Pilgrim’s Progress and the Divine Comedy to the parables of Jesus—fictional narratives have been important ways for authors and readers to explore matters of ultimate concern.

Anne Rice here places herself in this rich tradition. Yes, this portrayal of Jesus will engender controversy—but it will also convey a sense of the political, social, and religious milieu into which Jesus came, which will in turn shed new light on the meaning of his teaching, life, and passion.

Highly recommended!

Also, according to the Dallas Morning News, Rice’s intent is evangelistic: “[H]er greatest hope for people reading Christ the Lord is that they will at least begin to think about Jesus, if not come to believe in him.”

Having spent three years in research, laboring through every book on the life of Christ she could find (yet being strangely stymied by terms like “ontological,” “epistemological,” and “hermeneutical”!) and watching every movie about Jesus ever made, Rice is confident her book will accurately depict the kind of life-experiences the son of a carpenter might have experienced in 1st century Palestine. (See some of the books she read, and later reviewed, in Rice’s Amazon.com reviews.)

Also on the plus side, Rice recognizes that not all the “historical Jesus” crowd acknowledges Jesus’ divinity: “Some of the people in New Testament scholarship don’t hide their bias at all. They’re just out to prove Jesus wasn’t God, but of course that’s impossible to prove.” Rice further notes that historians are kinder to Hitler than to Christ, granting Hitler at least a little mystery, power, and mysticism.

In a bloodless attempt at criticism, the Dallas Morning News includes this nonsensical quote from Adam Becker, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at NYU:

“[Rice] seems to be attacking some kind of liberal, PC bogeyman. … But the majority of historical Jesus scholars are Christian and affiliated with the church in some way. She criticizes fashionable notions, yet she’s basically saying it’s fashionable to be a Christian.”

It’s not useful, here, to criticize the critics, but if this is the best, most authoritative critic the Morning News could find, then there must be a lot of substance to Rice’s book.

To further bolster the positive, Rice’s Jesus is unquestionably divine, and she rejects theories that Christ was married or merely a political revolutionary. Aside from speculating the on unknowable (and inflammable!), Rice’s biggest challenge is not simply portraying “what would Jesus do,” but rather, “what would Jesus think.”

Con:

Unfortunately, Rice is not as restrictive in what she considers content useful for sound speculation as Evangelicals would like. Her goal is laudable, but I think she casts far too wide a net in searching for historical data. While striving to be “accurate according to all the records we possess,” (emphasis added) Rice might have done well to filter out the junk and reject outright fiction. For example, see what is reported about content on page one:

…a bully comes after the 7-year-old Jesus. “I felt the power go out of me as I shouted: ‘You’ll never get where you’re going.’” The bully falls down dead. Later, Jesus resurrects the bully, having made his point.

This is inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, not included in your standard Evangelical canon of divinely inspired literature. And not typically considered an authentic gospel or historical account. This is a work dated around 150 AD, describing how Jesus learned to use his divine powers for good (…and not for evil? What is he, Spider-Man?). Here’s the passage that seemingly inspired Rice:

Next, he was going through the village again and a running child bumped his shoulder. Becoming bitter, Jesus said to him, “You will not complete your journey.” Immediately, he fell down and died.

(From Andrew Bernhard’s translation.)

Now, if you’re truly being faithful to the legitimate Gospel records of the nature of Christ both as the only perfect man and as the fully divine Son of God, this is not the passage you’d want to start your book with. This passage, and Rice’s extrapolation, don’t show a perfect pre-adolescent Christ growing in knowledge, wisdom, grace, and favor with God and man. Rather, this is speculation about a socially inept, rage-addled second-grader who bullies others, has the power to murder, and the power to avoid consequences.

So, despite Rice’s orthodoxy in matters of divinity, I’m not all that confident about her speculation on Christ’s humanity. Though he was a man, Christ was perfect in every way. This scene wins no awards from me.

What Would Anne Rice Think (WWART)?

Rice’s father studied to become a priest, and when she was 13 she wanted to be a priest, too. Since that was impossible, she wanted to be a nun. But by her first year in college in 1960 Rice lost her faith in God, and “…in losing my faith, I lost my whole view of the world. My whole rich and hopeful and really lovely view of the cosmos as a just place, in which nobody’s suffering was ever wasted or lost. In which God knew every tear that was shed.”

After calling herself an atheist for 38 years, and simultaneously exploring the bounds of sexuality, sado-masochism, the occult, Wicca, and various world religions, she came to “Christian” faith in November/December 1998. That kind of event usually presages dramatic and often immediate changes, but in 1999, not long after returning to the Church, Rice admitted, “I obviously have radical sexual views. … I see bisexuality as strength; I see it as deeply honest and powerful.”

Contrary to most conservatives, Rice is “okay” with homosexuality. It’s not hard to empathize, since her son Christopher Rice, a successful author in his own right, is openly gay. However, Anne Rice is not merely tolerant of the gay lifestyle, throughout her fiction she virtually celebrates it, and she has become something of an iconic hero for the gay, lesbian, and transgendered movements. And, significantly, this hasn’t seemed to change much since returning to the Church. Rice admits she has examined the New Testament several times, and she simply doesn’t “see any place where Christ says you can’t be gay. I haven’t found that.” (Of course, Christ doesn’t explicitly address vampirism, either, so “Hurray for Lestat!”) Gay marriage is a “non issue,” and somehow, despite the impossibility of gay procreation, homosexuals have contributed to the evolution of mankind:

Gays have nothing to do with the ills of our society. On the contrary, we find them everywhere playing positive roles in the arts, in education, in the military, in politics, in teaching. And we are coming to understand that they have always been with us, perhaps in the same proportions, in every society on earth—a percentage born apart—playing some significant role in the evolution of the species with regard to their special gifts.

As one reviewer wrote, Anne Rice’s return to Christianity is not simple. Indeed, it is “colored by her emphasis on appreciation of the pleasures of the physical world and on the ultimate importance of human accomplishment.” (From: Literary Encyclopedia: Rice, Anne.) Let’s just hope Rice’s Jesus won’t double as an extra for “Gay Eye for the Straight Jewish Guy.”

The Blogosphere

• Jason L. S. Raia, at Intellectuals, Inc., gives Christ the Lord a big, big “thumbs up.” Consider these gems of effusive praise, “This is not just good writing, but it draws on Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual practice of Biblical contemplation.” and “Christ the Lord is a gift—to the Church, to believers and non-believers alike. Everyone who wishes to know more about Jesus should read this book. Everyone who wants to know about first century Israel should read this book. Everyone who enjoys a good story should read this book. In short, everyone should read Christ the Lord—Out of Egypt.”
  
  
• Rcksteroni, at Brutally Honest, hopes Rice’s conversion is genuine, that her faith remains, uh, faithful, and that her readers will follow her footsteps. Well, we don’t really know where her footsteps lead, yet, do we Rckster?
  
  
• Terence, over at the aptly named, Terence’s Blog, isn’t happy. He figures this book is going to be: “Fun. Yeah. Fun like a stick in the eye.”
  
  
• Over at The Drudge Siren, Jon gets points for the best headline: « Anne Rice Finds Jesus, Jesus “Skeeved Out,” Hiding ». He’s bracing for the Evangelical and Fundamentalist backlash: “Somewhere, angry sermons are already being written. They’ll be given an action-prior-to-the-snap penalty, as I guarantee you this’ll be condemned well before anyone reads it.” Maybe so. The secular press, however, is loathe to touch the religious aspects with a ten-foot pole. We’ll see what the conservatives do. (I just heard my employer will be publishing an article on her next month, I’ll link that that when it’s available.)
  
  
• Josue Sierra, at Latino Issues, A Conservative Blog,” is a little torn: “I would not put any faith on her doctrinal accuracy.” Yet, on the other hand, “considering her ability to research, [this] should be a fascinating work.” In the end? “I’m curious.”
  
  That Josue. Such a conservative latino blogger.
  
  
• I like Jon Allen’s conclusion the best, over at Seldom Wrong, Never in Doubt: “[This book] will keep Jesus on the media’s front burner. We are all for confrontations between lazy secularists and that second-temple Jewish prophet who was crucified and by all accounts rose from the tomb. This book will reopen the discussion in coffee houses, break rooms and dormitories all over the global village.”

The Conclusion

When I get a copy of the book, I’ll review it here. But meanwhile, I’d recommend the book for anybody who wants to stay informed about the latest pop-culture Jesus hoopla. Rice’s book will surely raise a lot of questions which the Evangelical world must formulate answers for, but it’s likely this will also be a service to the Church, like Mel Gibson’s recent movie was. As with The Passion of the Christ, there may be much to criticize, but it’s certainly possible (even likely) that the Holy Spirit will use this woman, her career, her grief, her influence, and her books to affect a whole swath of people for Christ who would never have considered him otherwise.

Otherwise: approach the book with caution.

Rice says that from here on out the Vampire Chronicles and Witches and etc. are kaput, and she’s only writing for the Lord. May this be the first of many works of art inspired by Divine grace. May it be so. But, regardless, you’ll likely need to alert to avoid the liberal theology in her works for some time.

10/26 Update: Donald Sensing over at One Hand Clapping has a good analyses of the flaws in Rice’s selection of material for her background material, especially in her treatment of Christ’s miracles and their meaning within a narrative context. Worth the read.

11/02 Update: John Wilson, over at Books & Culture, highlighted a great article from The New York Times by Laura Miller: “The Coffin Was Too Confining.” Worth the read, it gives some more background behind Rice’s life, her relocation, and her personality. One great quote: “Ms. Rice, however, does not suffer casual observations. ‘Only people who don’t know my books,’ she said gravely, would perceive the change as a major shift. A clumsy question about demons provoked an icy response: ‘I never wrote about demons. Have you ever read my books?’ In particular, Ms. Rice bristles at the notion, held by some ill-informed persons, that her vampire books are light amoral entertainment. ‘I think they’re very Christian books,’ she insisted, ‘by somebody outside the church, lost in the darkness, striving to find meaning and sometimes being rebellious.’”

11/04 Update: My colleague (and savior of my cats—but that’s a different story), Stan Guthrie, found a distribution number that conflicted with mine. I said 500K, he said 325K. I figured he was right, but all my sources said 500,000, including the Dallas Morning News, and Publisher’s Weekly. I looked again, and found that PW had both numbers. Stan called Knopf and got the right number. Knopf’s confidence in Rice’s popularity has hereby been downgraded to a first-print run of $325,000. Still, if Knopf manages to squeeze $20 out of each copy, that’s a cool $6.5 million dollars in revenue.

Jennifer and I have tried to catalog just the books I own (forget about the books I read—the library has saved me thousands of dollars!), but it’s too hard to keep up. That’s not brag: I’m a bibliophile. I naively collect more books than I can possibly read. We can’t even finish the project we started four years ago.

:: sigh ::

I asked my public library if they’d print out a list of the books I’d checked out from them. No dice. Or so they say. I’m sure, though, John Ashcroft or his successor have a tidy little list on file somewhere, under my name and a grainy photograph with sticky notes about rodents and my suspicious literary patterns. Or fundamental lack thereof.

If I could only get my hands on that list, I could stop buying the paperbacks I read in hardcover and don’t really need to buy again because they weren’t all that memorable to begin with.

:: Here, Jennifer sighs ::

So, here’s a few of the books I remember reading in the last month or so, with brief comments (because, sadly, I really don’t have time to write more).

Just tonight, I finished an old goodie, David Morrell’s Fraternity of the Stone. I remembered this as a thematic companion to his other classic Brotherhood of the Rose, and I loved both books when I read them years ago.

Brotherhood ofthe Rose, by the way, clued me in to a trivial bit of information about the rose I enjoy: the rose has long been used as a symbol for utmost secrecy. It has been suspended above parliament, to indicate that all the proceedings conducted “under the rose” (sub rosa) were to be held in the strictest confidence. Its history goes back even further, to Roman mythology.

My wife and I used this symbol in our wedding: when we knelt at the prayer bench to pray after our vows—we implied that the deepest part of our own shared intimacy would be witnessed by God alone.

I’ll have to re-read that one.

Fraternity of the Stone, meanwhile, got picked up at the library for 25–cents, and it was as good a read the second time as the first. Morrell is one of the best at writing action/thriller/intrigue stories.

This plot line revolved around a boy who witnessed his parents’ terroristic-style killing, who grew up seeking vengeance, becoming an adept and fearsome terrorist-hunter—until the day he realizes he has become what he hated, has a religious epiphany, and joins the Carthusian order of monks to save his soul. The surface conflict revolves around an attack on the monastery and his life, and his subsequent return to the killing field for answers.

The deeper conflict, however, is between the protagonist and his own soul-searing efforts to excise the cancer of murder that eats at his conscience. The novel is an intriguing blend of action and thoughtfulness that only the best writers can handle without seeming heavy-handed. Morrell does wonderfully. And despite its age, it holds up very well, especially in light of current concerns over terrorism and assassinations. Nonfiction: If you ever want to read a great book on the writing process and the writer’s mind, you should check out Morrell’s book on writing: Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at His Craft.

Prior to Morrell’s book, I finished Black: A Novel, by Christopher Whitcomb, a true-life 15–year veteran of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, who earlier wrote a memoir titled Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, about his career as an HRT operator, carefully edited by the feebies, I am sure. I had mixed expectations about this book: professionals who truly write what they know don’t always make a successful transition to the fiction realm. Whitcomb did a passable job.

It wasn’t a bad read, but the “jaw-dropping surprise ending” left a lot to be desired. Sure, the anti-terrorism, technology-will-save-us-or-damn-us, adrenaline-pumping vertical-coffin entries where all there, but Whitcomb never rises to the level of thoughtfulness of Morrell, the commentary of Crichton, the savvy of LeCarre, or the wry humor of Childs. But, for a first novel, it was an excellent start. I just wish the ending had been more level-headed.

I felt cheated.

Prior to Whitcomb, I read Joel C. Rosenberg’s latest offering, The Ezekiel Option. This is the third in a stellar series including The Last Days, and The Last Jihad. Couple interesting things about Rosenberg and these books: Rosenberg is a Christian who was raised Jewish, he has worked as a senior advisor for for the White House and for Benjamin Netanyahu, and currently writes political analysis (see his website, especially his weblog). See the interview conducted by his current publishing house: Tyndale House Publishers.

In Rosenberg’s case, writing what you know starts looking eerily like prophecy. In his first book, he featured a hijacked plane used as a terrorist device … before 9/11. (Including a few other items presaging real events happening in the Near East.) It’s amazing stuff. And, get this, these are among the few books written by a Christian featuring truly Christian characters that is actually worth reading. Forget the Left Behind series.

Read these books. They’ll knock your socks off. I guarantee it. If not, send me your socks by mail and I’ll wear ‘em.

Prior to Rosenberg, I read an old Robert Ludlum standby, The Prometheus Deception, another post-cold-war intrigue novel that I am convinced had to be the plot genesis for the TV series: Alias. You have the brilliant polygot college student recruited to covertly fight for the good of the country. You have a deep black intelligence agency, The Directorate, that purports to be a very secret branch of the CIA—but which really isn’t. (Or … is it?) You have the agent who winds up working for the real CIA in order to uncover and destroy the fake agency. You have the double-dealing where you’re never sure who’s really CIA, who’s not, and—gosh—what the heck is our tax money paying for anyway? There are also strong echoes of Ludlum’s three Bourne novels (The Bourne Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum … uh … and Lustbader’s send up: The Bourne Legacy).

I was so impressed with Ludlum when I was a teenager. Now, I suppose, I’m jaded. I’ve given him four recent reads lately, and they all seem cut from a template. Boilerplate. I think he did them in his sleep. Save yourself the effort, and watch Alias, instead.

Let’s see … prior to Ludlum this month, there are a few other hazy books in my mind, but only two stand out. The first is Dean Koontz’ co-written second of a series of novels featuring a modern-day Prometheus: Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, Book One: Prodigal Son; and Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, Book Two: City of Night. Despite my utter distaste for the bulk of the “Horror” genre, Koontz (alongside Stephen King) is one of my all-time favorite novelists. He weaves such great themes together, is deeply thoughtful about theological and moral implications in his stories, and has a soft spot for dogs and children with handicaps. Plus, he’s so danged prolific he can keep me busy reading just his oeuvre alone.

I was nervous about picking these books up because anything that requires the author’s name in the title for marketing purposes probably exhausted his involvement right there. Both novels have different contributor bylines (book one: Kevin J. Anderson; book two: Ed Gorman), and I have no idea who the writers are. I’d like to know more about these books and their co-writers because the writing clearly has Koontz’ imprimatur all over it, and the stories don’t seem to suffer for another writer’s involvement.

If you like Koontz and weren’t sure if you’d like these books, don’t worry. Go fetch ‘em. You’ll like.

Finally, the other book that stands out in my foggy plot-saturated brain, is The Traveler, by the enigmatic John Twelve Hawks, about whom the book jacket says nothing except that he lives “off the Grid.” This is probably the best debut novel I’ve read in years. It’s a gritty blend of martial arts, contemporary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, metaphysics, intrigue, dystopianism, and technophobia all rolled into one. I really don’t have the time or space to give a decent review the book deserves, so I suggest you click over and read the Bookreporter review instead. As the reviewer says, you don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to get into this novel. It’s got a little something for everybody. It’s already been optioned for movie rights by Universal (not that this means anything, just that nobody else gets the movie made and earning the big bucks while studio execs get to bicker over the script and multiple successive and parallel rewrites), and is creating quite a buzz (or hype, depending on your point of view).

After you read this, you’ll never think about the panopticon the same again.

Now, it’s time for me to personally get off the Grid. G’night.

I’m harboring an armed and dangerous man,
a merciless killer, a monster, and he’s inside me.

This is a disturbing book, and it’s haunted me for the days since I first read it. I’m a veteran fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, murder & suspense reader, so there isn’t much that’ll make me put a book down in the middle of a page, take a deep breath, exhale and close my eyes. This book did.

Burke Devore is a desperate, angry man, deeply frightened at the prospect of personal and professional worthlessness now that he’s been handed the pink slip and “chopped” from middle management at the plant he gave twenty-plus years of his life to.

I’ve always imagined life is a series of identity crises punctuated by moments of boredom now and then. Any major change can precipitate a crisis: birthdays, breakups, graduation, accidents, college, marriage, kids, bereavement, new jobs, and the loss of old jobs.

Devore has a major identity crisis on his hands. He lost this job, and decides to manage his crisis rather… aggressively. After a dozen fruitless interviews, rather than take unemployment sitting down, Devore decides to thin the ranks of his competitors by hand.

The scheme and plot Westlake builds out of this angst seemed all-too-real for me. I recognize, in Devore, a portrait of my next door neighbor, my boss, maybe even myself — if I were pushed farther than I could cope.

After 329 pages of forced identification with a protagonist whose actions I found repugnant, author Donald Westlake finally reveals his hand. In three deft paragraphs Westlake outlines the premise for his story that, if true and if accepted, lead to the logical moral outcome the preceding 328 pages painfully described.

Briefly put: if ends justify means, then there is no action so violent, no moral code so abhorrent and no transgression so felonious that it cannot be endured or even embraced. Indeed if ends justify means then self preservation (whatever that means to you) is justification enough for even the most inhumane act you can imagine.

In the end I realized this book is a satire, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. The book is a joke, a dark, macabre joke, and despite the “billboards” hung out before even page one, I very nearly didn’t “get” it.

Don’t leave this book laying around for your children to read, Avoid it if you take anti-depressants, and don’t read it if your stomach can’t handle a large cup of dark-roasted satire. But if you like to think about stories after you read them, then this book’s for you.

Okay, I’ve got to admit up-front that the premise is hokey: What do you get when a telepath suffers the loss of his family to a serial killer’s madness? You get this book—which initially reads like a first-novel, but does pick up somewhere along the way. The plot is adolescent, but the character development isn’t too bad, and by the end of the novel I was really into it. Part of it may be a continuing childhood fantasy that I can read minds. (No, I know that I can’t, but I think my wife can…. And the cats? Don’t get me started.)

This book reminded me that it wouldn’t be such a great trip to have that ability. It would be a curse.

The primary protagonist is a little hard to identify in this story; I guess, really, there are two. The elusive telepath (who hunts down serial killers), David Vandemark, and the FBI agent wasting his career by tracking him down, Ira Levitt. In the first half of the book the antagonist almost appears to be the FBI agent, but later (after discovering a truly evil malignancy in New York—surprise?) they team up against an antagonist of governmental proportions.

Overall, it’s a decent, fast read. There’s a lot of violence (we’re talking about serial killers and a guy who hunts them down) and at least one sex scene that I can remember. In a critical scene, one protagonist believes he’s on mission from God, but the author doesn’t take that anywhere and Judeo/Christian “worldview” never shows up again (despite Ira Levitt’s yiddishims).

This is a phenomenal read! While I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat throughout the whole book, it was surprisingly satisfying.

I initially bought this book on the enthusiastic recommendation of a Hasting’s clerk. So, I wound up being leery of it for some reason — and then it languished on my shelf for more than a year. Maybe two. So, when I was finally low on reading material I gave it a try. I was very pleased and am now serious about chasing down other Follet works.

The main protagonists are Tom Builder and his stepson Jack Jackson. (Follet is probably not lecturing on the “interesting names for your novel’s characters” tour.) Tom’s lifelong’s vision is to be appointed master builder of a cathedral church, and everything is set against him living this dream. Losing work, wife, and child he presses on. As tragedy leads to tragedy his stepson helps Tom become master builder: Jack burns a monastery church to the ground.

Several disparate characters’ lives are masterfully woven together while the monastic Catholic church and a war-torn medieval England serve as the story’s backdrop. There are truly malicious characters here, serving their own self-centered ends, blindly following what they believe are Divine mandates. There are truly compassionate characters, blindly conceited characters, politically motivated power-mongers, strong-willed men and women, and families as dysfunctional as any I’ve ever seen. Somehow it all hangs together and near the end of the story I was hating the antagonists and loving the protagonists. Without seeming too conflicted, Follet manages to show redeeming value in some antagonists while simultaneously tarnishing the protagonists.

All in all, this was a deep and beautiful work. I will never look at a church the same again, especially if it has any of those famed “flying buttresses!” Read this book and reflect on how the pursuit of a passion larger than our selves deepens and strengthens us–whether for good or ill.

I finished reading an old Stephen King novel, The Dark Half, last night. Wow, what a read!

(I’m not sure I’ll have much time for this post … the kids are about to wake up from their nap and I need to take them shopping. So, I’ll try to be brief.)

I love books about moral good versus evil, and I especially enjoy books featuring writers as protagonists. One of the first I read along these lines, years ago, was Mr. Murder, by Dean Koontz, also an enjoyable read, as I remember it.

In this tale, the principle character, Thad, began writing as a pre-teen, but the creative act somehow awakened some tissue that remained inside his body that was the leftover from a so-called fetus in fetu. (The rare, but real, circumstance where one twin absorbs another in fetus, but not completely.) Thad begins getting severe headaches, sees sparrows everywhere, and eventually has a severe seizure, leading to a complete neurological work-up. The resulting surgery removes the tissue, and Thad goes on to lead a normal life for several years.

Almost.

For this is also a story about evil twins, another genre favorite, and King gives it a nice twist with Jekyll and Hyde psychological overtones for writers. Thad goes on to be a successful author, but his most commercially rewarding books are those written under a pseudonym, George Stark, giving voice to the darker half of Thad’s personality. The Stark novels feature a dark un-protagonist, who stops at nothing to get his money and exact vengeance.

But even that would’ve been relatively okay (if you don’t mind what it does to the writer’s soul) … until Thad and his wife publicly reveal the deception behind “George Stark,” and they publicize a staged “burial” of crazy George Stark. And that’s when Thad’s private Hell breaks loose and Stark enters the world for real, and brings to life the violence that was, before, only on the page.

I’m not entirely sure why I enjoy books written by the likes of King and Koontz. I normally avoid the “horror” genre because I don’t want to treat as entertainment something that should not be taken lightly (the power and nature of true evil). But I feel that both King and Koontz write redemptive stories, and that raises their work to a much higher level than the usual wallowing in the macabre found in this genre.

Evil, true evil, does exist. And fables like this story by King demonstrate how our own choices make a way for evil to enter the world and propagate, and we must take action to conquer it. What’s disappointing about most good-vs-evil stories (and this includes most of the work even by King and Koontz) is that evil is often defeated by mere mortal efforts.

Better, in my mind, is a writer’s awareness that we are fallen creatures touched by evil ourselves, and that we must rely on a goodness outside ourselves to save us. This is why I think I favor Koontz’ writing over King’s. While King’s best stories are amazingly redemptive (for example, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), I think he relies on mythology and the strength of the human spirit too much for my taste. In recent years, though, Koontz has appealed to God more and more in his stories.

In the end, this was a fun read with great suspense all the way up to the very end, though not many real surprises. But while the climax resolves the story, it still leaves me wanting more. The characters are all changed, yes, but none of them have come to a greater moral realization that God is in control or that there is even a benign higher power that they must learn to trust. There is, in fact, little light or hope at the end of this story.

Nevertheless, I’m still glad I picked it up. Maybe you will too?