Accidental Historian

Update for the Sake of Updating

Quick update that is the increasing carnival of weirdness that is my tiny, little corner of the internet:

Michael Mock has purchased a copy of Night of the Living Dead Christian in spite of my review (you're welcome, Tyndale House and Matt Mikalatos.  I hope you're happy).  MM is a much bigger fan of monster-related entertainments than I, so he undoubtedly has access to a lot of books that don't contain an evangelical sales pitch.  And I know that he, too, would not be the sort to say, "Tyndale House, I'd love to give them some money."

Also, too, I know I'm getting some traffic from Tyndale House itself, which amuses me.  There's a reasonably good chance that whoever is on that end of the link is someone I know personally.  Or someone who knows people I know personally.  So, hi, Tyndale House people.  Wanna go grab a beer at the Village Tavern?  I haven't been there in years, but might still have my Tav mojo...

And if you want to see a prime example of how Matt could have turned this in to a freaking train wreck, go wander over to Slacktivist, wherein Fred tore an article by one Joe Carter up one side and down the other, only to have Joe Carter show up as the very first comment and engage in every single logical fallacy known to humanity.  It's rather fun to watch, actually.  And I'd feel bad for Joe, but he comes off as a hypocritical ass early and often, what with his arrogance, condescention, and claims that anyone pointing out he's basing his arguments on discredited "research" is being hypocritical and cherry picking evidence.

That actually brings me to another point:  Since I tend to cultivate an internet asshole persona it might seem surprising that I put the knives away when Matt showed up in the comments.  That's probably doubly surprising for anyone who has seen me gleefully antagonize Coldplay fans for no damn good reason (other than the fact that Coldplay sucks and is totally overrated, of course).  There's a reason for this.  Just go to Matt's first comment in Part 1, then go to Joe Carter's first comment over at Slacktivist.  One of those guys did a good job of approaching someone who was obviously not pleased with his work.

I'll give you three guesses as to which one counts as a good example.  The first two don't count.

I just thought I'd throw that out there as a review while I re-tool for Part 4...

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 3

[I don’t actually think there will be spoilers here.  But who the hell knows?  Be prepared, kiddos.  Actually, upon further consideration, yes, there are spoilers.  But y’know what?  While I find that I’m not overly fond of the book itself, I’ve developed a great deal of respect for its author over the course of the day.  So, um, as weird as this might sound, I think you should seriously consider buying the book anyway, even if you don’t end up reading it.  Even if you end up giving money to Tyndale House, you’d also be voting with your dollars to tell them to support authors who are thoughtful, willing to respectfully engage people who have taken it upon themselves to say some rather unkind things about their books and who are trying to not be the Christian fiction authors of ten years ago when I was surrounded by the wasteland of Christian publishing.  Also, that may well be the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever given anyone.]

Back at the old digs I had a series on the book Wild at Heart.  The posts are still around, but for some reason when I tried (unsuccessfully, natch) to port all the old posts over to Typepad the posts there got messed up.  So you can go try and read them, but they’re kinda wall-o-text-ish these days.

Anyway, for those who don’t know, Wild at Heart is a book about reclaiming Biblical manhood by John Eldredge.  I loved the book, back in the day.  I was actually surprised, then, when I mentioned to Her[1] that it was one of my favorite book and she was shocked.  She told me (paraphrased), “All the guys I know who say that they like that book don’t actually know how to treat women.”

I found that fascinating and went back and re-read the book, trying to understand why.   What I realized was that there was an awful lot in that book that could easily be taken as support of the standard patriarchal system with women as lesser beings.  Moreover, there was a general attitude that men were the ones who went off to adventure and the prime position of a woman was in the background, supporting and cheering her man on.

I’d missed that the first couple times around because I didn’t believe that was the role of women.  I didn’t much care what the Bible said about such things, I saw women as equal and, in some cases, more-than-equal.  It kinda depended on the woman in question, really.

As I moved completely away from Christianity I went back to Wild at Heart and found that the book was a very different book than I’d thought.  All of the subtle misogyny I’d glossed over leapt off the page and forced me to pay attention.  That was why I wrote the Wild at Heart posts on the old blog.  I pulled from other sources, I challenged that book I’d once loved.  I found it wanting or lacking in just about every way.

There’s another thread that anyone who has been following this blog for a few years would also know.  When I left the church I discovered storytelling.  I traded sermons for stories, as I’ve said in the past.  The story was, when I discovered it, an instrument of freedom that left the audience free to discover their own meaning and morals and lessons.

I realized, though, that there is a danger to the story.  For every story comes with an intended lesson.  Without that lesson the story really doesn’t have any reason to exist, after all.  But every story is a product of its background.  With the old tales this is obvious, since the past is a foreign country, wherein they do things differently.

One of the things I realized was that in a lot of the old stories there was a very dangerous secondary lesson in re: women.  Think through the old stereotypes.  There’s the knight in shining armor who rescues the damsel in distress.  Whatever the main moral of the story, the secondary lesson is that it’s the man’s role to rescue and the woman’s role to be rescued.

The descriptions, too, are often telling.  The male hero is usually lauded for his bravery and courage and strength.  The female hero is usually lauded for her beauty and beauty and beauty.[2]  This, ultimately, is something I find extremely frustrating, mostly because one of the most human responses of all is to say, “This is how things have been, so it must be the way they should be.”

In Christian circles (and Muslim circles, really, but I’m not talking about Muslim literature here) this is known as “complementarianism.”  It goes back to that whole Genesis thing where god made Adam in the Garden of Eden, then said, “Hey, it sucks to be that guy, I should make him a helper,” so god made Eve.  The specific Genesis passage doesn’t actually have to be taken as a misogynistic explanation and codification of gender roles, as there are plenty of easy ways to interpret the idea of “companion to help him do stuff” can be regarded as a positive for everyone involved.

That’s not what it’s been taken to traditionally mean, however.  Women have, with few exceptions, been treated as second-class citizens throughout the history of civilization.  It’s something that happens even if the Bible isn’t involved.  Greek and Roman society, for instance, was hardly egalitarian.

In fact, egalitarianism can happen in spite of the Bible.  Several of the de facto leaders of the Byzantine Empire, one of the most Christian of all empires, were women.  They had to be somewhat creative in how they led, but their levels of power were scandalous as far as the rest of Europe was concerned.  The point there is that nothing is black and white.  Even where the Bible is concerned.

We do not live in the Byzantine Empire, however.  We live in the 21st Century.  We are heirs to the feminist movement, which I see as an almost 100% good as far as the history of humanity is concerned[3].  We are also the heirs to the counter-feminists, a movement spearheaded, like so many other shameful movements throughout history, by those who could be referred to in the shorthand as “conservative Christians.”  This is not intended as an indictment of all conservatives, nor of all Christians.  It’s just that in Western society the people most likely to say, “We have to do it this way because we’ve always done it this way,” are waving Bibles around for all to see.

“Complementarianism” is a convenient fifth column for those who want to repress women using the Bible as justification.  It relies on a whole shitload of prooftexting to say, “Hey, look, god wants women to hang back and, y’know, cook and stuff.  And that’s totally okay because it’s what women were made to do.  By god!”

Books like Wild at Heart serve a purpose (even if unintended by the author) of supporting that particular attitude.  They push the, “Men go out and have adventures,” meme by pushing an idea of “Biblical manhood,” that basically says, “Men go out and fight stuff.”  In the Bible, of course, women don’t go out and fight stuff.  As long as we ignore Deborah.  Or Jael.  Or we give them lip service, but then say that they did what they did because the men had temporarily failed at their duty.[4]

So, then, with regards to the subject at hand…

One of the consistent problems throughout Night of the Living Dead Christian is the lack of female perspective characters.  This is compounded by the fact that the female characters, in general, play secondary roles.  The main good characters basically leave their wives behind.

Now, I understand that there was a driving point in the book that could basically be summed up as, “Don’t ignore your familial obligations whilst going out on your great adventures.”  This is actually a good lesson and can, in many ways, be taken as a contradiction of that very Wild at Heart mentality I just spent two pages lambasting.

Part of the reason that I spent the first half of Night of the Living Dead Christian giving the book the benefit of the doubt was that I saw that as one of the points the book was attempting to make.  Mikalatos-as-narrator did basically set himself up as an unreliable narrator.  Assuming that was intentional, it was actually outside the scope of what I was expecting to see.  There’s a lot of earnestness in Christian fiction, after all.  Also, too, the way Mikalatos-as-author set Mikalatos-as-narrator up was pretty damned Gary Stu-ish.[5]

On some level, though, the Gary Stu nature of Mikalatos-as-narrator got in the way of the unreliable narrator nature of Mikalatos-as-narrator.  Geds-as-reader tended to downplay the unreliable narrator angle in favor of the Gary Stu angle.  Geds-as-book-reviewer realizes that this might not have been correct.[6]

There are two pivot points for this balance of potential misogyny: the treatment of Lara and the treatment of Clarissa (Luther’s wife.  I might not have name-checked her in part 2).  Actually, there’s kind of a third: the bit where zombie-guy-whose-name-I’ve-totally-forgotten says he’s going to marry a woman named Krista and then just kinda drops the subject half a page later.  What becomes of poor other-Krista?  Doesn’t she have any thoughts about this?

Hmm, that really should have been a footnote.  Ah, well.

Anyway, I interpreted Lara’s story as being an attempt to create sympathy for Luther.  I didn’t really see her pain and abuse as being properly treated, and the sort of blithe explanation that she was a vampire because of what she did in response to her story seemed extremely reductionist and, well, rather cold hearted.  Everything that came before and after was colored by that perception.

Similarly, I don’t think that Clarissa’s motivations were really given enough thought, specifically from Mikalatos-as-narrator.  And this is where the issue gets really thorny.  I understand that Mikalatos-as-narrator was, fundmentally, an unreliable narrator who didn’t know as much as Mikalatos-as-author (which, to give all due respect, is a really hard thing to do, especially if the narrator is supposed to be something less than omniscient).  What ultimately bugged me was that Mikalatos-as-narrator didn’t seem to give a shit about Clarissa’s motivations.

The night before he’d witnessed Luther go in to a rage and attempt to kill his wife and nearly gotten killed in the process.  Mikalatos-as-narrator’s basic response was, “Yeah, Luther probably deserved the mean things she said, but now I want to talk to Luther about freedom in Jesus.”  It was extremely dismissive in a way that was jarring.  Or, rather, it would have been jarring in another book.  By that point all the goodwill I’d been building up had been tossed out the window because I’d gone from, “Here’s a guy who’s trying to break out of the stereotypical Christian thing,” to, “Ah, crap, it’s another poorly disguised evangelical sales pitch.”  In fact, I sent a buddy a text that said, “Wow.  The salvation pitch can really derail a decent book,” when I hit Lara’s explanation of what a vampire was.

And it’s now eleven thirty here in the Holy Land West and I haven’t even hit on my other two big complaints.  I think I’m looking at a five-parter.

Or a six-parter.  Hell, seven or eight.  That’s just how I roll here in Gedsmoland…

---------------------------

[1]Um, wow.  Since I know that there’s at least one person reading now who doesn’t know, I figure that I should give a quick re-cap: there is an individual I refer to as “Her” ‘round these here parts.  She was someone with whom I was kinda-sorta pretty much in love back a few years ago who was also a Baptist pastor’s daughter and very much daddy’s little princess, which made the fact that I was in the process of leaving Christianity at the time very difficult for everyone involved.  I spent a bunch of time in late 2008 and 2009 using her as a sort of stand-in for my now-absent faith and also lamenting the fact that it didn’t work out.

The last couple places she appeared in a post were here and here, though.  Things have changed a bit lately.

[2]There are notable exceptions, though, specifically the beauty and the beast tales or their close Eastern European cousin the Hedgehog Prince.  In that the man is an uncouth, wild creature who is saved by the love of a woman whose chief quality is loyalty and the ability to see beyond the physical.  That, too, has a parallel in the old Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, in which the noble knight marries a terribly ugly woman, but then finds out that she is an accursed princess and the curse cannot be broken by a kiss, but by giving her the right to choose her own destiny.

It’s rather on the nose, really…

Also, too, there are other examples in traditional story.  Off the top of my head there are stories that I shorthand as “Clever Gretel” tales after the Brothers Grimm tale.  Basically, though, they’re Trickster (or, more appropriately, Jack) tales with a female lead.  There are also a few archetypical female heroes, like Atalanta.

By and large, however, the role of men in traditional stories is to go and do.  The role of women is to wait loyally.  That is not a particularly great division of labor.

[3]I say “almost 100%” because there’s always someone, somewhere, who fucks something up.  It’s simply impossible for something to be 100% or 0% good or bad.  In aggregate, though, the social equality movements of the 20th Century made the world a better place, no questions asked.

[4]Yeah, I have actually seen that argument.  Off the top of my head I can’t tell you where.  But it pops up from time to time.

[5]I have a hard time seeing it as not-Gary-Stu, since Mikalatos-as-narrator bumbles through a lot of stuff, has an epiphany about his own comparatively-minor-but-similar-to-the-other-characters flaws, then ultimately saves the day.  That’s kinda-sorta the very definition of Mary Sueism.  With the caveat that Mikalatos-as-author did try to retain a sense of Mikalatos-as-narrator being really super confused about everything, when the truly traditional Mary Sue/Gary Stu is the only one who knows what’s what.

[6]Geds-as-footnote-writer, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to fix his vanilla-pumpkin-granola yogurt concoction.  “Not eating it while drinking Dogfish Head World Wide Stout” is probably a good first step for next time.

The Unexpected Twists and Turns...

For those who wonder about such things:

One Matt Mikalatos (who I am assuming is THE Matt Mikalatos but you never can tell because it's the internet) has popped up in the comments of my review of Night of the Living Dead Christian.  He seems a perfectly pleasant and affable fellow, which is probably more than he'd end up saying for me if our roles were reversed.  I like to think I'm a perfectly pleasant and affable fellow who's open to criticsm.  I also like to be an asshole, especially on the internet, so that's a tough call.

Anyway, pop in to the comments, either on Part 1 or Part 2.  There is currently a conversation going on over at Part 1.  I have no idea what's happening in Part 2.  But it's something.

And remember: Be kind, be curteous, and push the malt liquor.  It's all we've got.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 2

[Warning: spoilers shall abound.  The only way it can be avoided is by, y’know, not writing this post.  But I have every intention of not not writing this post.  So my hands are tied.]

Stories have turning points.  Most of the time when we think of turning points we think of them in terms of plot, but there’s a different kind of turning point that can have a much greater impact on the book.  Well-written books avoid these second turning points to a certain extent and focus on using plot based turning points.[1]  This is because the second sort of turning point is one of style or tenor.

The worst thing about these secondary turning points is that they don’t usually come up suddenly.  Stuff starts to…happen, I suppose.  For those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about writing and telling stories these turning points are fairly obvious and when they’re beginning to approach they drop hints of their impending arrival.  So, basically, the reader spends a lot of time with various sphincters clenched in dread.

Even though I was absolutely prepared for Night of the Living Dead Christian to hit one of those turning points, I wasn’t prepared for what happened.  Right around the midpoint of the narrative the book went from a fairly light-hearted, if ham-fisted romp to downright mean.  The sad thing was, too, that Mikalatos had actually managed to build up a measure of goodwill when it happened.  He seemed to be trying to make several important points and struggling against the constraints of his chosen genre.  He seemed to be trying to create interesting, coherent backstories.  I was far more willing to blame the obvious problems on Tyndale House than Mikalatos.

In the early pages of the book he took several shots at his own people.  The obvious references to zombies as unthinking conformists who just do what their pastor tells them counted in his favor.  The bit where he made the point to have one of the characters say that Hitler was not an atheist over the course of an argument about who counts as a real Christian, not to mention the insistence that Lutherans and Catholics were actually Christians[2]

From here, though, I fear I cannot go on without basically spoiling the entire premise.  I’m okay with that.

There are three basic monsters in the book: zombies, werewolves, and vampires.  These monsters hew pretty closely to the way they’re used in non-Christian contexts.  Zombies are unthinking conformists with a rapacious desire to convert everyone[3] to their system.  Werewolves are a representation of the unconstrained animal nature of man.  Vampires are people who take from others for their own benefit.

In the early pages of the book we’re introduced to Luther, a werewolf.  We find out that he was raised with a strict, disapproving pastor father who forced extreme religious instruction on his son.  We also find out that his wife has just left him and taken their daughter because she’s, y’know, afraid of the werewolf thing.  He’s been struggling mightily to overcome the whole werewolf thing, but it’s just not working out and all of the religious instruction has only made him believe god don’t give two shits.  If you haven’t already figured out how that story arc goes, then you obviously don’t know anything about the conventions of Christian fiction.

We also briefly meet Lara in the early pages of the book.  She’s a vampire.  In the middle we get her backstory.  It’s here where the sphincters start to really clench.

See, Lara had a high school boyfriend who she moved in with after graduation.  He, as it turns out, was a vampire.  She tells a sad story about him abusing her and, eventually, biting her.  Now, at this point it almost works.  Because she’s telling her story to Luther, who is seeing his wife in Lara and realizing, “Oh, shit, I’ve been a monster.”

But remember, Lara is a vampire.  It’s not a passive thing in this particular universe, as you get bitten, then you bite someone else, then you become a vampire.  Then you get chased around by some dude named Borut who’s basically the Van Helsing of this particular universe and who has no sympathy for your back story but just wants you dead or de-monsterfied.

So let’s review.  We have a woman who was abused.  But once we get done hearing her story of abuse so that one of the other characters can have sympathy, we learn that we really shouldn’t be sympathetic to her, since she then turned around and did that shit to other people.  Oh, and also?  This is the only female perspective character in the book.  All of the other women are just kind of there as props so that the various men learn the all-important lesson of, “Don’t ignore your wives.”  Well, except for the counselor woman, who gets a special place in Hell.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I can’t completely go after the use of the Lara character.  In a vacuum that particular backstory would make a certain amount of sense.  Her reaction to being abused was fairly realistic and actually fits pretty well with the standard vampire tale.  I can go after it, though, because it highlighted the misogyny of the book.  See, her story is basically there so that Luther can feel sympathy and decide he needs to change.  Any sympathy for her is transferred to Luther’s journey and she makes it a point to not feel sympathy for him, so you know that she’s actually kind of a bitch.

But then she goes and engages in self-sacrificial battle against Borut.  So that everyone can get Luther out to get him the help he needs.  Yeah.  That actually happens.

It works, too.  Everyone goes to find the one man who can help Luther.  That man turns out to be (drumroll, please), Luther’s estranged father.  If you didn’t see that coming, I cannot help you.

Luther, not surprisingly, doesn’t want to go see his father.  He instead opts to go see a psychologist.  At this point Mikalatos (who, I should add, is the narrator, main character, and only “normal” person in this book.[4]  Other than, I suppose, his wife and children and various other wives and children.  But they don’t count, since they’re only there to drive the plot) goes off on a seemingly random tangent about a terrible experience with a school counselor he had as a youngster who actually hated children and was way dumber than his ten year-old patient.  It then came as absolutely no surprise that Luther’s decision to avoid church and go to a psychologist works out really, really badly.

The next time we see Luther he’s a werewolf in a suit because the psychologist has told him to embrace his werewolf nature.  For those who are wondering, yes, it is that bad.  This is the standard evangelical Christian explanation of the depraved nature of mankind.[5]  The werewolf is bad, the man is good.  The werewolf must be purged.  Dressing the werewolf in a suit is obviously a terrible idea destined for failure.

Meanwhile, Luther had managed to convince his wife to come over and bring their daughter so he could attempt to patch things up.  She shows up with a gun loaded with silver bullets instead of their daughter.  He finds out she’s not going to play to his tune and becomes enraged.  She doesn’t shoot him, but leaves the gun behind and walks out, saying, “Here’s the cure.  But you’re not man enough to take it.”  So, y’know, total bitch, right?

Later on, then, Mikalatos-as-narrator offers this internal monologue: “I felt badly for the way his wife had treated him the night before, even though he deserved it and probably worse.  But still, he had invited her to the house in good faith, wanting to show her that he had made steps toward health, and she had purposely torn him apart.”

This bit comes on page 121 (Nook epub edition).  After Mikalatos-as-narrator has already reminded Luther that Luther almost killed him the night before whilst attempting to kill his wife.  And other than the whole thing about how he “deserved it” there’s no real sympathy or empathy for the wife.  Because the very next sentence is, “I wanted to help him find the peace I had found in myself, and though he wasn’t interested, I wanted to try to explain again that following Jesus didn’t have to mean zombified Christianity, that it could be something with real, vibrant, overflowing life.”  Because that whole “almost killing me and your wife,” thing is less important than the whole “finding Jesus” thing in the narrator’s mind.

I feel like I’ve skipped over something here.  Oh, wait, right, I totally forgot about the chapter in between, where we get more of Luther’s backstory, with Luther as narrator.  That chapter starts with some high-minded philosophy-esque stuff about how he’s a selfish jerk but it’s okay because everyone is a selfish jerk.  Because Luther, of course, is the voice of natural man in rebellion against god and people with god are just jackasses.  It then goes sharply downhill from there.

I’m going to do something that I’ve never done on this blog before.  I’m going to offer a trigger warning, because this next bit sickens me.  Because we find out that Luther-the-werewolf is actually Luther-the-wife-beater.  And that’s just the start.

I could tell you that it was, in fact, the first time I had struck her, but not the first time I had considered it, and I could tell you that I instantly wondered what I could do to stop myself from doing it again while quietly planning to make it a habit.  I wondered what it would be like to strike my daughter.

Yeah…that.

No doubt you recoil from these frank admissions, but I suspect you recoil because you recognize them and have buried your own similar stories too deeply to acknowledge me as a mirror.  Not to say that you desire to strike your spouse, or even that you have a spouse.  But perhaps you like the tiny thrill of pocketing something that does not belong to you, or you enjoy taking a small bit of another person’s vitality in a one-night stand and then slipping out the door.  Perhaps you merely enjoy the small barbs and carefully destructive words that can cause a coworker to look like an imbecile and you his superior, or you enjoy sharing information that is not yours with someone else, or giving attention to a man who is not your husband because he makes you feel for one moment like someone cares.

No.  Just, no.  I don’t recoil from that frank admission because I see a bit of myself in a wife beater.  I don’t see a bit of myself in a character who planned to make beating his wife a habit and fantasized about hitting his daughter.

This is the problem of evangelical Christian theology that Mikalatos attempts to address but fails miserably to actually do anything about.  See, this entire thing is about pulling out the Romans Road.  You get someone to admit that they’ve sinned, then say that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god, the wages of sin are death, but Jesus offers the free gift of forgiveness of sin.[6]  In order for this to work, though, everyone must be a sinner.  To make that argument though, all sins must be equally capable of destroying the relationship between god and man.  So we end up with the absurd notion that making a coworker look bad is equally as evil as fantasizing about beating your daughter.[7]

Futhermore, we also learn that the mother who is simply trying to protect herself and her daughter from a man who intentionally made beating his wife a habit and fantasized about beating his daughter is actually the real bad guy because she’s not helping her violent, abusive get closer to a true relationship with Jesus.  I mean, sure, she told her husband to kill himself and belittled his manhood.  But, y’know, intentional, premeditated spousal abuse and fantasized child abuse.

Luther is a bad person.  Luther is an extremely bad person.  And Matt Mikalatos-as-narrator is an enabler.  Furthermore, Matt Mikalatos-as-author is an apologist for wife beaters and child abusers, so long as they manage to learn about Jesus in the process, though.

Oh, and remember that psychologist I said deserves a special place in Hell?

When we first meet Luther-as-werewolf-in-suit he is waiting for his wife to show up for their ill-fated conversation.  Mikalatos-as-narrator is confused.  So Luther helpfully explains, “Your psychologist helped me understand that I am, in fact, a werewolf, and that is not something that can be changed.  It can only be lived with, and through behavioral training she has helped me to embrace that fact, allowing me to remain a werewolf but not behave as a werewolf.”

That’s right.  The psychologist’s advice boiled down to, “Embrace your inner habitual wife beater.”  Because that’s totally what psychologists do when they’re not child hating morons who work in grade schools.

The problem here is that sometimes psychologists do, in fact, help people to embrace the inner-thing-creating-self-loathing.  Usually, though, that happens with people who have been abused in some way or are dealing with self-confidence or self-image problems.  Then, of course, there’s the other obvious parallel: self-loathing homosexuals.  Affirming those thoughts and integrating them in to the whole self is a good thing.

Affirming thoughts of wanting to beat your spouse and daughter and integrating them in to the whole self is not a good thing.  I can’t imagine any mental health professional doing anything even remotely like that.  I can’t imagine the any of the major professional associations of mental health professionals allowing their members to do that and not receive censure.

Matt Mikalatos seems to think this is just what psychologists do, however.  And he defames psychologists in the process of advancing his own view, which is the far more laughable, “Accept Jesus in the correct way and that stuff will pretty much go away.”  Because, really, we all know that the only reason Christians aren’t perfect is because most Christians aren’t the right kind of Christians.  They’re going to the wrong churches and stuff.

I hate this book.

---------------------------

[1]Which isn’t to say that this sort of turning point is necessarily all bad, nor is it to say that a book can’t be well-written and not have them.  Consider for a moment Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or Neverwhere.  Both books absolutely hinge on a character suddenly finding the world is not what he thought it was.  The secondary turning point, then, is necessary, as the world goes from normal to not-normal.  But, of course, that secondary turning point is also a plot point.  So it’s, y’know, intentional.

[2]Lutherans, after all, can be a little too liberal or high-church for evangelicals.  And the Pope is regarded as the anti-Christ half the time.  And the rest of the time evangelicals, by and large, think that Catholics worship Saints as alternatives to god.  Baby steps, people, baby steps.

[3]And it is, literally, everything.  Which, again, is a shot at those who create divisions between Christians.  The zombie church is the only correct church as far as everyone in said church is concerned and they’ll attempt to convert non-Christians and not-the-same-as-them-Christians equally.

The irony in this, though, is that the book basically attempts to say, “This isn’t the right kind of Christianity.  This other kind of Christianity is actually the right kind of Christianity.”  Out of the frying pan, in to the fire, as they say.

[4]This, by the by, pissed me off to no end.  Because he was not “Matt Mikalatos, narrator of his own wacky tale.”  He was, “Matt Mikalatos, author of a book all of the other characters have read and everyone seems to find it necessary to reference.”  This particular conceit is extremely arrogant and really got in the way of all of the other arrogantly annoying shit that happened in the book.

I’d contrast that particular turn of events with Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil.  That book starts with an author who has a successful novel that sounds a lot like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, then gives up writing because his epic follow-up ends up being terrible, but then finds his next tale.  Over the course of the rest of the book, then, you have the question in the back of your mind, “Is this supposed to be an autobiographical-type thing?”  In that case it totally works due to an intentional ambiguity and a general lack of, “Everyone recognized me as Yann Martel, famous and excellently wonderful author.”  In fact, one of the major plot points turns out the narrator not being recognized at all.

[5]This one is especially problematic.  Of the three monster types, the werewolf appears to be the only one that someone just is.  The vampires and zombies are converted.  When we get Luther’s story it includes his father walking in to his bedroom and catching him in the act of, y’know, being a werewolf.  He also talks of his brother standing up in church, declaring himself an atheist, and walking out of church, an act he refers to as a “flamboyant, dramatic streak.”  These two things made me think that the author was attempting to make a point about the church’s treatment of homosexuality.  At the point I drew the comparison I was still offering charity and I hoped it was actually a subversive attempt to make a point to an otherwise unreceptive audience.  Sadly, that was not to be.

[6]I’ve mentioned the Romans Road on this blog before, I think.  It’s prooftexting at its finest.  You start at Romans 3:23, then jump to Romans 6:23, then go back to Romans 5:8, then Romans 10:13 and 10:19.  Put these together and it says (paraphrased), “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of god (3:23), the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of Christ is life (6:23), and god loves us so much he gave that gift to us even though we didn’t ask (5:8), so all you have to do is call upon Jesus and confess he is lord to get salvation (10:13 and 19).”  Of course, if you read those verses in order and with all the other stuff in between they don’t quite offer such an easy and clear-cut story.

[7]You might say this is an unfair assessment, as I’ve already said that Luther is supposed to be the worldly character in rebellion against god.  I’m going to put my 25 years as an attendee of various evangelical churches up as an offer of my credibility and say that, no, we were all pretty much running around believing that one lie was exactly as bad as murdering because all sin is ultimately against god.  The whole system only works if someone who only screws up a little is exactly as worthy of eternal damnation as, say, Hitler.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 1

[Warning: There will be spoilers.  In fact, I’ll be spoilering the shit out of this book.  There’s no way to say what I intend to say without doing so.  I’m sure that the reasons behind it will soon be made abundantly clear.]

I’m reasonably certain that Scalzi’s “Big Idea” series has cost me $600 since I bought my Nook.  Of course, part of that is because on some level I blame Scalzi for the fact that I own a Nook in the first place.  Well, okay, that’s not fair.  I, after all, opted to get the more expensive Nookcolor and the fancy-schmancy faux leather case.  And I’ve overestimated the number of books I’ve purchased because of it.  The actual number is nine.  So he’s cost me, like, a hundred bucks.  Still, y’know, consideration could be paid.  Or something.

Anyway, I love Scalzi’s Big Idea series because it appeals to me as a writer and storyteller.  I’m often far less interested in the story than the story behind the story.  And sometimes I can become interested in an otherwise uninteresting narrative precisely because of the story behind the story.

That was the hook that took me to Night of the Living Dead Christian by Matt Mikalatos.  He sold it as a comedy novel about the monsters we see every day with theological discussion thrown in.  I’ve seen comedy, monsters, and theology put together before, specifically in Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.

Were I to meet Matt Mikalatos I could say to him, “I’ve read Christopher Moore and you, sir, are no Christopher Moore.”  But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.  Because I knew what I was getting in to with this one.

See, my general strategy with Big Ideas is a three-step process.  I decide if I want to check the book out.  I then download and read the available Nook sample.  Then if I like it I buy it.  At the moment the Big Idea is 9-5-2 on my Nook, with the 2 being one book I haven’t decided if I want to buy but probably will and one that I just downloaded the sample for today and haven’t actually checked out yet.  And there were a couple other Big Ideas that lead me to buying books in the before time, the long, long ago.  One of those was Cat Valente’s The Habitation of the Blessed, which also handled issues of religion and theology and technically had monsters.  I just thought I’d toss that out there.[1]

One of the problems that comes up in a piece like this is the, “Well why don’t you offer something constructive, instead?” question.  It’s generally the last resort of the butthurt so I ignore such things in counter-criticism.  But one of the big issues here is that Mikalatos book fails miserably, but for a single, entirely predictable reason.  That reason boils down to two words:

Tyndale House.

If you’re reading this blog and you didn’t come here through a Google search for “coldplay sucks”[2] there’s a pretty good chance that you’re well acquainted with Tyndale’s big fiction series.  For that would be Left Behind, which Slacktivist will be deconstructing until the end of time.  I nearly decided not to buy the book when I saw those two little words in the sample.  I had no urge to give Tyndale House my hard-earned money, as they do not deserve it.

But then I realized something.  This is a book that uses monsters as allegory published by the same publishing house that is so allergic to allegory (allegorgic?) that they have published, like, 60 goddamn books turning a pretty explicit allegory in to a supposedly factual history of the future.  I was curious, then, how they’d handle using real monsters.  And if the real monsters would approach the level of inexcusable nastiness of Rayford Steele and Buck Williams.

Now, I suppose my perspective on this whole thing is wrong.  If I’d been reading Left Behind I’d probably have loved to have the option to read Night of the Living Dead Christian.  Because if you’re the sort of person who primarily purchases books from Christian book stores, you’re pretty much limited to theology, “Christian Living” books (which are basically self-help books about Jesus), and the plodding, unimaginative fiction of Frank Peretti or Tim LaHaye.[3]

I, however, had just finished reading Merrie Haskell’s delightful The Princess Curse.  I’m now reading Lee Arthur Chane’s Magebane.  Both of these books are infinitely better.  They’re very different books that are infinitely better for different reasons, but those different reasons and why they’re better than Night of the Living Dead Christian can be summed up with three words: not Tyndale House.

In this I can say that I can feel bad for the author.  It is almost impossible to write for an explicitly Evangelical audience and write for entertainment purposes.  Still, the subtitle quickly made me angry.  “One Man’s Ferociously Funny Quest to Discover What it Means to Be Truly Transformed.”

The book isn’t “ferociously funny.”  The book isn’t even particularly funny.  It spends a page[4] on a tangent in to a discussion of which Bible translation is most accurate.  This is the sort of thing that could be played off as funny and I get the impression that the author was genuinely trying, but the explanation of why they were having the argument came out in an overly earnest expository paragraph.

Sadly, it couldn’t be any other way.  The intended audience to which Tyndale House panders is afraid of…well, they’re afraid of many things.  I suppose I could shorthand it as, “The Unknown.”  Allegory is a gateway to The Unknown.

Let me take this back, for instance, to Merrie Haskell’s The Princess Curse.  That particular story, which I will endeavor mightily to not spoil,[5] is also a tale of transformation.  There are multiple points in that story, however, where an apparent victim becomes a villain or a villain a victim.  The apparent universal order is flipped on its head and black becomes white.  Or, at least, an interesting shade of gray.

The flipping over of the universal order is fundamentally something that cannot be done with Tyndale House’s intended audience.  Turning the villain in to victim, after all, might well engender sympathy for the Devil.  And we cannot have that, can we?

I mean, sure, Milton might disagree.  But he probably wasn’t a real, true Christian.

Allegory, then, must be avoided at all costs.  And if allegory is necessary, then it must be accompanied by explanations of the allegory.  This, too, takes away from any of the fun of the book.  I’m pretty sure that the old saw about having to explain the joke wasn’t meant to be a suggestion for how to be a successful comedian.  Now that I think about it, it’s more of a warning about how explanation robs the joke of its, um, jokeness.  Yeah.  That sounds about right.

The book, then, is long on “tell” and short on “show.”  This seems to be the disease of the Christian publishing industry.  The reader is not allowed to just get the joke and roll.

Shortly after the first time we’re introduced to zombies in the book we see them handing out flyers to a church.  It’s pretty obvious that they’re supposed to be a certain type of Christian.  Just in case we didn’t get it, though, we’re eventually told that, yes, those zombies are a certain type of Christian.  Then, if I recall, we’re told that several more times.  I kind of wish I’d have counted, now.  But that quickly became a lesser complaint for me.

While the whole non-allegorical-allegory problem is glaring, it’s not really a big deal.  Lots of people fuck that one up.  And it’s a feature, not a glitch in Christian publishing, so I can’t really hold it against Mikalatos if he wants to write Christian fiction.  In fact, many of the things he said in the book really need to be heard by the intended audience.  Which is why I wish I could actually endorse the book, with the caveat that people who are willing and able to read Christopher Moore or Cat Valente won’t enjoy the book and probably shouldn’t read it because, y’know, why bother?

No, the bigger problem is that once you get past the central conceit of “monsters as allegory for spiritual transformation,” the book is actually a mean little book.  It’s downright vicious, really.  It forces us to, ask that question that always comes up with Left Behind: “Who are the real monsters in this story?”

That’s why this post is only Part 1.

------------------------------------

[1]Especially since I just discovered the sequel, The Folded World, is due out next month.  And I was reminded that I’ve been intending to check out The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, due to a different Big Idea.  And I just took a break from this post to basically turn the left home page of my Nook into the Valente page.  I’m [this] close to buying The Habitation of the Blessed on the Nook, too, making in the second book I have purchased in both formats, the first being Craig Ferguson’s inimitable Between the Bridge and the River.

[2]That’s, like, half my traffic.  And I’ve learned that one of the things that has traveled all over the world is the simple fact that Coldplay does, indeed, suck.  Although I suppose that’s easier to explain than the top search term that got people to my old digs, which was some combination of the words “28,” “year,” and “virgin.”

[3]I say this as someone who once worked in a Christian book store at the height of the Left Behind craze.  I think I purchased one fiction book from the store in that time.  It was a historical fiction book that was controversial because it used the word “hell” as an expletive and not a place name.  Once.

[4]A page-ish.  It’s really hard to figure out page breaks with electronic books.

[5]Because you should go read it.  Now.  Or, y’know, soon-ish.

9-11-2011

I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit, but I avoided the 9/11 coverage as much as possible this past weekend.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to remember, though.  I didn’t want to remember it the way that everyone seemed to think I was supposed to remember that day.

I mourn what we lost on that day ten years ago.  But it’s not the four thousand lives that cause my tears.  It’s not that great scar on the New York skyline I think about.  The lives lost did not belong to people I knew, so my life is not diminished by their absence.  New York, to me, is just another city, so the loss of its great iconic buildings means little to me.

I want to make a great, sweeping statement about how we lost our way in the days following 9/11.  I want to say that America was still on the path to greatness on 9/10, but then fear and ruinous, senseless, blind retaliation emptied our coffers and drained our future potential.  But I cannot.  The world does not allow us to wrap it up in a neat little metaphor.  I know too much about who we were before to pretend that we were something different after.

On Friday I received an unexpected package from Amazon.  It contained the copy of Lawrence Weschler’s newest book, Uncanny Valley.  The subtitle of the book is Adventures in the Narrative, but I think there’s a better way to express the contents of the book.  If you know anything about the term “uncanny valley” you know it is a term that expresses the space between the obviously not-human and the authentically human.  It’s the spot where the brain stops saying, “Wow, that’s a really good likeness of a person,” and starts saying, “What the hell is wrong with that person?”

That’s what Uncanny Valley is: a collection of essays on the nature of what it means to be human.  Weschler’s essays work in toward that question in his typical fashion, through the study of art and justice.  This is how I spent a good chunk of September 10th reading stories of people who stood up to oppressive regimes in the name of human rights.  It’s how I spent time on September 10th reading Weschler’s report from the negotiations that created the International Criminal Court in Rome.

It’s how I spent September 10th angry with America.  The American delegation did everything in its power to strip the ICC of any sort of reach or jurisdiction.  They claimed they wanted to protect American soldiers on peace missions from being prosecuted for war crimes.  In reality, America wanted to avoid having to risk having its leaders called on charges of war crimes.

I’m sure that there are people out there who would read this and nod sadly, thinking of Iraq and Afghanistan and saying, “Damn that George W. Bush,” or considering Cambodia and saying, “That fucking Nixon.”  But the President who presided over America’s obstructionism at the conference to create the ICC was William Jefferson Clinton.

This, of course, followed the United States’ refusal to sign the UN’s Genocide Convention for 40 years.  And it came on the heels of the United States not ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, joining only Somalia in that august role.  Of course, Somalia doesn’t have a government, so they have an excuse.  This also followed on the heels of the United States’ refusal to sign to the Ottawa Treaty, which would have gotten rid of anti-personnel landmines.  The United States’ stance on this puts them on the same side as such human rights luminaries as China, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Libya, Israel, and Vietnam.  Finland also isn’t a party, along with South Korea, India, and Pakistan.  But I suspect the latter three aren’t involved because they’re planning to have to go to war with non-signatories in the future.  I don’t know what Finland’s reasoning is, though.

Of course we can’t consider the United States’ attempts to thwart the ICC, or lack of ratification of the Ottawa Treaty and Convention on the Rights of the Child without also considering the US’s past failings on the international stage.  There was the League of Nations debacle, for one.  Then there was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which the US used as an excuse to send the Marines in to Latin American nations at the turn of the 20th Century to act as debt collectors for European imperial interests.

I think the most fitting note that I read about the tenth anniversary came from the pages of Weschler’s Uncanny Valley.  It wasn’t his essay about Ground Zero, however.  It was from an essay on people dealing with those disappeared by their own governments in Latin America.  But the words weren’t even about that.  They were from an essay about World War II by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

We have learned history, and we claim that it must not be forgotten.  But are we here not the dupes of our emotions?  If ten years hence, we reread these pages and so many others, what will we think of them?  We do not want this year of 1945 to become just another year among many.  A man who has lost his son or a woman he loved does not want to live beyond that loss.  He leaves the house in the state it was in.  The familiar objects upon the table, the clothes in the closet mark an empty place in the world…The day will come, however, when the meaning of these clothes will change: once…they were wearable, and now they are out of style and shabby.  To keep them any longer would not be to make the dead person live on; quite the opposite, they date his death all the more cruelly.[1]

I’m not saying we need to forget 9/11.  I think we just need to stop being told to think about it every time we turn around.  To live in that moment is to live in a moment of irrational fear.  We cannot survive as a nation if we live only in irrational fear.

We must, to borrow from Merleau-Ponty, make room again in the national closet.

---------------------

Of course it would be nice to be able to look back ten years from now and say, “I am proud of what we have done and who we have become since September 11, 2011.  That is a much harder thing to achieve, however.  It requires ignoring the raised voices that conflate “patriotism” and “unflagging obeisance to some imaginary America.”

America is a place and a nation, but it’s also a people and a set of ideals.  People can change.  Ideals can be discussed, dissected, and realized.  Nothing is set in stone.

That is why the true patriot starts with questions and only reaches answers after long and thoughtful deliberation.

---------------------

[1]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The War Has Taken Place.”  In “Gazing Back: The Disappeared,” in Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, Lawrence Weschler (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011), 112-113.  Originally published in Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 150-151.

Also, good gravy, I probably got that footnote wrong.

And Now, A Book Review...?

There’s a guy who lives down the street from my grandma who is growing pot in his garage.

My grandmother is utterly convinced that he and his associates are out to get her.  She thinks that they eavesdrop on her conversations and follow her when she goes out to eat.  Because, y’know, they’re druggies.

My grandfather died of lung cancer at the tail-end of the 1970s.  He was an alcoholic.

Both my grandmother and my grandfather grew up in Minnesota.  He came from Duluth, she came from the backwoods along Lake Superior, not far from a river called the Temperance River, so named because the river was peculiar for its lack of a bar where it spills in to the lake.

My grandmother was born right around the time of America’s pointless experiment in Prohibition.  I suppose it’s too much to ask that she remember the time of bootleggers[1] and Al Capone, as she spent the first decade of her life in a place that barely had roads and probably sorely lacked for speakeasies.  But to me the idea of pot being illegal makes about as much sense as Prohibition.  I don’t smoke pot.  But I know one thing: pot is a harmless drug and potheads are more likely to annoy you to death with inane ideas that only seem profound under the influence[2] than shoot you.

Yet it seems to me as though my grandmother should be thinking of this in terms of the terrible idea that was Prohibition than some idea of a bad element[3] moving in to start gang warfare around her little rural cottage.[4]  The reason she’s so freaked out can be summed up in four words:

The War on Drugs.

-------------------------

Now I know what you’re thinking right now.  You’re thinking, “Yeah, that’s great, but what does it have to do with zombies?”

Why?  Because zombies are so hot right now.  I hate the fact that zombies are huge right now, because zombies are a completely uninteresting monster, yet they’re all the fuck over the place as if they’re the coolest thing since Power Wheels or Hungry Hungry Hippos or whatever the kids thought was cool three years ago (Tamaguchis?  Pokemon?  Chia Pets?  C’mon, somebody help me out here).

Now, this isn’t to say that I completely hate the zombie thing.  I loved Shaun of the Dead.  I own Zombieland on DVD.  But I enjoyed those movies because they weren’t actually about zombies.  They were about a world that contained zombies.

This is a small nuance, but an important one.  And it’s usually the small nuances that make all the difference.

The movie monster reflects a fear that everyone viewing the movie has on some level.  Of all the fears represented by the movie monster, the zombie’s is the most existential, the least personal, and in that, the most personal of all.  The zombie represents nothing so much as death itself.

Think about it.  The zombie has no personality.  The zombie has no thought.  All the zombie wants to do is feed, and in feeding, make you become the same as it.

But there are two moments in every zombie movie that define that existential fear.  You know them.  The first comes the first time the protagonists are confronted by the fact that one of the zombies is actually someone they know.  It’s a father, a sister, a friend shambling towards them, attempting to destroy everything they are.  The second is the person who gets bit but tries to hide it from everyone else.

Everyone sees death personified.  Someone tries to avoid death through denial.  It doesn’t work.  It never works.

This is why the greatest use of the zombie genre is to ask the question, “What do we do when we’re surrounded by death?”

Because there is no deeper, more profound, and more important existential question we can ask.  We are all surrounded by death.  Everyone will be a zombie some day, even if the dead never again walk out of their graves.

There’s a reason why the zombie story is usually the story of teamwork in the face of overwhelming odds.  The tough lone survivalist finds there’s nothing better than having someone trustworthy to stand next to.  The person found cowering in the back of an empty store turns out to have the courage to stand and fight to protect a new friend or love interest.

But, of course, there’s always the person with the dark secret or the person who can’t hack it and runs at a crucial time.  These are the twin fears that always bring the team to the verge of ruin: fear of that which is overwhelmingly dangerous about the self and that which is overwhelmingly dangerous out there, in the abyss.

-------------------------

It’s easy enough to dismiss Mira Grant’s Feed and its sequel, Deadline.  It’s got two conceits working against it.  First, it’s another zombie book.  Second, it centers around super awesome action bloggers.

But Feed and Deadline aren’t actually about the world after The Rising left the world filled with people terrified about running in to the walking dead.  They're about the world after 9/11 left the world filled with people terrified about running in to terrorists at the mall.

It’s about my grandmother sitting on her porch, terrified because a guy down the street is growing pot in his garage.

It’s about how fear becomes a commonplace way to control people who just want to be scared.

Go.  Read it.  It’s better than anything I can say about it.

Chances are I’ll be back to talk about something similar.  I’ve spent a lot of time reading on trains of late…

-------------------------

[1]By the way, correct me if I’m wrong here, but weren’t the Dukes of Hazzard bootleggers?  I mean, I know that Uncle Jesse was an old bootlegger, which makes sense.  But were them Duke boys supposed to be bootleggers, too?  How the fuck does that make sense in the 1970s?

[2]True story: I have inane ideas that seem super profound without actually smoking pot.  And I’m fucking annoying.  All.  The.  Time.  I don’t need pot to be a pothead.

[3]Of course, she was worried I’d move to Dallas and “fall in with the wrong crowd.”  I was nearly thirty when I moved to Dallas and one of those college educated professionals.  So this story is probably about how my grandmother worries pointlessly about stupid invented shit than what I want it to be about.  But I’m still going to tell it, because fuck you, that’s why.

[4]Also, too, there’s something she should be way more worried about: it’s statistically probable that there’s at least one meth lab in her area.  But for the love of all that’s good in the world, DON’T TELL HER THAT.[5]

[5]Also, it occurs to me that this now makes it seem like I’m saying that alcohol and pot are okay, but meth isn’t.  You’d be correct.  The line that makes the most sense to me is that tobacco, alcohol, and pot should be on one side of a line, while meth, cocaine, and all the other “hard” drugs should be on the other.  I suppose it’s an arbitrary line, but pretty much everyone draws that arbitrary line right there and I get the impression that there’s a good reason for that.

That said, I’m not sure how I feel about peyote, LSD, and the various other hallucinogenic drugs.  If there’s no major long-term damage, I say, “Have at.”  If not, then whatever.  But, of course, “major long-term damage” can also very easily include things like “lung cancer” and “cirrhosis of the liver.”  And, when it gets right down to it, many of the arguments against keeping drugs illegal boil down to the issue of gangs and societal breakdown.  That can be pretty much answered by pointing to the bootleggers and what happened post-Prohibition.

So, I guess what I’m saying is this: if there’s an argument out there for why the line between pot and the drugs to which pot is apparently supposed to be a gateway is both arbitrary and stupid, I’m willing to listen.  But I’m not going to go too far to seek one out, since I really don’t care about this on anything more than an academic or rhetorical level.  And I’ve got plenty of other academic and rhetorical shit to think about.

OW: Failing the Bechdel Test

I’m thinking that as I go through this process of writing with intent I’ll stop every once in a while at write about writing.  For one thing, I like writing about writing as much as, if not more than, I like writing itself.  For another, it seems like a good way of keeping myself accountable.  Or creating excuses not to do the real work.  Either way.

So, tonight I’ll start with a bit that I just wrote.  It’s a writing exercise that won’t actually make it in to the final book, so I feel completely comfortable posting the entire thing right here on the blog.  I also feel completely comfortable making it the inagural post in a series I'm ever-so-cleverly calling "On Writing."

I learned a long time ago that it’s good to write character sketches.  I have a book right now that’s partially written because I kept seeing scenes in my head and seeing the characters moving through them but didn’t yet have the sense of what passed between the scenes.  Over the course of working through that I radically changed the way I was writing the book.  Which brought up a whole host of other problems and explains why I haven’t gotten anywhere close to finishing that book.  Well, that and the fact that I’m a lazy, lazy bum…

In that other book there was originally a female character named Ellie who served a central but peripheral role.  The main character was Jack.  Ellie appeared in Jack’s life and Jack reacted to her.

Over the course of setting up my random collection of character sketches I wrote a pair of opening chapters in which I told Jack’s story and Ellie’s story using the exact same structure.  I loved it.  Until I realized that if I wanted to write the book that came from those two chapters I would have to write the entire narrative in parallel.  I believe that as the writer I have to choose a narrative voice.  For the story I was working on the narrator had to be limited, aware of only slightly more than the perspective character.  If I wanted that Ellie chapter at the start of the book she would have to become a perspective character.  So I nearly scrapped the idea.  It seemed hard.  More importantly, I hadn’t conceived of an Ellie who existed outside of Jack’s perception of her.

When I hit that realization I felt incredibly foolish.

All else aside, the re-write of Second Chances will not be nearly so audacious as that.  I already know the basic narrative flow of Second Chances and I have no urge to mess with it.  Still, I have realized that puts a different level of pressure on me.  I, as the writer, still need to know where the other characters are even if my perspective character and, therefore, the narrator does not.

It also seems to me that after being gone so long it would be a good idea to re-introduce myself to the characters.  So, without further ado, I present the first character sketch.

----------------------

    “I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry to get rid of this place.”
    “Other than the fact that it’s sitting here, empty?”
    “So?” Emma shrugged.  “Look around.  It matches everything else.”
    “And has it occurred to you that this might be a reason why I’d like to get rid of the place?”  Ruth turned from the old house to face her niece.  As she did she put her left hand on her hip.  It was her, “this conversation is over,” stance.  “Who’s going to buy a house out in the middle of nowhere?”
    “I…”  Emma looked at the ground and kicked a rock.  “I don’t know.”
    “Look,” Ruth dropped her hand to her side, “I know this is tough for you.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Don’t try that crap on me, honey.  You’re the one with the fancy degree in psychology.”
    Emma raised an eyebrow.  “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “Nothing.  Other than the fact that it means you think you’re a lot smarter than your old aunt.”
    “No I don’t.”
    “Honey, I’m the closest thing to a mother you’ve got.  So if you think you’re gonna get away with lying to me right to my face then you’ve got another thing coming.”
    “Honestly, there’s nothing going on.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Emma took a half step back.  Her aunt used profanity so infrequently that the words themselves tended to hit with an almost physical force.  “Well what do you want me to say?” she asked after a moment.  “You want me to tell you that, no, I don’t want to see the house I grew up in plowed under so some farmer can plant another couple bushels of wheat?  Fine.  I don’t want to see that.”
    “You never come out here,” Ruth replied.  “It’s not like you ever see the house you grew up in.  And I have to do all the upkeep on the place myself.”
    “Fine.  I’ll come out here and help more.”
    “No,” Ruth shook her head, “You won’t.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “The fact that we have this conversation every three months or so and you still never come out here to help.”
    “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
    “Because I told you I’m going to have the place torn down.  It’s the only thing that’s gotten your attention since…” Ruth trailed off.
    Emma’s bottom lip began to tremble.  She bit down on it, then turned away from her aunt and the old farm house to fix her eyes on a spot just on the other side of the gravel path optimistically named Leonard Road.
    “Look, honey,” Ruth said after a long moment.  “I know it’s tough.”  She sighed.  “I hate to sit here and watch you live like this.”
    “Like what?” Emma asked, voice barely above a whisper.
    “Like a woman consumed by fear.”
    Emma looked back at her aunt.  “Of what?”
    “The world.”
    “Oh.”  The faintest glimmer of a smile tugged at the edges of her mouth.  “That old thing.”
    “I know this used to be the only place you felt safe,” Ruth put her hand on her niece’s shoulder.  “Roy’s been offering to buy the land ever since you and…ever since you moved out.  But I could never do it.”
    “Well since you put it that way, I feel pretty foolish.”
    “Don’t.”
    “Maybe it’s for the best, then.”
    “I’ll call Roy in the morning.”
    “Okay.”
    Ruth wrapped her arms around her niece and pulled her close.  “Then maybe you can finally decide to move on with your life,” she said, her voice so low even she could barely hear.
    Emma didn’t respond.  She gave no indication she’d even heard.

--------------------

As I wrote this I realized something.  This is not the Aunt Ruth who appeared in the first version of the book.  That Aunt Ruth was bitter and took it out on Emma.

Of course, in the original version of the book Aunt Ruth was an angry ex-Christian who had lived through a lot of hardship and blamed everything on god.  She was, dare I say, something of a strawman.  So that’s interesting.

I also want to say that this is a different Emma, but I’m not so sure.  It’s certainly a different first view of her than the one offered in the book, but that doesn’t mean this is a different Emma.  Not by a long shot.

So enjoy.  I’m off to re-introduce myself to another character.