Rachel Starr Thomson

Jennifer Bogart of Quiverfullfamily.com has written a great review of Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled, which you can read here. Here’s an excerpt:

Each short and snappy, slice-of-life chapter (written by either Thomson or Currey), invites us into the joyous tumult of family life. From “The Battle of Underwear Mountain” — we have one of those — to “Vacuum Cleaners I Have Known” — wherein I found assurance for my husband that ours is not the only home inhabited by clumps of tangled hair on the rug due to its many long-haired occupants — and everything in between, this volume is both frank and comedic.

As an added charming flourish, both Currey and Thomson write with a distinctly homeschooled flair. Sprinkling such gems as “quoth” into the mix, with a sense of precise syntax paired with oddball impressions add to the distinct character of the text. A few times I found myself thinking, “Someone has certainly been reading (or watched) Tolkien and Austen lately.” With my ongoing predilection for vintage vocabulary, I found these stylistic renderings quite endearing.

Thanks for a great review, Jennifer!

In the midst of a very busy week, hence the relative quiet around here: marking papers, finishing a manuscript edit, writing The Advent, rehearsing Behold the Child, formatting a new Irish book, and running Soli errands takes up a lot of time! But there’s always time for thought . I’ve been reading II Corinthians this week (an epistle from a very busy man, the apostle Paul), and am struck by this mark of his lifestyle:

And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation . . . or whether we be comforted, it is for your consolation and salvation . . . For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. (II Cor. 1:6, 4:15, emphasis mine)

It’s humbling to realize how much Paul lived for others. Yes, everything he did was ultimately for the glory of God, but he realized that serving God meant building up the church. “For we preach not ourselves,” he declares in 4:5, “but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.”

Paul was a single man who traveled, wrote, and struggled privately just like we all do. Yet he saw his whole life as service to the church, and he believed that even his afflictions and consolations were ultimately for others, not just for himself. In that, he shared the heart of Jesus Christ, who lived an intensely human life and died an agonizing death — for the glory of the Father, yes, but also for us.

Last week when I blogged on Haunt of Jackals for the CSFF Blog Tour, I was hoping to stir up conversation. Well, thanks to everyone who jumped in with many different viewpoints, conversation has been stirred! In fact, Eric Wilson, the author of Haunt, was gracious enough to offer a response of his own. If you were intrigued by the posts or would like to read a great discussion on God and fiction, I encourage you to read all three days again with the comments.

I was hesitant to do a negative review at all, because as an author I know they can sting. So I’m very glad that others whose response to the book was positive have chimed in on the conversation. Take a look at what they have to say!

Here’s the posts:

Day 1: http://www.rachelstarrthomson.com/2009/10/haunt-of-jackals-csff-blog-tour/

Day 2: http://www.rachelstarrthomson.com/2009/10/a-review-haunt-of-jackals-day-2/

Day 3: http://www.rachelstarrthomson.com/2009/10/god-in-fiction-haunt-of-jackals-day-3/

My friend JoJo Tabares of Art of Eloquence is running a seventh-anniversary contest in which you can win $350 worth of prizes — including Worlds Unseen, Burning Light, Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled, and Letters to a Samuel Generation. Check out this page for contest info!

That is, the James Street Night of Art did — and my reading at Williams Jewellers was caught briefly on camera . You can also see Carolyn warming up for our performance of Street Lullaby, a twenty-minute, two-person mix of ballet and poetry that I conceptualized.

Stop. Hush. You in the street.

Hear the feet rushing? Mouths speaking? Noise building? Stress pounding?

Hush.

Overwhelming, overbearing, overtiring world. Everything building as you stand in crowded places in this moment utterly surrounded.

Hush.

Hush.

Close your eyes for a moment. Listen well. Let us bring you a street lullaby.

Here’s the article and accompanying video: http://beta.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2134306

Reading out loud was actually quite a lot of fun. I found out that I can get all wrapped up in the story even while sitting in front of complete strangers talking into a microphone .

JSA was a secular event, so we went in with a goal of catching people’s attention and turning their thoughts toward God. As Street Lullaby begins:

As my review made clear yesterday, I was bothered by the representation of Christ in Haunt of Jackals. In some ways I found it more pagan than Christian. But that brings me back to a question I’ve asked myself a thousand times since I began writing: how can we faithfully represent God in fiction?

As God is real and alive in the world, and so writing about Him is not like writing about a character who was born entirely of my own imagination — as I am a Christian and responsible to glorify my God and represent Him accurately — as we who write fantasy try to tell the truth about the world even while we explore the possibilities of the imagination — how shall we then write?

I’ve long objected to Christian fiction that gives lip service to God in ways that are trite or shallow — God is a sort of shadowy absence, possibly because we don’t want to cross the line and misrepresent Him. (But then again, depicting God as an absence is certain misrepresentation.) William P. Young’s The Shack was the farthest thing from trite or shallow, yet I don’t feel Christians ought to put words directly into “God’s” mouth as Young did. C.S. Lewis created Aslan, a character allegorical of Christ who was not actually Christ, and this to my mind worked tremendously well. Tolkien created fallible characters who in various ways were types of Christ, much as Moses and Joseph were types of Christ in biblical history. This also works well.

But what do we do when we’re not working in allegory or in purely other-world fantasy? What do we do when our stories intersect with this world, when the God we’re writing about is the same one we know in reality? How can we write about Him without resorting to shallowness on the one hand or to dangerous misrepresentation on the other?

Two examples come to mind of how this can be done. One is Karen Hancock’s The Enclave, which we toured back in July. (See my posts here, here, and here.) In The Enclave, God more than once spoke directly to characters or led them in supernatural ways — but each time, Karen carefully used the words of scripture itself, and she never tore them out of their context. God comforted Cameron by saying “My strength is made perfect in weakness”; He called Zowan out of darkness through the words of Genesis.

This method of involving God as a character isn’t without its drawbacks — we can take scripture out of context and thus misrepresent it, and the use of only scripture as “God’s dialogue” is limiting. But it does work, and I think it works well.

A second method is to involve God through His impact on people. This doesn’t mean the classic Mandie out of quoting “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee” every time the heroine gets into trouble and having the words comfort her. I’m thinking in the veins of George MacDonald’s adult novels, like Malcolm, Sir Gibbie, or Heather and Snow. (MacDonald’s books, which are in the public domain and hard to find, are available to read online here.) Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps is another example.

In these books, we don’t hear God speaking or see Him walking around on earth, yet He is unquestionably there, active, and life-changing. We see this in the relationships the characters have with Him. MacDonald’s characters do not give lip service to Christ: rather, their devotion to Him is their key motivation. Their struggles, doubts, joys, and triumphs are inextricably wrapped up in their faith. I can easily imagine a Cal Nichols without Christ; I cannot imagine a Malcolm without Him.

In this type of Christian fiction, God has changed the lives of fictional characters just as He’s changed the lives of Christians in the real world, and just as we are called to live out the faith in such a way that others can “read” his work in us, so our characters can live out their faith and make God a real, present, active character in our books.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue, so please comment! How do you handle this tension in your own writing? How have you seen it handled? Of my conclusions, where do you agree and disagree? What facets am I missing?

April 2000–Zalmoxis Cave, Romania
She was free, for now. The first step . . .

With dagger in hand, Gina Lazarescu faced the cave opening where the sounds of scuffing feet seemed to mark the presence of another. A Collector? One of Jerusalem’s Undead?

Bleeding, she stood still and waited.

Haunt of Jackals opens where I presume Field of Blood left off: in a cave where Regina Lazarescu (“Queen of the Resurrected”) has slain an ancient vampire and torn herself free from thorny bonds; where she is weak, losing blood, and still hunted; where a fight plays out as it has for thousands of years between Good and Evil, between the Alive and the Undead, between Those Who Hunt and Those Who Resist.

The book’s story unfolds as Gina rejoins Cal Nichols, an immortal who has been walking the earth since he was brought out of the grave at Jesus’ crucifixion (read Matthew 27:52-53 for the account). Cal was once one of the Nistarim, a select group of men and women who carry the world’s burdens on their shoulders. If one of them slips before another can replace him, it will bring about Final Vengeance, the revenge of the evil Collectors, demonic spirits who once rebelled against God. Although Cal’s place among the Nistarim was lost when he fell into sin with the beautiful Nikki Lazarescu, he continues to fight the Collectors by finding and training those who are destined to join the Nistarim eventually — and by thwarting the plans of the Akeldama Cluster, a particularly nasty group of Collectors who are not just demonic, but undead. Raised from their own graves when the blood of Judas Iscariot fell upon them, the Akeldama Collectors are physical, immortal, and relentless in their pursuit of Final Vengeance.

Haunt of Jackals follows Cal and Gina, his unwitting daughter, as they seek to protect a child whose destiny lies with the Nistarim. At the same time, Cal is determined to find and destroy a particularly terrifying vampire, Natira, before he can carry out plans of his own. The book also spends a good amount of time in the heads and plans of the Undead, using the point of view of vampires, werewolves, and various possessed creatures.

Haunt‘s plot is complex, taking us across the world from Romania to Oregon to the wasteland of Kerioth in Israel. It delves into the past, present, and future of Gina Lazarescu, exploring her heart as she attempts to overcome an abusive childhood and reconnect with her father, identify her own role in the fight against the Undead, heal the wounds of losing a child to death and a husband to divorce, and figure out whether or not she’s willing to put her faith in “the Nazarene” — Jesus, whose blood she wears in her jewelry as protection against the Akeldama Cluster and as the door to salvation if she ever decides to drink it. It delves into Cal’s life and past as well, with plenty of action scenes and drama. It takes us into the homes and hearts of the Undead and shows us horrifying things (some of them graphic and stomach-turning).

In all of this, “the Nazarene” is often mentioned, yet I found him strangely absent. And here is ultimately why I disliked Haunt of Jackals. In monster lore, superstition dictates that power lies in artifacts, and Wilson hasn’t particularly changed that. Gina kills an ancient vampire by using the knife that Peter wielded in Gethsemane. The Collectors can be dispatched by a metal tent peg driven through the temples of their host body.  To banish a Collector to the abyss, a drop of Christ’s blood will suffice — and all Gina needs to do to be saved is literally drink the same blood.

If Haunt of Jackals was an allegory, I could see value in all of this — but it’s not. It’s an adventure set in the real world, albeit with lots of speculative dimensions, and in this adventure, all you really need to defeat evil is the right artifacts, self-discipline, and good combat training. Cal declares at one point that “We battle not against flesh and blood,” yet his methods of battling are decidedly physical. Vampires are killed with blades, blood, and tent pegs, but never once is a demon vanquished by the power of Jesus’ name or by the power of faith in His blood.

It is here, not in the violence, sexual innuendo, and anti-established-church attitudes, that I felt Haunt of Jackals failed as a distinctively Christian voice in a subgenre saturated by occult ideas and superstitions.  The book upholds Christian morality and lauds the Nazarene as the Savior and head of Those Who Resist, yet the power and presence of Christ as the Bible reveals them to us seem replaced by the power and presence of Christ as the source of ritual, artifact, and victory in combat.

Kudos to Eric Wilson: he is a brave man.

Since I put Worlds Unseen into the world, I’ve learned that reviews are a mixed bag. You’ll get good ones. You’ll get bad ones. Often you’ll get mixed reviews, because very few people will share the exact vision you had for your story or will feel that you should have written the message you did. And my book isn’t really controversial!

Haunt of Jackals, on the other hand, is.

The second book in the Jerusalem’s Undead Trilogy, Haunt of Jackals is a Christian vampire novel. Enter controversy! It’s violent, it’s gory, it’s definitely not rated PG, and it brings all kinds of speculative supernatural elements to bear on the real world. (Read “Fantasy in the Real World” for how I felt about this when Tom Pawlik did it in Vanish.)

May I be frank? I didn’t like Haunt. The premise didn’t work for me, nor did I like the characters or even the writing much, and so this month’s review (for the first time) is going to be almost purely negative.

But that’s exactly why I say kudos to Eric Wilson. It takes courage to write a book. It takes more courage to publish it, to let other people see it. To write a story that you know will spark controversy and negative reactions takes a huge amount of chutzpah and willingness to let your ideas take on lives of their own and stir up discussion, conviction, and reexamination.

Despite the fact that Haunt of Jackals was not my cup of tea, I am really looking forward to this month’s tour. I think Eric Wilson has given us a lot to discuss, and since I’m sure we won’t all agree, it should be a fantastic ride. I’ll post a review tomorrow and an essay on portraying God in fiction on Wednesday. In the meantime, check out the other bloggers and see what they have to say. You might also visit Eric’s jerusalemsundead.com, where you can see a better-than-average trailer for Field of Blood, the first book in the trilogy.

The rest of the tour:

Brandon Barr
Wayne Thomas Batson
Jennifer Bogart
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Amy Browning
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Timothy Hicks
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Dawn King
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika
Nissa
John W. Otte
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler
Jill Williamson
KM Wilsher

This morning before work, Carolyn, Naomi, Elyssa and I (aka the dancers and writer/narrator for Soli Deo Gloria Ballet) were out in the studio rehearsing Behold the Child, our Christmas production, which is breaking all kinds of new ground for us. (We’re telling a story rather than illustrating a theme — and we’re using props — and the music is, um, less traditional than your average Christmas production.) Telling stories this way teaches me about life (like I expressed in “The God Backstage“), today, in a special way — it reminded me how important all the transitional bits are.

This morning we concentrated on smoothing out the places between songs where people enter or leave the stage, where props are introduced or removed, where dancers need to look alive even when they’re dancing. Transitions don’t look impressive and the audience won’t walk away talking about how smoothly we moved the fake pottery offstage, but without good ones, the whole production would become disjointed, distracted, and ineffective.

So, my life’s lesson for this morning? The little in-between stuff matters. How disciplined I am about things like rising time, prayer time, and bedtime matters. My “insignificant” interactions with people are more signifcant than I think. Like prepositions in a sentence or quiet entrances in a ballet, the small things I do matter just as much as the big things — in fact, without the small things, the big things would never take shape.

Katherine was kind enough to review Taerith on her blog, so I thought I’d share the review here . It begins:

First of all, I generally don’t like fantasy. And Taerith is fantasy . . . The fact the God is shown as Deus, the Only-Wise, makes it fantasy. And of course, the unicorn… even though I’ve never been totally convinced that unicorns weren’t real anyway. So, it is fantasy. But it is real. And beautiful. I love the imagery surrounding Deus. Psalm 91 is my favorite psalm, and the feathers and wings that fill the pages which speak of Deus are perfect . . .

Read Katherine’s whole review at the link above, and leave her a comment to let her know you stopped by . She did a particularly good job of summing up the plot and characters, and I really enjoyed getting a look at them from someone else’s point of view!

Taerith is a full novel available for reading on this site. You can read it here.