Christian Realism

Had I been doing a good job at keeping up with it, by now you would probably be sick of hearing that one of my goals for the year is to record every book I read, and comment on how it affected my life. Great idea, but it works a lot better if I post more than once a quarter. There are about a dozen books to report on, but I’m going to do a quick run on a stack of airport paperbacks; the rest will be addressed in another post. By airport paperbacks I mean the type of pop lit one would normally read on a long flight, its content serving primarily as distraction. Yes, that is a bit snobby, and no, not all of the books listed below should be dismissed so easily. But as it so happens, most of these were, in fact, read during a recent trip overseas.

One of my areas of interest is the horror genre, particularly where it intersects with the Christian faith. About a month ago I recognized that were I to speak with any authority on the subject, it would behoove me to break out of my “horror literature stopped with HP Lovecraft” fantasy world, and to read some contemporary works. So I conducted an in-depth analysis of the extant writing on the subject… well, actually, I started with some horror writers I like, and used their names as keywords to find relevant newsgroups, Web sites, and Amazon.com favorites lists. Armed with a dozen new names, I drove to the local Barnes & Noble to see what was in stock. My long-winded intro out of the way, here now is the list:

Mystery Walk by Robert R. McCammon. Two young men are bitter enemies: one can communicate with the restless spirits of the dead; the other is a faith healer and inheritor of an evangelistic empire. They grow up, they fight, and one of them dies, the end. Not bad, not offensive, not from a Christian worldview, but it didn’t bash Christianity either.

The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell. A really, really bad night at a bookstore. The intentionally funny parts of the story were quite funny, but I never really cared about any of the characters. Campbell’s previous work, The Darkest Part of the Wood was far more engrossing.

Revelation by Bentley Little. The devil pops up in Randall, Arizona, to start the battle of Armageddon. This book was so close. Change maybe 500 words and it would have been labeled Christian fiction… but toward the end it pulled one of those, “some call him Jesus, some call him Anansi, but we all believe in the same thing, so let’s sacrifice a goat” switcheroos. Darn.

The Doorkeepers by Graham Masterson. Six doors they stand in London town… It’s sort of like Tim Powers, only not as good. It’s about people who move between alternate versions of London. I believe they get from one reality to the next by falling through holes in the plot.

The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene. What if there was another great flood? Who would be around on the 41st day of rain? Giant tube worms from the bottom sea, that’s who!

Storm Front by Jim Butcher. Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, paranormal investigator. Sorta like Philip Marlowe with potions, unfettered by meaningless details such as an investigator’s license.

Even Vampires Get the Blues by Katie MacAlister. This half-elf runs a private detective agency, and she falls in love with one of her clients, a vampire who lost his soul because of a curse, and he’ll get it back if she can get him to fall in love with her, but in the meantime they are playing the “friends with benefits” game… AURGH! I ran out of reading material in Germany, and borrowed one of my wife’s books. MacAlister writes excellent dialog. She should use her powers for good, not for the creation of vampire/elf detective/romance novels.

That’s it for now…