A Storyteller First

I recently read Broken by Travis Thrasher, his twelfth novel and what I think is likely his best yet. Broken is only the latest in a series of consistently well-done novels, ranging from love stories to thrillers/suspense stories. A few months prior to publishing Broken, he self-published Every Breath You Take as a kind of love letter to his daughter. And he’s published three of four novels in a series of Young Adult novels as well.

I’ve now read most of his published work. There’s not a bum story in the lot. Thrasher is always good, always entertaining and always thought-provoking, which isn’t what you usually get from terrifying suspense stories like Isolation or Ghostwriter or a love story collection like The Promise Remains. But he delivers more than a good story.

His heroes are flawed, sometimes seriously flawed, and his villains are totally evil (as a rule). In Broken, for example, Laila starts as almost unsympathetic, a character I was almost determined not to like, and then she changed and my attitude changed with her. She was flawed, yes, but more importantly, she was real.

Thrasher also explores subjects and themes you sometimes find in Christian fiction, but it’s still not typical, themes like mental illness, burned-out faith and loss of faith, dysfunctional families, prostitution, and abortion. Again, the emphasis here is on the real. He doesn’t exaggerate; instead, he creates characters and narratives that are recognizable to Christians even if we’re uncomfortable talking about them.

There’s often violence; people get shot and die; people are sometimes brutalized. With Thrasher, though, the violence isn’t gratuitous. It’s not meant to shock but instead to help tell the story.

And there are, in many of the his stories, elements of the supernatural – the ghosts of Broken and the evil spirits of Isolation, to cite two examples.

But are these “Christian” novels?

In some of his works, the Christian message is fairly explicit (Isolation and Broken, for example); it’s less so in stories like Ghostwriter and Sky Blue (still my personal favorite). But before I add more fuel to the ongoing debate about “Christian fiction,” I would say that thrasher is a storyteller first and foremost, a storyteller who happens to be a Christian and whose writing is undergirded by his faith but not suffocated by it. He doesn’t preach the gospel in his novels; he shows it, sometimes directly and sometimes implicitly.

These same themes can be found in his three Young Adult novels – Solitary (2010), Gravestone (2011), and Temptation (2012). The fourth and final book in the series, Hurt, is due out in January.

We can’t neatly categorize Thrasher as either a writer of Christian fiction or a novelist who happens to be a Christian (the usual way this discussion and debate goes). Instead, what we can say is this: he tells the story he has to tell, and in the process he makes the message of forgiveness and redemption all the more compelling.

This isn’t what we usually find in thrillers and suspense, even when they’re well written. But we find it in Travis Thrasher.

This post was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but they revamped the site and the archive disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting a few of the articles I wrote. This one has been modified to include his Solitary stories.

A Nation, Broken

I don’t write about political stuff on this blog, because I can’t stand the political stuff that’s going on. But something seems fundamentally broken in my country.

Over the weekend, the images crowded in, online and on television: U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot at a Tucson shopping mall. Six people dead, including a nine-year-old girl born on Sept. 11, 2001.

Within minutes, it seemed, politics took over. Economist Paul Krugman, writing shortly after the shooting, connected Jared Loughner, the assailant, to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. With no evidence whatsoever. A Democrat had been shot, and so he assumed someone connected to Republicans or the Tea party must have done it. The sheriff in Tucson, a personal friend of the congresswoman, rushed to a similar judgment but was less specific. The media ran with that narrative for a while, most likely because it fits with the media often seems to want to believe.

It took the FBI to start calming things down. There’s no established or suspected connection, the agency said. If anything, what little anecdotal information suggests the shooter leaned the other way politically but was clearly and emphatically messed up mentally.

Connecting others to hate is in and of itself a hate crime. And there’s no end of it.

Civility and governance: broken.

Then there’s the state of our finances.

Our government functions with no budget. The state governments collectively do little better, and some of them – California, New York and Illinois, to cite only three – do a lot worse. And the national debt? How much do our great-grandchildren, not even born yet, owe the People’s Republic of China?

Illinois has a novel idea to solve its debt problem: borrow more. Delay the inevitable for a year or two. Maybe something will turn up. In the meantime, let’s increase the state income tax by 75 percent.

Finances: broken. The political leadership to tackle finances: paralyzed. In the meantime, one party is focused on seizing the initiative for the elections in 2012 while the other is focused on how much staff can be crammed through via executive and administrative fiat.

Finally, there are our churches, or the church. I have this idea in my head, and perhaps in my heart, that so much of what is broken today is a result, not from the nation walking away from God, but from the church not doing what it’s supposed to do, and that is to be salt and light. We’ve drunk the same Kool-Aid everyone else has. We’re more about celebrity and mega-size than we are about salt and light. We’ve embraced the tenets of business without realizing that it comes with a cost, a huge cost.

And then I remind myself what God can do with broken things. That that’s really all he’s ever had to work with on this planet – broken things. It’s through the broken things – the things that don’t matter in the eyes of this world – that he creates mighty works. And it was through a small group of broken men and a few women that an empire was eventually conquered.

So I pray.

My prayer is not for revival.

My prayer is not for our nation to turn back to God.

My prayer is not for our churches to be filled.

Instead, my prayer is for God to use broken things.


Peter Pollock is hosting a One Word Blog Carnival on “broken.” To see other posts, please visit Peter’s site.

Photograph: Ruined House by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Travis Thrasher's "Broken"

What a ripping good story this is.

Laila Torres works at a bank in Greenville, South Carolina. A co-worker, Kyle, is interested in her. She is clearly a beautiful woman. She keeps discouraging Kyle. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know her past. But her past is about to catch up with Laila, Kyle and just about anyone else associated with her.

And it’s a past that only gradually unfolds, adding layer upon layer to Laila’s story, a story that begins with one fact: she shot and killed a man.

Or did she?

The twelfth novel of author Travis Thrasher, Broken is a wonderfully crafted story of a woman haunted by her past, chased by the brother of the man she believes she killed, and pursued by her own conscience. The story moves from Chicago to New York to Greenville and finally to post-Katrina New Orleans, the perfect “broken” setting for a broken woman running from a broken life. Thrasher sustains the growing tension of the story by allowing Laila herself to finally face what she’s truly been running from, what she cannot forgive herself for but only can be supernaturally forgiven.

“Broken” is a great story. Thrasher has written a series of suspenseful, sometimes terrifying but always satisfying and even provocative stories, and this one is one of his best.