Travis Thrasher’s “The Remaining”

Last September, a movie about the Rapture – the “taking up” of believing Christians prior to the end times described in the Biblical book of Revelation – was released in theaters. Reception of the movie was so-so, and it seems to have disappeared rather quickly. After all of the “Left Behind” books by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins (with Nicholas Cage in the movie), perhaps there’s nothing left to the imagination about the Rapture and its aftermath.

The movie script for “The Remaining” was “novelized,” and Travis Thrasher was the author who wrote the book, published under the same title. I normally don’t read novelizations, but I’ve read one of Thrasher’s before, “Home Run,” and he writes good stuff, even if he has to work from rather weak scripts.

The book is profoundly disturbing. Perhaps it’s meant to be. But my response to it has lingered for days after finishing it.

The story filters the Rapture through that most commonplace of events – a wedding. Six friends have come together for the wedding of two them in Wilmington, North Carolina. They’re all from the area; they’ve all gone to school together. A year before the wedding, one of them, Lauren, had a series of horrific visions and dreams about her friends dying. But the visions had faded, and this is a joyful event for the couple getting married, Dan and Skylar.

The entire book is set in roughly a 24-hour time period.

It’s during the wedding reception that the Rapture happens, except the believing Christians aren’t “taken up” bodily. They simply drop dead, and it is their souls that are taken up. Lauren is the only one of the six who dies on the spot.

Travis Thrasher

Chaos ensues. Explosions, plane crashes, trumpets sounding, fires, a ferocious hailstorm. Then comes the attacks by something – reptiles? Demons? It’s hard to see them clearly at night, but they’re attacking anything connected to faith, like church buildings, and anyone who is gaining faith as a result of the unfolding events. As events progress, the five remaining friends learn that this isn’t just happening in Wilmington but all around the world. Civilization as they’ve known it for all of their young lives had suddenly and horrifically come to an end.

Thrasher uses short chapters, and tight (and tense) writing to build the suspense and, yes, the horror. At times it’s difficult to keep reading, because it seems that all hope has been removed, and judgment is at hand. Telling the story through a wedding (taken from the movie script) somehow makes the narrative both terrible and compelling.

The effects of The Remaining still linger in the mind, though. And the heart. Thrasher has once again told a good, if horrible, story.

Top photograph: A scene from the movie by Affirm Pictures, a unit of Sony Pictures.

Travis Thrasher’s “Home Run”

I usually resist reading novelizations of movies. Often hurriedly written, based completely on a movie script, novelizations are often marked by poor writing and a story less than satisfying than the movie itself. I particularly resist novelizations of movies I haven’t heard of, or that I’ve heard of but haven’t seen.

Home Run by Travis Thrasher is a bad example of the point I’m trying to make. I hadn’t seen or heard of the movie. And it’s ostensibly about baseball; I’m not a fan of sports novels. But I read this book. And I read simply because of the author who wrote it.

Chicago-based Thrasher is a fine writer. I’ve read nearly all of his books. Sky Blue (2007) is one of my favorite novels (I’ve read it twice, and it gets better the second time.) He’s written across a number of fiction genres, and does all of them very well indeed.

So I trusted the author and read Home Run, based on the script for the movie of the same name. And I met a hero who’s one of the most despicable human beings you’re likely to come across.

Corey Brand plays baseball for the Denver Grizzlies. If there’s one thing Corey knows how to do, it’s hit home runs. It may be the only admirable thing about him. Arrogant, unfeeling, uncaring, disconnected from his brother and his family. Drives fast cars, and drives them fast. Endless streams of women.

And alcohol. Corey Brand has a serious substance abuse problem. He’s in a hitting slump, and it’s contract renewal time.

Travis Thrasher

His agent packs him off to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, his home town. He has to spend eight weeks in a rehab program. Even before he arrives in town, he totals his rental car and injures his brother in the process.

And in his hometown, Corey has to face and confront his past, including the dead father who’s verbal abuse drove Corey away and shaped him into what he’s become, good and bad. And he has to face and confront the girlfriend he left behind, the girlfriend who was pregnant.

Like I said, a pretty despicable human being.

But Thrasher tells a good story. He’s not content simply to pull from a movie script. He ads depth to the characters. He adds depth to the story. And what could have been just another thin novelization becomes a story worth telling and a story worth reading, about how a man learns forgiveness and finds redemption.

I was right to trust my gut about a Travis Thrasher story.

Here’s the official trailer for the movie (which I still haven’t seen, and I may not since I don’t want it to run the chance of it ruining the novelization).

 

Travis Thrasher’s “Hurt”

The events that propelled teenager Chris Buckley into an ever-escalating horror story are coming to a head. The question is, will Chris and his loved ones survive?

Welcome to Solitary, North Carolina, and welcome to Hurt, the fourth and final novel in Travis Thrasher’s Solitary series.

It is in Hurt that Chris (and the reader) gets all of his questions answered, and the answers are usually terrifying. He learns he’s been selected to assume the family “responsibility” from his dying great-grandfather, except that responsibility is a kind of ownership of evil.

And it is in Hurt that Chris discovers what faith means. But he may lose his life, and his girlfriend Kelsey may lose her life as well.

Thrasher maintains a fine tension between what looks like the regular life of a high-school teenager and the growing horror of what is happening around that teenager. It’s no mean feat to consistently move back and forth between normal and abnormal (or paranormal), and Thrasher pulls it off. He makes it look almost effortless – which usually means some serious sweat equity went into the writing and rewriting.

As in the other books in the Solitary series, the right is tight. Chapters are short, likely to appeal to the Young adult audience the book is aimed at. How the book is structured has the effect of propelling the action of the story forward, and forcing the reader to confront the same choices Chris must confront and make. This emphasis on brevity continually heightens the tension, and makes Hurt a very fast read (and you want to keep reading).

It is just the right conclusion to the story. Thrasher has managed to maintain the interest and excitement across all four of the books in the series, and it’s quite an achievement. 

Related Reviews of the Solitary Series:

Solitary

Gravestone

Temptation

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since I gathered up my “notes to self” and Post-Its and what-not, and had a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

The picture above is none other than Roller (Caden) (because he likes to roll) and Cameron (Dancer) (because he likes to dance). Cameron, unbeknownst to his mother, was hiding in Caden’s pop-up bed. Mom got a real surprise, and Caden, who was supposed to have been sleeping, remained unflappable when Cameron yelled.

We had the opportunity to babysit them last Saturday. Grandpa had a ball.

I mentioned last weekend that we had seen Les Miserables, the movie. I still have the scenes and music running through my head. And I’m still amazed at the quality of the singing by actors I didn’t know could sing. A friend at work told me all of the songs were recorded live, on the set and not in a recording studio, which, if true, makes the singing all the more remarkable.

Current reading: Hurt, by Travis Thrasher, the final installment in the four-volume Solitary series. He’s managed to maintain and increase the momentum of this young-adult-but-older-adults-will-like-it-too story.

Next up on the reading list: an advanced reading copy of The Crystal Scepter by C.S. Lakin, another volume in the Gates of Heaven series. These are the books that helped convince me to read fantasy again. The book will be published Feb. 15.

And on the Can’t-Wait-to-Read List is Adam Blumer’s The Tenth Plague. Adam’s first book, Fatal Illusions, was one suspenseful read. His new one will published as an e-book next Tuesday. (Adam is the editor who slogged through both of my novels, and he did a wonderful job.)

My Novel News: My two novels have been getting some attention. Pastor Ron Edmondson of Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, called Dancing Priest one of the best descriptions of relationship evangelism he’d come across; I did a guest post for his blog on where the novel came from. And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a “Penned in St. Louis” about A Light Shining.

My Not-Novel News: It’s early in the process, but I’ve signed a contract with another publisher for a non-fiction book. I’m being deliberately vague; we’ve agreed on the idea and I’m working on a very extended outline, which will have to be accepted and then turned into a draft. If all goes well, it will be published late in 2013.

Finally, a picture of Roller (Caden) that I absolutely love. Taken by my daughter-in-law, it shows him peering around the corner of the sofa. Did I mention that I love having grandchildren?

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.

Travis Thrasher's "Temptation"

Solitary, North Carolina, can be one creepy place. And dangerous. And it’s getting worse for a 17-year-old boy recently moved there from Chicago.

The pastor at the big mega-church is anything but a Christian. The big man in town seems to run things from his rural estate/fortress. The police department may, or may not, be in the pocket of the powers that be. And then there are the visions, the haunting, the voices in the night, and the secret tunnels.

Life is tough enough for 17-year-old Chris Buckley, newly transplanted from Chicago with his divorced mother. But every time he gets interested in a girl, she disappears. Or dies.

Solitary is not a normal place, And it tunes out that Chris Buckley is not a normal teenager. Only he doesn’t know it. Yet.

Travis Thrasher’s Temptation, the third in the series of four Solitary novels, is officially a YA (young adult) novel, but it’s just as readable (and interesting) for OAs (older adults) (I just made that up). Thrasher has managed to suystain the pace and suspense of the first two books, Solitary and Gravestone, and create a satisfying, if often terrifying, read.

The strength of Temptation and its series novels is in the voice of the main character, Chris. He talks, acts and thinks like a teenager. The writing is also a particular strength – spare and lean, keeping the reader moving through the story at a fast and easy pace.

Chris is plagued by doubts and confusion, part of the normal trauma of growing to adulthood and partly fueled by his parents’ divorce. He finds himself increasingly estranged from his mother, who is tipping over into alcoholism. His most immediate concern is relief from the pressures f his life, but the powers of Solitary – and they are dark powers – have very definite plans for Chris.

The Solitary series has had a dark, foreboding feel from the beginning. In Temptation, the evil design at the back of everything is gradually unfolding and becoming more clear. The temptation of the title is the choice Chris faces – to fight or succumb to what he’s been told is his destiny. His decision is by no means obvious.

Travis Thrasher has produced another great read.

Related:

My review of Solitary.

My review of Gravestone.

Travis Thrasher’s web site.

Travis Thrasher’s blog, The Journey Is Everything.

Travis Thrasher's "Gravestone"

Travis Thrasher has written a number of novels, in a number of genres – romance, suspense, contemporary adult and (borderline) horror. Last year, he started a four-part Young Adult series with Solitary. The second novel in the series is the recently published Gravestone, and I devoured it, and on Kindle, no less – the first book I’ve read on Kindle.

Chris Buckley is a high school junior living in Solitary, North Carolina, having moved with his mother from Chicago following his parents’ divorce. Solitary is a strange town, and the longer Chris is there, the stranger it gets. In Solitary, he has what he thinks are the typical new-kid-at-school experiences – the bullies, the looks, the giggles. He meets and falls in love with a girl named Jocelyn. Gradually he comes to understand that nothing is what it seems in Solitary. Nothing. And instead of small-town life, Chris finds evil. And evil finds Jocelyn.

In Gravestone, Jocelyn is gone, mourned and missed by Chris. And the evil is growing more intense. His alcoholic mother claims to be threatened – by people in their own house. One of Jocelyn’s friends and her family move away, suddenly. Another friend comes to understand what has happened to Jocelyn, and tries to help Chris. And there’s the pastor of the town’s big church, whose wife isn’t seen any more and who – as far as Chris is concerned – radiates evil.

It’s not all bad. Chris goes to work for an elderly woman named Iris who operates a remote inn, and she's completely different. He meets a girl named Kelsey in his art class, whose family is refreshingly normal. And the son of his missing Uncle Robert finds him, and wants to help him.

Part of Gravestone is Chris having interior conversations with himself, much like any teenager would, except most teenagers don’t have these kinds of experiences to live through. The novel is fast-paced and action-packed, and the story itself is riveting. Best of all, Thrasher is a fine writer. The creepy characters have just enough humanity in them to avoid stereotypes, while the good characters have their flaws and failings. And the novel keeps packing a punch and never stops.

Gravestone may be aimed at the Young Adult market, but this older adult was wowed by a great story.

Related:

My review of Solitary.

Travis Thrasher's web site.

Travis Thrasher's Love Stories

Author Travis Thrasher is today associated with well written suspense novels like Isolation and Ghostwriter, including Solitary, the first book in his new Young Adult series. (He’s also got three other writing projects underway for publication in 2011 – the guy not only writes well but he writes well and prolifically.)

Interestingly enough, Thrasher started his writing career with two collections of love stories.

Because I like his novels, and because I usually like to read everything by an author I like, I was able to get my hands on both collections (one was easy; the other was not and took quite some time before an Amazon affiliate got hold of it). The first is The Promise Remains/The Watermark: A Collection of Love Stories (2001) and the second is Three Roads Home: Stories of First Love & Second Chances (2003).

The Promise Remains/The Watermark is two novellas. In The Promise Remains, a young couple who fall in love during a summer camp find their way back to each other (and just in time to avert one’s pending marriage). The Watermark is a more contemporary interpretation of the story of the prodigal son, in which a young man from a wealthy family experiences years of guilt for the responsibility he bears for the death of a young woman because he was DWI.

Three Roads Home is a collection of three novellas, and they continue the themes of first loves and second chances found in the earlier volume. In Somebody, a young married couple have an argument about the wife’s suspected infidelity just as the husband is going out the door to catch a plane to Germany; the plane crashes in the Atlantic. In In Care Of, a successful author with a family he loves receives an email from his first love, and then faces the possibility of meeting her. In Still Life at Sunset, a young woman returns home to make peace with her past, and discovers an old love.

I like these stories. Thrasher early on was demonstrating his ability as a storyteller. But I discovered something else. These love stories foreshadow a number of the later suspense novels to come.

That shouldn’t have surprised me. A love story, after all, has elements of suspense, even considering the suspense is about “will they get together” as opposed to “will they get killed.”

But there are also specific stories lines and plot developments in the love stories that will see a different kind of treatment later on. The geography of The Promise Remains, for example, is very much like the geography of Solitary and plays much the same role. There is a Mexico parasailing event in Still Life at Sunset that will become a major element of the novel Sky Blue (and one of my Thrasher favorites). And then there are the surprise twists and plot developments that are used so well in both the love stories and the later suspense novels.

The love stories all stand on their own, as do the later suspense novels. But they’re of a piece, and it’s interesting to identify and understand the connections. But whether you read his love stories or his suspense novels, you're in for some good reading.

Another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

Once more, it’s that time of the week, when our intrepid leader Duane Scott officiates at Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays.

Yesterday, page visits to a blog post I did earlier this month skyrocketed (well, “skyrocketed” may be too strong a term, but my normal number of page visits quadrupled in a day). I couldn’t figure out why – there didn’t appear to be a single source. And then I found out that High Calling Editor Marcus Goodyear had included that post of mine in a Faith in the Workplace newsletter he does for Christianity Today Magazine (online).

Thank you, Marcus. That was an awfully nice thing to do.

In August, something similar (but smaller) happened when someone took a poem I’d posted and linked it in StumbleUpon. Whoosh went the page visits. Thank you, Someone.

I’m familiar with this stuff, and I know this online stuff, but I still get amazed when it happens.

It’s been two weeks since I went to the High Calling editorial team to Laity Lodge near San Antonio (that’s “near” in Texas terms; it was actually about 140 miles away). Since then, the High Calling web site has merged with the High Calling Blogs web site; the combined site is simply The High Calling. I really like the design; and I’ve successfully maneuvered the Drupal platform and actually posted an article this week: Is God More Pleased with My Work than I Am?

Ann Kroeker, one of our number at Laity Lodge, did a blog post this week on the experiences they had at their lodge house (Lodestar) with scorpions. We didn’t have scorpions at our lodge house (Song Bluff). I did have to get rid of a wandering cricket in my bedroom, though. A couple of people closer to the main lodge had experiences with tarantulas. And I was followed by a couple of vultures while hiking one of the trails. (That was a little unnerving; I think I’m on a hike and they think they’re looking at dinner).

I’ve been reading a lot of good stuff lately:


• Billy Coffey’s novel Snow Day was officially published on Monday. It’s storytelling like only Billy Coffey can do it.

• I finished Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the book we’ve been discussing for The High Calling; my last post on it will be Sunday afternoon.

• I read Three Roads Home, a group of three love story novellas by Travis Thrasher published in 2003.

• I’ve started reading Another Hotel Room: Selected Poems 1988-2008 by Steven Marty Grant.

Thanks to all you who commented on my post yesterday – the one about approaching a tough decision on what to do with our elderly dog. I talked with the vet Wednesday, and we’ve worked out a process for sometime in the next two weeks or so. I was so cool, calm and totally professional with the vet on the phone. I only lost it twice.

Finally, it wouldn't be an official Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday without a new photo of the world’s greatest grandson. My daughter-in-law Stephanie took this picture while trying to fit him for clothes – and she found this hat. So, here’s Cameron in a bear hat.

Travis Thrasher's "Solitary"

Chris Buckley moves with his mother to a small mountain town in North Carolina named Solitary. She’s divorced her husband, who discovered God and forgot his family. Solitary is where she grew up; she and Chris move into her brother’s cabin. Her brother had disappeared a year before.

It’s the typical new-kid-at-school experience for Chris. Almost. He defends a kid against some bullies – and even the kid being bullied tells him it was the wrong move. He meets Jocelyn Evans and her friends Rachel and Poe, and totally flips for Jocelyn. Except everyone starts warning him against her.

And then there’s that church that is the church in town and the one where the pastor’s sermons say nothing about Jesus but a lot about death. And the muddy footprints near the cabin; someone is watching them. And the email warnings to stay away from Jocelyn. And the small group who seem to worship by themselves. And his mom getting chloroformed. And then Chris getting chloroformed. And the town doesn't celebrate Christmas.

This is Solitary, the first of four Young Adult novels by Travis Thrasher. The author of 11 previous novels for adults (and some ripping good books ranging from love stories to suspense), Thrasher has created in “Solitary” a combination of suspense, nightmare and the anguish of a teenage boy who is head over heels in his first love.

The pace simply doesn’t let up. Thrasher has structured the novel with short chapters and sparse, clean prose that add speed and propel the reader forward.

This first novel introduces the key lines of action. And while there is a resolution, the novel is really setting up the rest of the series. Yes, I know it’s a Young Adult novel, but at the breathless end I was already feeling the internal clamor for “more Solitary.”

I’m hooked. Your teenagers will be, too. So will you.

Related:

Travis Thrasher’s web site.

Travis Thrasher’s blog, The Journey Is Everything.

The trailer for Solitary on YouTube.

(Yes, Federal Trade Commission, I received this book from the publisher's agent to do a review. But I would have bought it anyway.)

A Storyteller First

My new post for Christian Manifesto, "A Storyteller First," is about author Travis Thrasher. Let me know what you think. I reviewed his latest novel Broken earlier this week.

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.

It All Started with "Sky Blue"

It’s been a year since I started blogging. On March 19, 2009, I opened a Blogger account and set up a blog, with my first post called A Life-Changing Novel. The novel in question was Sky Blue by Travis Thrasher. That was where it started – with a novel I really enjoyed. The post explains why.

That was one year and 297 blog posts ago. I still think Sky Blue was one of the best books I read last year.

The blog didn’t just happen. It started with me posting book reviews on Amazon, and doing research on the authors and the books for the reviews. And then came the blog, followed closely by me signing up with Facebook and Twitter. The first person who signed up to follow my blog was suspense writer Mike Dellosso. I think he was being kind, but it was a huge boost at the time.

And what happened was this:

I started writing poetry.

I started doing guest blogging.

I’m co-editing an online poetry journal and participating in poetry jams.

I found incredible writers, and new authors to read and new poets to recite.

I wandered into The High Calling Blogs, and now publish articles there, mostly about work.

I started writing articles twice a month for The Christian Manifesto, mostly about culture.

But the most important thing that happened was that I met all kinds of new friends online, and became part of both large communities and smaller ones within the larger.

And it all started with Sky Blue.

Saturday Good Reads

My list of “good reads” today is shorter than last Saturday’s, and they were all posted before Tuesday evening. Then came the almost simultaneous labor for my daughter-in-law and head injury requiring surgery for my son, the father-to-be. Life is slowly returning to normal, or becoming a “new normal.” And I’m already becoming a bore on the subject of my new grandson.

Poetry

Phoenix-Karenee’s poem, “Wordless Vision.”

Maureen Doallas’ beautiful poem "Anne," about Anne Frank.

Laura Boggess’ poem in her Sunday Sermon Notes.

The End of Innocence by Justinian at Discount Verbiage.

Shadow, Jezamama’s walk along a lake, a story and a poem.

Prose

“It is Home,” by Marty Duane at Coffee with Marty.

“A Gun, for Goodness Sake,” by Jeff Jordan at To My Children, If They Are Listening.

“Should the Message be Hidden?” A guest post by author Randy Ingermanson at Brandilyn Collins’ blog.

“Engagers of Separatists?” by Mike Duran at deompose

Columbia Journalism Review: “Who Says? Narrative Authority in a Fragmented World.”

Author Travis Thrasher on criticism: “Everybody’s a Critic.”

And finally…

While this isn’t a post about me, I do want to call attention to an article I wrote for the High Calling Blogs, which was published Friday. It’s about a business called Transformational Threads, owned by my friend Maureen Doallas (yes, the poet) that is all about a passion for art.

“Every Breath You Take”

Thomas Rowe awakens on an airplane bound for Chicago. Nothing unusual for most of us, except Thomas Rowe died 24 years before in a traffic accident, leaving behind his two-year-old daughter Kayla. The man sitting next to him tells him to fasten his seat belt, and that he’s being sent back because there’s something only he can do. It has to do with Kayla – and the man can’t tell him what it is.

Kayla Rowe is getting married in three months. She has spent a lifetime missing the father who was killed. She’s spent the last two years missing Billy Harris, a young musician she met in college and whom she fell in love with. And Billy Harris, despite his musical talent, is going nowhere, because he can’t get over Kayla Rowe.

It’s obvious that Travis Thrasher’s Every Breath You Take is a love story. But it’s not the kind of love story you expect when you start reading it, and it certainly isn’t the kind you expected by the time you finish it. But it is many things more than a simple romance. A deeply satisfying story. A story about love and misguided intentions. A story about love getting derailed and set right. A story about soul mates. A story about a father’s love that is so strong that it reaches across eternity. A story about the love for music.

I was captivated. I didn’t want this novel to end. There are scenes between Kayla and Billy that are so real and so familiar that it’s like living your own first love all over again.

Thrasher started his writing career with two love stories, The Promise Remains (2000) and The Watermark (2001). He then moved into suspense, and has written a series of outstanding suspense novels, like Admission (2006), Isolation (2008) and Ghostwriter (2009), along with several before and since. Sky Blue (2007) might defy classification; it is a kind of combination suspense novel and love story that’s an extraordinary work.

And now Every Breath You Take. While all of his other novels have been published by conventional publishing firms, this one is self-published. It fell outside publisher expectations and, I suspect, he wanted to do this one entirely himself, because it is its own love story – Thrasher’s love story for his own daughter.

The love story about music is important, too. The novel’s title comes from a song by the Police/Sting. And there are a lot of references to Cold Play and other groups (I like Cold Play, although I know I’m not supposed to at my age, and I was tickled to catch all the references in the novel).

A final note. This was not a review copy. I bought it through Thrasher’s web site because I’ve read a lot of his other works. And I knew this one was going to be special. But it surpassed even my high expectations.

For more information on the book and how to buy it, visit Thrasher’s web site. And I give you my strongest recommendation to do so.

Every Breath You Take is that good.

The Tenth Day of Christmas: Suspense

I’ve loved reading mysteries and suspense since I was six or seven years old. The first one I can remember reading was Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion. I can also remember ordering ever mystery offered by Scholastic Book Service at school, inhaling all of the Hardy Boys (with a slight detour into the Tom Swift science fiction stories), and then going on to mysteries with murders and general mayhem. Even today, I usually can’t resist the newest mystery novel by Elizabeth George, P.D. James, Ian Rankin or the Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte (English translation).

Christian fiction has its own sub-genre of mystery and suspense, and a growing category of horror. And there’s a lot of controversy within the ranks, so to speak; not everyone likes it or believes it to be “edifying.” But I’ve found four novelists are who tell great stories, and I will read anything by them.

Earlier this year, not too long before I started blogging, I discovered Mike Dellosso and his novel The Hunted, shortly before he published his latest novel, Scream. Set in Pennsylvania where Mike lives, these are stories more influenced by Stephen King than P.D. James. There’s mystery, to be sure, but there’s also horror, and sometimes the supernatural. He writes about life in a small-town, but it’s life like you’ve never run across before. I got hooked. His next novel, Darlington Woods, is due out in May 2010.

Then I saw a recommendation for Isolation by a Chicago-based novelist named Travis Thrasher. He’s a full-time writer, and has written 12 novels, including a love story and a lot of mysteries and suspense. His novel Sky Blue is a personal favorite, and I’ve also read Admission and Ghostwriter. Some are mysteries, all are suspenseful and a few fall into the horror category (As I read Isolation, I had to occasionally put it down, go walk around and calm myself, and then come back – the tension that Thrasher creates is something else). He’s under contract for a series of Young Adult novels, and has just self-published Every Breath You Take because it was something he wanted to do. (Yes, I’ve ordered it.)

Adam Blumer's novel Fatal Illusions was published in the late spring, and I don’t think I will ever look at magicians the same way again. Adam is a freelance editor who lives in Michigan’s U.P., and this is his first novel – and it’s a corker of a story about a family trying to take a healing sabbatical, and instead finding themselves being stalked but not one but two different people for two different reasons. Don’t read this novel before turning the lights out for the night; I made that mistake and lay in bed wide-eyed for some time. Adam is also working on his next novel.

Sam Batterman also published his first novel this year, called Wayback. It leans more in the direction of science fiction than the other three novelists, and it’s more like Michael Crichton than Stephen King. It’s got a fascinating premise – that scientists are able to prove the Biblical flood, and travel back in time to do just that. The descriptions of the landscape – and of the cataclysm of the flood itself – are incredible. Batterman is working on a sequel to WayBack.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

Travis Thrasher's "Ghostwriter"

I like how Travis Thrasher writes. He’s written 11 novels; I’ve read four of the most recent – Isolation, Sky Blue, Admission and now Ghostwriter. Earlier today, I posted my review of Ghostwriter at Amazon. It’s a novel that sticks.

Ghostwriter falls in the suspense/horror genre, and it’s got all of the characteristic elements – a ghost, a serial killer, the possibility that the main character is only living his own horror writer’s imagination and slowly going mad, and enough tension that builds to the point you wonder if you can stand any more. The novel succeeds simply as a suspense/horror story.

But it’s more than that. And it’s the “more,” rather than the story’s ghost, that’s haunting me right now. The “more” is about creativity and faith, and I’ve read this novel at a moment in my life when I’m wrestling with both. And Ghostwriter has helped me see that I’m actually wrestling with one thing, not two, and His name is God.

I’ve talked before (OK, I’ve bragged before) about the incredibly creative team I have at work. For more than two years now, the team has had an unparalleled run of innovation and accomplishment. A handful of lightly regarded functions was brought together and given the chance to excel. And excel they did, beyond anything thought possible. Our website was transformed. Our internal communications went from coach to first class. Our involvement in social media was launched. A research function was created and soared right out of the starting gate. Issues management was fundamentally changed from reactive to “we’re playing in this space so watch out.”

A lot of people have pointed to my leadership of the team. I knew better. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t the wellspring of all the creativity. I contributed some things (like helping hire good people) but I added one critical thing – my belief that all people have the same inherent value (which I’ve often talked about at work), the inherent value that comes from all of us being made in God’s image. That part is more problematic to talk about in the workplace; possible but problematic, and only done very carefully.

Things at work are now changing. It’s hard. My focus has shifted from creativity to helping people deal with the change and not be changed by it.

At the same time, church is changing. We’ve attended a church for several years that we really enjoy. And now church is changing, beginning to embrace a more “relevant” and contemporary approach. We left our last church because the focus became relevance instead of worship and discipleship. And I’m struggling to cope here, too, questioning a lot of what’s going on and my own beliefs as well.

Then I read Ghostwriter. And it tells me that, like the main character, I’m trying to control what I really can’t, at both work and church and all other parts of my life. A novel did this. It’s going to haunt me for a while, and I needed to be haunted. So, Travis Thrasher, you did more than entertain and tell a good story. You challenged and provoked.

Good writers tell good stories. Great writers challenge and provoke, and help change people’s lives.

Back to College with "Admission"

I posted a review of Travis Thrasher's Admission at Amazon.com, and I won't repeat or recycle it here. It's sufficient to say I liked this mystery/suspense novel. Anyone who's ever been a college student or known a college student will recognize the intensity of college life (including the binge drinking), how things seem to matter so much more than they ever will again, and the college pranks and practical jokes and what happens when they go wrong.

The novel is the story of how one former college student has to find out what happened in an incident from 11 years before. Thrasher keeps you guessing throughout. Someone did something, and you gradually begin to suspect what the something was, but the mystery is who might have done it and the details of what actually happened. The story is structured and tied together well. You finish Admission and you're satisifed. This is an author who writes for his readers, and he writes very well indeed. I've previously read his Isolation and Sky Blue, and all of his books are good.

Admission also provokes long-buried memories. You think back to your own college days and about things that happened that you remember or heard about. It reminded me of college "names," the student "wheels" on campus. And then the book connected me to the memory of going to the police jail in my college town on a cold, overcast Sunday morning. A friend and I, he a "name" in student government and I a "name" on the student newspaper, went there to see if we could get a girl we knew released from custody. She'd been arrested because because she was with her boyfriend when he was arrested for drug possession (this was the early 1970s).

The girl was a type -- sweet, naive, innocent and wildly in love with her boyfriend, who was also a "name" in student government. And, shocking everyone, a drug dealer. We talked with the police; they listened and told us to leave, but they did release her about an hour later and never pressed charges against her. Some time later, another student government "name," who was one of the university's official, card-carrying-and-proud-of-it "leftists," suddenly quit school. It turned out he was actually a narc, and had been the one to turn the guy, and many others, in.

The narc's girlfriend, another "name" in student journalism, was a good friend of mine (we'd even dated a couple of times). She was devastated. Think what that would have meant for her --dating a guy who turned out to be narc who turned in his friends, then disappeared. She loved the guy, but she was only part of his cover, and their relationship a complete sham, as was his commitment to the campus leftist political association he was part of (which, by the way, never recovered from the scandal of having a narc in its midst). This sounds like a novel, but it actually happened.

There's an intensity about college life that's hard to describe -- you have to live it to understand it. That's what Travis Thatcher captured in Admission.

How Did the Story Hook Me?

On Monday, I was interviewed for a project at work -- I'd been asked to read Tony Dungy's Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance and then be interviewed for one of the print publications published by the company for employees. The interview went fine -- took all of about 15 minutes and we were done. Tuesday morning, I received the draft for comment -- the turnaround was quick. It was a different way to do a book review -- have someone read a book and then talk to them about what they read.

Last night, I started reading Travis Thrasher's Admission. It jumped around a bit at first, or it was actually more a case of me being easily distracted. And then, by about page 20, I was hooked. I had a hard time putting it down but I had to get to sleep. I went back this morning and tried to find the spot where Thrasher hurled me into the story, but I don't see the precise point. All I know is that it happened, somewhere around page 20, when the lead character, Jake Rivers, is offered $50,000 to find a college friend he hasn't seen in 11 years. It's odd how those hooks work. You're reading along, trying to figure out if you're going to be interested or not, and the next thing you know, it's 60 pages later. Gotcha.

I have to fly to New York this afternoon for a talk I'm giving tomorrow at a Conference Board meeting (my assigned topic is "Creating and Managing Online Content"). I can't wait for the plane ride and a good two hours of uninterrupted reading.

That Box from Amazon

I've been biding time with my reading, getting around to a few things I had put off for a while. Two books were related to work -- Roger D'Aprix's The Credible Company and Jim Shaffer's The Leadership Solution -- both about internal corporate communication. I also read the museum guide to a show I saw last May at the Chicago Art Institute on the painter Edward Hopper, the artist who painted "Nighthawks," among a number of iconic American works.

Just biding my time -- waiting for the box from Amazon. This afternoon, as I pulled into the driveway, I saw the box on the front porch. I'm like a kid at Christsmas when I know books I've ordered have finally arrived. In this box were Travis Thrasher's Admission; Chris Fabry's Dogwood; Marlo Schalesky's If Tomorrow Never Comes; and Charles Martin's When Crickets Cry. I'm waiting on Adam Blumer's Fatal Illusions from another supplier.

Ah, the delightful anguish of deciding what to read first...