Billy Coffey’s “There Will Be Stars”

I’ve read all of Bill Coffey’s novels, from Snow Day (2010) to The Curse of Crow Hollow (2015). And I’ve watched his work grow and develop and take on a shape both unexpected and delightful.

And now comes novel #7: There Will Be Stars.

Coffey’s been bending genres for some time now, moving from general fiction to more speculative. There Will Be Stars almost defies categorization. It is speculative. It is suspense. It is mystery. It is imagination. It is faith. But it’s also something else.

It’s what I would call literary.

Coffey has been moving in this direction, but There Will Be Stars plants a flag.

The story: Bobby Barnes, the official town drunk in the small Southern mountain town of Mattingly, wakes up one morning, thinking through the recurring nightmare of the night before. His twin sons Matthew and Mark accompany him to the local filling station for gas and beer. After an altercation with the station owner and the sheriff, he heads to another filling station, where he runs into Junior Hewitt, a kind of bully who lives in the past glory of a minor league baseball game. Junior hears Bobby say something about Junior going fishing – an ordinary statement in and of itself – but Junior realizes Bobby has seen something unexpected – the future. And junior knows what that means.

Junior grabs Bobby and takes him to the house of the Widow Cash, who has just started lunch with a few friends – a young boy named Tommy, a young woman named Laura Beth who wears sunglasses all the time, the retired high school teacher George, and the Methodist preacher Juliet Creech. Gradually Bobby comes to understand that the people sitting around that table are dead, reliving the last day of their lives in an endless loop. It’s a loop called “The Turn.”

Billy Coffey

And Bobby realizes something else: he’s in his own Turn. And that must mean he’s dead.

This is not a story about zombies. It is a story about sin and redemption. It is a story about how the spiritual and the real are interwoven in daily life. It’s a story that’s powerfully written, with a command of the narrative that is amazing.

It is also a literary work. As readable as it is, it lifts the reader to a higher place. We move out from what is simply a good story and discover ourselves in a different place altogether. Great fiction aims for this, and There Will Be Stars succeeds at it.

Related: My reviews of Coffey’s books

Snow Day (2010)

Paper Angels (2011)

When Mockingbirds Sing (2013)

The Devil Walks in Mattingly (2014)

In the Heart of the Dark Wood (2014)

The Curse of Crow Hollow (2015)

Photograph by Jonathan Norris via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Mike Duran’s “Subterranea”

I read the nine stories that comprise Mike Duran’s Subterranea and I stepped into the Twilight Zone. Nine times.

Duran blogs at deCompose, and is a regular contributor to Novel Rocket, a site for fiction writers (of all genres, but mostly Christian). He also regularly challenges the sacred cattle of the Christian writing and publishing world.

He writes what’s called speculative fiction. His writing reminds me of T.L. Hines, who wrote in a genre dubbed “noir bizarre.” (Hines published five remarkable novels between 2007 and 2010 and nothing since then.) Duran isn’t “noir bizarre,” but he’s occasionally noir with a dash of bizarre (or perhaps vice versa).

Nine gripping stories, all dealing with underground themes.

A man is interrogated about what happened during a subway dig, during which several men were killed in an explosion. Without explanation, a man leaves his front porch and is later found floating in a pool. A group of college students set out to Mexico to disprove the existence of a mythological story. A bar scene that seems straight out the intergalactic Cantina in the first Star Wars movie (1977). Six men die because of a woman. A man recovers, or maybe not, from a horrific automobile accident. Demons chase muses to stop the creative impulse. An overweight man has to be removed from an apartment building. A priest projects compatibility of couples seeking to get married, usually ending with the couples deciding to go their separate ways.

Mike Duran

What Duran plumbs here is the “subterranea” of the human mind and heart. He’s using a speculative, almost Twilight Zone approach in much the same way the old Rod Serling television program did. The stories force you, through odd and unexpected circumstances, to consider motives and actions. The people see familiar; their surroundings do not. And it’s that juxtaposition of familiar and strange that provide glimpses into the human soul.

It’s not a pretty sight. But it’s a true one.

That’s what strikes me most about these stories – they read true. Duran knows his subject, and knows it well.

Related:

My review of Mike Duran’s The Resurrection.

Photograph by Marina Shemesh via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Robin Parrish's "Nightmare"

Maia Peters is the daughter of two rather famous paranormal investigators. She’s trying to find her own way in life, and is studying criminal justice in college. But the knowledge of her famous parents sticks to her, and attracts the attention of Jordin Cole, a wealthy fellow student who will pay just about anything to investigate the very things Maia wants left behind her. Eventually Maia gives in, and the two visit some of the most famous haunted places in America, from a tuberculosis sanitarium in Kentucky and Alcatraz to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans. They find ghosts, all right, all kinds of ghosts. And Jordin loses something in the process – her soul.

And Maia, helped by Jordin’s fiancé Derek Hobbes, is going to get it back.

There’s a lot to ponder about Nightmare, this novel by Robin Parrish.

First, it is highly structured, with the story of Jordin’s disappearance alternating chapter by chapter with the investigations that Maia and Jordan undertake around the country. Parrish uses this structure to heighten the growing tension, building the story toward a terror-filled climax.

Second, it is what’s called speculative fiction, something known primarily to readers of Christian fiction as “that edgy stuff that just might be theologically suspect but it's hard to tell.” The story is filled with ghosts, apparitions, and demons meaning great harm, and it’s published by Bethany House, one of the best known and highly regarded publishers of Christian fiction. Yet the author stays true to orthodox theology.

Third, it’s a ghost story, plain and simple. It’s well written and fast paced, and it reads quickly. At this level, the structure takes on a different kind of role – actually providing relief to the growing tension and horror of the main story.

My one criticism of the novel concerns the villain, who occupies a rather shadowing position in the story until near the end. The villain’s presence could have been less shadowy; some considerable ground had to be covered to get the back story. But this is a minor criticism; I got so absorbed in the narrative that I often lost track of the time on my bedside clock. And I read it in less than weekend.

Parrish tells a good ghost story.


Related: My review of Robin Parrish's Offworld.

More than One Reality

My tastes in reading run to the universal. I cross genres, and I cross them a lot.

In the past, my reading tended to cluster over an extended period. In the mid-1970s, it was mysteries – and preferably the older mysteries from roughly 1910-1960: Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett (still a favorite), Philip Marlowe, Erle Stanley Gardner, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers and a lot of others. Then I caught the science fiction bug, likely prompted by the first Star Wars movie but really inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune.

After that, it was rather eclectic for a while, until I took a course in a Masters program on the Latin American novel. I discovered Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and many others. Then, in the 1990s, I discovered, or rediscovered, the poets of my youth (mostly British and American) and Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. That was followed reading a lot of Southern writers, still devouring the Latins and mysteries, and then most recently back to poetry.

I also read horror, fantasy and “speculative” fiction. Not a lot, but I read it. And enjoy it. Mike Dellosso. T.L. Hines. C.S. Lakin. Most recently, Ian Thomas Curtis and his Dragonsong and Mike Duran’s The Resurrection. And while they are all widely different kinds of fiction, what plays a role in all of them is the sense that there is another reality existing right alongside the reality we live each day. This is not limited to only Christian writers – Anne Rice made a fortune from her vampire novels, not to mention Stephanie Meyer and her Twilight series.

This “other reality” seems at times to have been ground out of Christianity, some say by the modernism that affected even evangelical seminaries over the past century. Yes, Frank Peretti scared us all to death with This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, but those are novels, after all.

And yet.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, after a brief but very pointed discussion about whether the Law of Human Nature (that we know how to behave but generally don’t) is real or not, says this: “It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real – a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.” In other words, there is something that affects us and that we have to deal with that comes from outside the existence we know, the existence we can touch and feel and taste and see and hear, perhaps even outside the existence we can normally imagine.

Perhaps those horror, fantasy and speculative novels aren’t as strange as we might initially think. Perhaps there on to something, something more than we know. I suspect this is the reason I enjoy reading these novels – they’re reminding me of that other reality.


To read more posts on chapter 3 of Mere Christianity, please visit Sarah Salter's blog, Living Between the Lines. She and Jason Stasyszen are hosting this book discussion.

Going "Wayback"

Thirty years ago, I went through a science fiction phase in my reading. I believe it started with Frank Herbert's Dune series; by the time the phase ended, I had devoured Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Arthur Clarke, Orson Scott Card, Ben Bova and scores of others, all of them great storytellers. Previously, the closest I had come to science fiction was Michael Crichton -- The Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man, other best sellers, and then the mega-hit (and mega-movie) Jurassic Park.

There was a gap for me between Terminal Man and Jurassic Park -- I was on to other genres. But what always impressed me about Crichton was his ability to embrace science in his novels, and make the speculative totally believable.

I'm almost finished the novel Wayback by Sam Batterman, and I may have found another Michael Crichton.

Wayback is about an idea -- the idea that scientists have figured out a way to travel back in time, and a team goes to a time shortly before the Great Flood of Genesis. The scientists on the team represent the gamut of belief -- from ardent Christians to atheists. They don't know that Middle Eastern terrorists are right behind them, terrorists who are not interested in scientific knowledge but something sinister.

It sounds implausible. It sounds like believability will be a problem. But you start reading the novel and wham!, it's got you. Sam Batterman has that same ability to utilize science and speculative science that Michael Crichton had. The breadth of the research he's undertaken for the novel is extraordinary. And the novel does what good speculative novels have to do -- suck you into the story and move fast. You find yourself exploring the world of Noah with all the wonder of the novel's fictional scientific team.

I'll have a more in-depth review, but I can say right now that Wayback is a terrific, and thought-provoking, read.