C.S. Lakin's "The Land of Darkness"

 I’m becoming a real fan of fantasy.

C. S. Lakin has now published The Land of Darkness, her third novel in the “Gates of Heaven” series. The three stories stand as independent novels, linked by the world and geography Lakin has created and a fshared characters.

Somehow, the stories are getting better. And I really enjoyed the first two novels, The Wolf of Tebron and The Map Across Time.

Each of the novels are subtitled “fairy tales,” and this description becomes especially pointed in The Land of Darkness. The story has everything a (grown-up) kid could want – mysterious creatures, a quest, a story that never falters and even a wicked stepmother and two ugly stepsisters (yes, I know that’s politically incorrect, but that’s the story). And it’s all wonderful.

Jadiel, a 12-year-old girl, lives with her wealthy father and stepmother on a spacious farm. The stepmother is not what she seems, and finds way to bewitch the father while she steps up her mistreatment of and cruelty to Jadiel. After several unsuccessful attempts to kill the girl, the stepmother sends her off to find the leaves of the terebinth tree, which no one seems to have heard of. If Jadiel fails in her quest, the stepmother will kill her father.

Callen, a young man not much older than Jadiel, works for the girl’s aunt and uncle. He becomes interested in old parchment drawings of a bridge, with words inscribed in an unknown language and the drawing of a giant tree. He leaves for the capital city of Sherbourne (which was the major setting of The Map Across Time) – and finds himself rescuing Jadiel from kidnappers.

Together, Callen and Jadiel embark upon a quest, she to save her father and he to find the bridge. Eventually they are joined by an old, scarred guide named Ebed, who directs them forward both geographically and spiritually.

The reader comes to understand that whatever else The Land of Darkness is, it is the story of a spiritual quest, one that transcends the fantasy it’s set within to become something very recognizable – the meaning of faith.

It’s a delightful, enchanting story. Even with the wicked stepmother.

Related:

My review of The Wolf of Tebron.

My review of The Map Across Time.

I Am a Temple

I am a temple.

He stands before me.

He turns over

my money tables.

I am a temple.

He lays hold

of my salesman.

He smashes their

cages of doves,

blemished.

I am a temple.

He tears the curtain

of my holy of holies.

I am a temple.

He cleans out

the bazaar

I have made

of myself.

Photograph: Remnants of the First Century Stairs of Ascent to the entrance of the temple

Saturday Good Reads

Tim Henderson, director of Campus Crusade for Christ at Penn State, has some good thoughts about the scandal that engulfed the school, the athletic program and football legend Joe Paterno. Billy Coffey wants to help change the world of a little boy who’s very sick. Pete Marshall writes a poem about a broken home. Jennifer Dukes-Lee takes a photograph that says everything about her husband’s mission trip. All this and a whole lot more was online this week.

Prose

“Serving a Generous Master” by Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk.

“Love Notices Wet Hair” by Tim Henderson at The Gospel Coalition.

“The Most Practical Life Skill Ever” by Matt Appling at The Church of No People.

“When Strangers Beckon, Take a Seat” by Claire Burge.

“I Am Jonah” by Cassandra Frear at Moonboat Café.

“Changing Ethan’s World” by Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

“The Beauty of the Moment” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

“When you can’t get that telemarketer’s voice our of your mind” by Deidra Riggs at Jumping Tandem.

“The Waitress” by Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver.

“Why You Should Get a Prayer Partner” by Bradley Moore at Shrinking the Camel.

“Rocky Ain’t Got Nothing on God” by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact.

“A First Hug” by Travis Thrasher at The Journey is Everything.

“The Arrogance of Beauty” by Athol Dickson for Novel Journey.

Poetry

“Life and Break the Morning Out” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“Taking Responsibility” by Brian Miller at Way Station One.

“Charles Kingsley” by D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

“Looking up” by Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’.

“I will not see frost” by B.K. McKenzie at Signed…BKM.

“A broken home” by Pete Marshall.

“Black Willow” by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

Paintings and Photographs

“An [I Love] Saturday: Morning Light” and “Five Minutes with Strangers: Le Papillon Vert” by Kelly Sauer.

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Artwork” by Karen Eck at Karenee Art.

“Travel Plans” by Susan Etole at Just…A Moment.

“In the shadow of the cross” by Jennifer Dukes-Lee at Getting Down with Jesus.

Short Stories

“Abandoned” by Jake Lee at Very Much Later.

Videos and Podcasts

“People are Awesome” by derDon1234.

Painting: Wildflowers by David Wagner via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Reading "Chicago Lightning"

I’m reading a book of private detective stories, Chicago Lightning by Max Allan Collins, and I’m hooked by the second age of the author’s introduction. Collins and I grew up on the same kind of television fare – and the same love for detective and mystery stories.

I watched westerns as a child – programs like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and Bonanza – but it was the detective and mystery shows that I loved. Peter Gunn. Dragnet. Perry Mason (my Southern Baptist grandmother adored Perry Mason novels). 77 Sunset Strip. Hawaiian Eye (remember Connie Stevens as Cricket?). Mike Hammer.

My reading followed similar lines. From Trixie Beldon and the Hardy Boys I moved on to mysteries with real murders by writers like Agatha Christie. In the 1970s, there was something of a renaissance for the hardboiled detective novels, with new editions of books from the 1930s and 1940s. I read all of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, like Red Harvest, The Continental Op, The Maltese falcon and The Thin Man. I read Raymond Chandler’s novels, too, but preferred the almost literary prose of Hammett. Than I discovered S.S. Van Dine and the Philo Vance mysteries.

I moved away for reading almost solely mysteries but never abandoned the genre. After an extended romance with science fiction, I went literary and read the Latin Americans – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and others. For about 10 years I was the Latin American and Spanish fiction reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I still read some today, and have a novel by Carlos Fuentes waiting on the shelf.

The Latins, interestingly enough, led me to a popular Spanish writer named Arturo Perez-Reverte, who has written a number of semi-literary mysteries that are wonderful stories. Lately he’s been producing the Captain Alatriste novels, set in the declining Spain of the 17^th century.

But I still enjoy mysteries. I’m tending to stick more in the Christian mystery category, more because few mainstream mystery novelists seem to have to get too graphic with sex and violence. And despite my love of mysteries, I do not like violence. I don’t like it in movies or on television (which tells you how many movies I see and how much television I watch).

I like a number of British mystery writers, like Colin Dexter of Inspector Morse fame and Ian Rankin, who’s written the Inspector Rebus novels. But these days most contemporary mysteries are police procedurals or something similar, which are fine but don’t have the flare of those old private detectives, the guys who are tough as nails, pack heat and aren’t afraid to use it.

I enjoyed the stories in Chicago Lightning. They contain a few graphic scenes, but the scens seem to fit the stories. The hero, Nate Heller, is cut from that same cloth that produced Sam Spade, Nick Charles and Philip Marlowe. These aren’t the “solve the puzzle guys” so much as the “get the truth even if you have to beat it out of them” guys.

As odd as this might sound, reading these stories reminds me of my father. He grew up in that period when Hammett and Chandler and all the rest were at the height of their powers. He read a lot of them, too. And the stories he told of his experiences in working in the East Texas oil fields and the Depression-era newspaper business had that same kind of flavor to them. Although I can’t recall any murders or serious crimes in his stories, except for one he told about his grandmother that became part of the family legend. Did she or didn’t she?

I think I hold that story in reserve. It might make an interesting historical short story.

Gratitude

He watched her. He couldn’t help but watch her.

He was dawdling over his coffee and newspaper, killing time before going back to sit by Karen’s bed. The days were growing shorter; winter was coming.

Bored with reading the newspaper a second time, he saw her as she entered the cafeteria. She walked to the coffee bar and selected dark roast, the one on the far left. He knew because he had chosen the same one.

He felt vaguely guilty as he watched her. Karen slept almost constantly now, heavily medicated to counter the pain. The cancer, which started so innocently as a backache, was consuming her.

The woman sat two tables away. She placed her purse on the floor at her feet and a book on the table.

When he looked up from his newspaper again, he could see the woman was absorbed in her book. Her hair was dark, framing her oval face and dark eyes. She was well-dressed, but then she would be; the hospital was private and expensive. He wondered who she was here for, a parent or sibling, perhaps her husband.

A server walked up to her table, asking if she’d like more coffee before the breakfast bar closed. She shook her head and said “No thank you,” loud enough for him to hear the Italian accent.

He guessed her age on the younger side of 40. Everything about her was striking, including the white gloves she had removed before she stirred her coffee. No one wore gloves any more, yet they were perfect on her.

He thought of Karen and her ravaged body, her spirit buried under a mountain of medication. Karen had been a beauty, too, until the cancer.

They had had a good marriage, mostly. He knew about the affair with his brother. Karen had thought she had hidden it but he had known almost from the beginning. He had spoken to his brother, not in anger or a rage but in the way appropriate for their class. They were civilized. His brother had broken it off without telling Karen why, devastating her. He hadn’t talk to his brother in years.

He watched this young Italian woman, who was at least 15 years younger than he was, and, oddly, he felt gratitude. He loved Karen, even though he knew she loved his brother more. He had loved his time with her, to hear her laugh, to see a certain turn of her head, to hear her tell a joke as only she could tell it, to see how much she loved their son. She had been his wife for what seemed too short a time, and now she was slipping away. He was entering a fog and didn’t know any way out.

The woman was suddenly standing in front of him.

“I think you need this,” she said, handing him a handkerchief.

It was then that he noticed the tears on his cheeks.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is hosting a blog carnival on faith, and the prompt for this week is “gratitude.” I stretched it a bit, and rewrote one scene from a section I had cut a year ago from my novel Dancing Priest, to be published in ebook form in December and paperback in January by Dunrobin Publishing.

To see more posts on gratitude, please visit Faith Barista.

Photograph: Single Cup by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Post-Occupyed

Shortly after midnight Tuesday, New York City police moved in to clear Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Some 142 people were arrested inside the park and another 50 outside. At this moment, the park is surrounded by barricades to keep people out while legal wrangling goes on.

If you’ve followed the stories, the Occupy protests were either (a) people rebelling against the people who run things, ostensibly for their own benefit, or (b) a hotbed of labor union activism complete with rape, sexual assaults, tuberculosis and shootings. In this case, the truth doesn’t lie somewhere in the middle; instead, it lies all over the place, including at the extremes.

The Occupy protestors have been helped by a sympathetic news media, who gave the protest ongoing, prominent and generally favorable coverage. I am simply stating a fact when I say that the news media is philosophically closer to the Occupy protestors than to the Tea Party protestors.

A few commentators early on tried to compare the two movements as comparable, but it was soon clear that wasn’t the case at all. While they are both protest movements, they have different means, goals and objectives.

President Obama came out fairly early and appeared to endorse the protests, and then he disappeared. No one is quite sure why he did that.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was fully prepared to be on the critical side of the Occupy protests, until I read what two young Christians had to say about it. Their writings gave me pause, and I stepped back and took a harder look, at both the protests and my own reactions. Good thing, too, because I was going to do my usual conservative knee-jerk response. What I learned told me more about myself than it did about the protests.

Movements often get co-opted, and Occupy is no exception. The unions, or some of them, moved in with resources. Anarchists showed up, although an organization of anarchists should be a contradiction in terms. Everyone with a cause showed up – animal rights, stop the war, organic food, you name it. It became confusing to understand what this was all about except perhaps one big protest party.

But early on, there were things said that have since been lost, and probably shouldn’t have been. Interestingly enough, the things were similar to what some of the Tea Party people have been saying. It was – is – the original sense of both protest movements.

And it is the idea or perception, rightly wrongly, that the elites in the United States are doing two things – one bad thing and one venial thing. The bad thing is that our elites – political, economic, cultural and academic – are making a general botch of things. They not doing their jobs, and/or they’re doing them badly. The venial thing is that they doing a bad job and taking care of themselves in the process, making sure there’s enough room in lifeboats for themselves and good luck to the rest of us.

The Tea Party said the same things, but in different ways. Tea Party supporters tended to aim at Democrats (don’t forget the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kickback” whose votes for the health care proposal essentially were bought). Occupy supporters have tended more to aim at bankers, big business and other “big” institutions, with a lot of ire saved for the recipients of the “big” bailouts, engineered by Republicans and Democrats alike.

But they’re saying many of the same things. And once you cut away the political rants and posturing of both left and right, not to mention reelection politics, you see the message boiled down to what it is.

It’s about trust. There isn’t any left.

I don’t have good feelings about where this might lead. And so I do the only thing I know to do, the thing I should have been doing all along.

Pray.

Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

Last year, I attended a poetry seminar at Laity Lodge with poet and teacher Scott Cairns, who led 12 of us on a two-day journey to destinations none of us quite imagined when we started. Our overnight assignment was to write a poem based on a hard or difficult passage in Scripture.

It was something I had not considered before – using poetry to explicate Scripture. Cairns and most of the others in the seminar seemed quite comfortable with the idea and practice. I wasn’t; I was also nervous about the idea of reading a poem I had written to a group of people, something I had never done before. But I plunged ahead, wrote (and rewrote and rewrote) my poem, and actually read it.

It opened up a new world for me, a new way to study and understand Scripture.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.