Lee Duigon

Rabbit Legacy by Ellen C. Maze

(TreasureLine Publishing, 2011)

Just when you thought it was safe to take the garlic down from your windows…

Of course, if you’ve read the first book of Ellen C. Maze’s Christianized vampire trilogy, Chasing Beth Rider, you already know that garlic won’t do any good against these bloodsuckers. Nevertheless, by the time that story was finished, it seemed the vampires were pretty much finished, too. But no–in Rabbit Legacy they’re back, and they’re looking for revenge.

The good news is that the sequel has built on the first book’s strengths. It has more depth of feeling, more insight into character, and more boldly faces hard questions of faith and theology. It is in every way a better book.

Can the vampire be saved?

Again, we aren’t dealing with “real vampires” in the Bela Lugosi sense of the word, but rather with a cryptic race called “Rakum.” We learned in Book One that the Rakum originated with a demon and have lived in secrecy among the human race for thousands of years. Maze’s boldness in throwing out all the vampire story conventions has allowed her to do interesting things with plot and character development.

Continue Reading “Rabbit Legacy: Book II of Ellen Maze’s ‘Christian Vampire’ Series” →

(Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, IL: 2010)

“The [Narnia] books are much more Christian than we’ve realized.”

-Michael Ward (p. 130)

“Lewis ate and drank from the table of pagan idolatry. He slurped it in and was so full of it, that this world of idols and sorcery came out through his books.”

-David Sorensen¹

No author has ever succeeded at being correctly understood by all of his readers. C. S. Lewis is widely, but not universally, regarded as a great Christian thinker and apologist, best known for his seven books, The Chronicles of Narnia. These children’s books, also enjoyed by adults, are often held up as the best example of Christian fantasy literature.

Michael Ward, Chaplain of St. Peter’s College, Oxford, has studied Lewis exhaustively. He’d read everything Lewis ever wrote-including unpublished manuscripts and letters, poems, and childhood notebooks. If there is anything Mr. Ward doesn’t know about C. S. Lewis, chances are that nobody knows it.

Ward claims to have unraveled a secret code pertaining to all the Narnia books-something that Lewis put in on purpose, and which, very subtly, holds the whole series together while subconsciously working on the reader’s mind. No, it’s not like one of those “Bible codes” that tells you Leviticus 4:14 secretly predicts who will win an Oscar next year. It’s more in the nature of a hidden theme, deliberately concealed by C. S. Lewis, to heighten the impact of his art. So Ward’s title is a bit misleading.

Seven Heavens, Seven Books

“Lewis took the seven heavens that he so loved and used them as symbols of Christ … to present Christ in seven different ways,” Ward says (pp. 129-130). He is referring to the ancient cosmology which featured seven heavens circling the Earth, each ruled by its own “planet”-the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn-with each “planet” having certain influences on Earth and its inhabitants.

Each Narnia story is “ruled” by its own planet: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Jupiter; Prince Caspian, Mars; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Sun; The Silver Chair, the Moon; The Horse and His Boy, Mercury; The Magician’s Nephew, Venus; and The Last Battle, Saturn. The planets, says Ward, are “spiritual symbols speaking through stories” in which C. S. Lewis “translated the planets into plots” (p. 146).

It sounds complicated, but Ward does make a very strong case. Everything he says, he backs up with quotes from Lewis himself. He also does an amazingly good job of writing in a clear, simple prose style very similar to that employed by Lewis to tell his Narnia stories. Ward sounds like Lewis. He has written a book which an intelligent child would understand, but which won’t make an adult reader feel like he’s been kidnapped by Barney the Dinosaur.

Ward has convinced me that Lewis didn’t just “throw in everything” when he was writing a Narnia tale: “randomness and mishmash are not to be found” (p. 8) in these books, he says-even when it may look like mishmash. Thus there is a reason for Father Christmas appearing in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even if it seems careless, even silly, to insert one of our own popular culture icons into the parallel universe of Narnia-an apparent anomaly which Ward says got him started in his search for C. S. Lewis’ cryptic messages. Superman wouldn’t belong there, but Father Christmas does.

It’s not necessary to go into the details of Ward’s reasoning. His book is easy to read and explains itself. It’s a clever piece of literary detective work, and those most interested in his argument should read the book.

But we cannot help asking, given that C. S. Lewis secretly followed a cosmological theme in composing his Narnia tales: Are we better off for knowing that? Mr. Ward finds his own pleasure and understanding greatly enhanced for knowing it. Then again, millions of children and adults, over more than half a century, have adored these books without ever suspecting there were any secret messages involved.

Is that because Lewis succeeded in speaking to the readers’ subconscious?

There’s no way to know; and meanwhile, there are other issues to consider.

Continue Reading “Book Review: The Narnia Code by Michael Ward” →

(TreasureLine Publishing: 2010)

For the past two years or so there has been an undercurrent of buzz in the book world as to when we would see the first “Christian vampire novels,” and what they might look like. The subject has even come up recently on my book blog.

Meanwhile, sleazy, slimy, most decidedly un-Christian vampire novels have proliferated (Twilight knockoffs, most of them). With so much of that going on, I had reservations about Ellen Maze’s novel-clearly labeled “Christian HORROR” on TreasureLine’s cover. Frankly, I expected to be saddled with a schlocky, formulaic horror novel with some “Christian stuff” slapped on like a decal.

Happily, I was quite wrong about that.

Why Do It?

Let’s say it right up front. Whatever this book’s shortcomings (and there are a few), Ellen Maze has taken a big step in the right direction. In fact, hers is a pioneering effort, and other Christian novelists ought to be able to build on it-especially if they’re writing fantasy or horror.

Behind this is something very important: the prospect of reclaiming the whole “entertainment” industry for the Kingdom of Christ, starting with print fiction. People in the Western world consume untold quantities of fiction in various forms-novels, stories, movies, television, games, etc.-and the vast majority of it depicts a world that is totally without God, inhabited by characters who have not the slightest sense of God in their lives. This depicts a thoroughly non-religious civilization whose like has never existed on the earth: and consumers of it spend uncounted hours marinating in it. Let the reader imagine its effects on the way such consumers think and live-including the many who identify themselves as Christian.

Perhaps finding a way to write a “Christian vampire novel” is a very little thing. But we know our God delights in producing great effects from little causes.

Continue Reading “Rabbit: Chasing Beth Rider by Ellen C. Maze” →

Writers hope their work will live on after them (I do, at least). In some ways our books are like our children. We don’t like to think they’ll just dry up and vanish.

I’d like to mention two novelists who were very successful in their day but who are now fading into undeserved obscurity: Edison Marshall (American) and Arthur Upfield (Australian).

Marshall wrote, among other things, historical novels. His most productive decade was the 1950s. Among his most successful books was The Viking (1951), which was made into one of my favorite movies as a kid, The Vikings, in 1958, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Ernest Borgnine. All the kids in my neighborhood played “Vikings” for weeks afterward.

Upfield wrote mysteries set in the Australian Outback featuring “the half-caste detective,” Napoleon Bonaparte, Bony to his friends. My wife and I are crazy about these books, we have dozens of them, and we’d like to have them all. But that’s getting harder and harder to do, because reprints have not been forthcoming: Arthur Upfield, it seems, is going out of print.

Continue Reading “Fading into Obscurity” →