Happy Novel Back Up Monday!
Five days in and my novel is starting to feel like a millstone.
A lovely millstone set in the 1930's involving mad science, tomes of great evil, sawed off barreled shotguns and enough existential grief and horror to sink a small ship.
The main hero, which was much to my shock, is a divinity teacher at Miskatonic University.
Which if any of read H.P. Lovecraft is a strange place to find a sane divinity teacher with mostly orthodox beliefs.
Depending how loosely one wishes to apply the "Christian" label to something, I would very tentatively call this a Christian Horror/Suspense that is becoming more reminescent of pulp fiction of the 1930's which Lovecraft himself wrote only a couple of pieces in that sub genre.
Typically he focused on the fact we live on a small dot in a huge ocean of tiny dots and have little to no control over what happens to the dot and our dot could be swallowed up in an instant by some unfathomable horror.
So if hope has chosen to exist in Lovecraft country that means heroes cannot just die, they have to fight and blow things up.
As soon as the novel informed me that part of the line up of protagonists would include a senior studying chemistry and pharmaceutical I knew where those explosives and explosions were going to come from.
And most Christian novels tend not to feature anything more intimidating than a fluff bunny and it's not even the white bunny from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" Add in the fact that this will include a body count, some adult languages, adult situations, monsters from the deepest part of the human psyche, some deeper underlying thoughts on hope and actually I feel that I have a Molotov cocktail of a novel.
I hate the stigma of things labeled Christian but what do you expect from someone who is paying to sit around read theology, write theology, discuss theology, defend theology and think about it while sleeping. It's sort of a natural progression of things...I like tensions and dualities meeting up.
Light/dark, material/physical, metaphysical/concrete, literal/imaginative, dreams/reality, faith/disbelief, Good/Evil, etc and etc.
It's as Christian as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter so far...except so outside of a genre that perhaps even labling it this early is a disservice to the work itself. I never really felt I wanted to write Christian fiction because what I write has no appeal for that section of Barnes and Noble labeled "Christan Fiction" and the stories I try to write are usually so organically strange that it's like trying to catch mist.
I'm not sure.
Regardless.
Writing is happening here, there and around the world.
Voting is tomorrow so if you're in the United States go vote.
Don't forget to feed your pets either.
Good luck to those writing!
-Matt
No comments:
Post a Comment