chaos and mayhem, making things
not only really suck for everyone, but is a necessary element for those like
Dras to either come to terms with the Christian realization and empowerment
that he requires to face and ultimately defeat this evil, or to die a
terrible death like the other victims of the onslaught instilled by the
devilish Stranger who invades the town to claim un-Christian souls.
Greg Mitchell (not to be confused
with the Greg Mitchell author of contemporary political and social
bestsellers and commentaries for ABC News), is a man after my own heart. He
has a love of creatures and monsters and the sort of creepy supernatural
elements that, together with a yearning and knack for sitting down and
writing about it, sows the seeds for someone great in the field. Firstly,
Greg does have within him the makings of a
great writer. His writing method is in its beginning stages,
professionally, which is to say quite honestly that I should expect from him
in that writing style to perfect his stuff to the point where he stands out
and becomes more and more original, achieving that mark that pinpoints one
writer from another, which makes a reader of the genre for years and years
on end to say hey, that’s Greg Mitchell’s work. He has yet to
achieve that, but he’s on his way.
Now, this is personal, so follow
me here: I’ve spoken of Greg’s style, so now here are two points for him
expressly, involving story originality and the expression of faith, and I
say this from experience in that I, too, set out to tell a story of similar
formula with the same expression of faith, to which, as my readers know, was
blown all to hell in many ways when my first novel shifted along with my
life and was as a consequence reconstructed. Firstly, the storyline itself,
though highly readable, is way too predictable and follows a
straight-forward plot scheme duplicated thousands of times….an evil comes to
a town where a certain rebellious soul must figure out how to defeat it.
And the evil has no motive but to simply do evil deeds, has no true indepth
character or core motivation outside of itself, and the characters have no
meaty integral driving substance that sets them apart from what readers are
used to reading. The book is dripping with fundamentalist evangelical
Christian rhetoric, where salvation only lies with whether or not the
characters accept Christ as their personal savior. For a work of fiction
along the lines of monsters and creatures and mayhem that invades a small
town where townsfolk must fight against it, such a simple scenario need not
be, and that’s not to say the author’s faith and message should not be
sacrificed. It should be reinvented, reconstructed, re-expressed to say the
same things while taking the reader into an exciting world no one’s ever
entered before, while taking the preachiness and doing what, for instance, C.S. Lewis did, making the tale and its construction come first and its
message be an underlying element expressed better in interviews.
I must be harsh with this,
because I’m honest, and believe me, as a Christian and as a horror writer,
I’ve been there before and I only say this in hopes that Greg takes what I
say as not a negative review, because it isn’t, but a lesson from one who
knows. I highly recommend this book to those of Christian persuasion who
normally read nothing else outside the boundaries I speak of, but I know
Greg will find after he flexes his literary muscles further that he can
broaden not only his appeal and audience, but become a more seasoned,
professional writer admired by the world as well.
