PART 1: INTRODUCTION

 

At the beginning of August, Dave Long sprung a surprise on writers in the Faith in Fiction community by announcing a new contest. Last time around, the parameters were broad: Dave’s first contest in December merely required a vague connection to Christmas. For the second contest, though, he decided to raise the bar considerably, asking us to provide him with good examples of a type of tale some of us love to hate: the conversion story. “We complain a lot about bad conversion stories,” he said, “so let's see if we can write something more compelling.”

    A few days after he announced the new contest, Dave made another splash: he invited me to join him in a critical analysis of his debut novel Ezekiel’s Shadow, a book that snagged a 2002 Christy Award for First Novel, sold around 15,000 copies and is now out of print. What is critical analysis? Dave explained the concept like this:

 

Written post-publication, this form is linked to analysis above but comes from a different direction. Here, the book examined is flawed at some level and so the intent in looking at it closely is to learn from, for lack of a better word, failure.

 

    So Dave was asking me to go through his book, find the flaws, and suggest lessons that other writers could learn from them. I accepted, of course, but not without misgivings. After all, Dave’s request came not long after I had written the following:

 

I think we should be careful about turning Faith in Fiction into a critique mill. I'm not sure how much we would learn from it, and it would be a considerable distraction from what we're meant to be doing—writing fiction. If a particular published book sheds light on an issue relevant to craft, then I'd say it is fair game ... but taking on periodic analysis of published novels that haven't already distinguished themselves in some way would be quite a distraction.

 

    Accepting the mission after having dismissed similar projects as “a distraction” would seem to make me quite a hypocrite! Admittedly, Dave’s idea was a little different from what I’d had in mind when I wrote this. For one thing, Ezekiel’s Shadow is a book that has distinguished itself—in a positive sense by winning the Christy Award, and in a negative sense by having been designated the poster boy of all that’s wrong with Christian fiction in Abram Van Engen’s “Cathedral Reality: What is ‘Christian’ Creative Writing?” (published in #25 of the now-defunct Mars Hill Review ). Plus, Dave saw his own book as flawed and was detached enough to offer it up for discussion. He was so convinced that this kind of specific, in-depth analysis was needed to move the conversation about “new” Christian fiction forward that I came to share that view.

    Something else intrigued me about the project, and that was the premise of Ezekiel’s Shadow itself. This is a novel about a bestselling horror writer who converts to Christianity and struggles to put his conversion story into words. Ian Merchant moves from fiction to memoir to testimony, and his struggle anticipates many of the themes central to Dave’s work at Faith in Fiction. Ezekiel’s Shadow is a novel about art, illusion and truth packaged to look like a suspense novel.

    As I read Ezekiel’s Shadow to formulate my analysis, I also struggled through the process of writing a conversion story of my own for Dave’s contest. Was it a coincidence that Dave set the contest deadline right before the critique of Ezekiel’s Shadow was scheduled, or is he an extraordinary mastermind who knew that an audience which had just slogged through the difficult task of writing a conversion story themselves would be more sympathetic toward his own efforts on that front? We may never know the answer, but that was the effect of the timing on me. I came to see Ezekiel’s Shadow through the lens of the conversion narrative, and it has colored my reading of the book—so much so that I am now convinced (as you will see) that the suspense subplot is irrelevant to the heart of the book. I’m looking forward to discovering whether other readers will agree.

 

MY APPROACH

 

Fiction operates on two basic planes: the story level and the sentence level. Instead of taking a chapter-by-chapter approach to the book, my analysis reflects that story/sentence distinction. Over the next three days, I will address sentence level concerns by looking at matters of structure in Ezekiel’s Shadow and matters of craft. Then, I will pull back to the story level for a consideration of theme. The outline will look something like this:

 

1. Structure

(a) Weeks and Days

(b) Artists, Mentors and Work

 

2. Craft

(a) Pacing and Scenes

(b) Stakes

(c) What I would cut, what I would re-think

 

3. Theme

(a) The artificial desert: trompe d’oeil, dry bones and jackrabbits
(b) The end of horror: illusion, reality and conversion
(c) Is the fix in? Use of Christian imagery

    At the end of the week, I will offer a “big picture” summary and try to highlight what I see as the “lessons” a Christian writer can take away from Ezekiel’s Shadow.

 

HOW WE PROCEED

 

First, a word about how we will proceed. This is meant to be a group discussion. My analysis is divided into five parts to be posted daily as the week progresses. Dave will also be posting daily, providing insight into his intentions as he wrote the book and his thoughts re-reading it five years later. Our hope is that readers will take in what each of us has to say and then head to the new CRITICAL ANALYSIS section of the Faith in Fiction Forum to share their own opinions. This is a subjective business, after all, and as beneficial as Dave’s perspective or mine may be, the goal is to spark an ongoing discussion of theme and craft that will benefit the community.