The Sunday Oregonian of 10/15 had an article wherein two frightened Forest Service employees were so spooked by the sound of howling wolves that they radioed for a helicopter evacuation from the Sawtooth Wilderness in Utah last month. Although the wolves made no aggressive moves toward the pair and there are no documented cases of wolves attacking humans a helicopter was dispatched to retrive them. Steve Nadeau, wolf program supervisor with the Idaho Department of Fish & Game said of the incident:
"Holy moly - sounds to me like someone's read too many of Grimm's Fairy Tales."
Well, that's a good tag line of what the book is about. Author John Connolly gives us a kind of Grimm's Fairy Tales meets the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'll admit that the reason I read the book is that I have 3 things in common with the protagonist:
- We both share the name David
- We both are afflicted with some sort of seizures (unclearly defined in the book).
- We both love to read.
How can you not like a kid that enjoys dactyl iambic or elegiac pentameters? Set in England in the days of World War II, the book begins with the death of his mother and his father's eventual remarriage impacted David greatly. Clashes quickly ensued with David's new stepmother as they sold their home and moved in with her.
Prior to the remarriage and move strange events began to happen to David. His mother's favorite books, fictional stories of "knights and soldiers, of dragons and sea beasts, folk tales and fairy tales" took an anthropomorphic qualities as they began to talk to him, "softly at first and then louder and more compellingly." Those events then led to another:
"That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David."
Right from the start, the malignant entity David called the Crooked Man began his troubling stalking and evil influence upon David. A terrifying crash of a shot down Nazi bomber thrust David into another world, an alternate reality; where the fairy tales and his mother's books were now invested with life.
Like much fiction the book borrows from Christian themes, but clearly does not seem to advocate Christianity. There is the Woodsman, a type of Christ. There is the Crooked Man, a type of Satan. There are the wolf/man hybrids, a type of demons.
The wolf-man hybrids constantly stalk and threaten other creatures in the alternate world that David now finds himself a part of. Classic satanic temptations are proffered:
"...give him (David) to us and we will offer him the protection of the pack. But the wolf-man's eyes gave the lie to it's words, for everything about them spoke of hunger and want"
This imagery could have been lifted right from Genesis 4:7 where God, speaking to Cain; says that "...sin is crouching at the door:, and its desire is for you...". The Hebrew word for desire in that passage is a word picture of a salivating, barely restrained savage beast with its fangs bared and muscles in tension ready to spring upon its prey and rip it to shreds.
Another Biblical allusion is found in the revealed belief of the "...Crooked Man that whatever evil lay in men was there from the moment of their conception." and "No one can make you do evil. You had evil inside you, and you indulged it." An echo of Romans 5:12 is heard: "Therefore, just as through one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned...".
The book discloses some of the great questions of Christianity that are difficult to answer. In reference to his mother's death David thinks of "...listening to the priest talking of God and how much He loved His people. He (David) had found it to equate the priest's God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully."
I'll admit that I became a bit bored as David's journey in the latter part flatlined for me, and I was tempted to give it a grade of D+. Although there was some interesting imagery presented I began to lose interest However, I was pleasantly pleased with the ending and some of the twists, and how the ending tied the whole tale together. Although not a great book, it became a good book. I struggled a little with vacillating between a C to a B, here's my conclusion:
