Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 220
December 17, 2012
Rudy Yuly's Sparkle is named one of the top five books of 2012 by Crime Fiction Lover!
// Features
DavidPrestidge: Top five books of 2012
By DavidPrestidge ⋅ December 5, 2012
It’s been a year when self-publishing and the rise of the digital book have made a huge impact on the range of crime fiction available to reviewers and the reading public. Anyone who has the stamina and bloody-mindedness to plan, plot and complete a book can now see it on screen, if not feel the pages with their fingertips. One of my choices came out as digitally self-published novel, but the top four made it into print, which suggests that, rightly or wrongly, the much-maligned traditional publishers don’t always get it wrong.
5 – Sparkle by Rudy Yuly
Joe Jones and his severely autistic brother Eddie – a pair echoing Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men – make up a firm who have the grisly task of cleaning up crime scenes. Joe’s whole life is based round keeping Eddie safe, while making a precarious living from his autistic brother’s bizarre and obsessive cleanliness. Joe is tired, permanently at his wit’s end, and his social life is a car-crash, but when Eddie discovers something at a murder scene which defies logical explanation and then becomes fixated by a gentle female zoo attendant, Joe’s tolerance is stretched to the limit. Sparkle‘s plot initially requires some suspension of disbelief, but as well as being a terrific whodunnit the book is an absorbingly written account of a condition which lies somewhere between an affliction and a gift. There is a real surprise at the end, which I certainly did not see coming.
Buy now on Amazon
Fiction Addict Reviews Story Merchant Client Larry D. Thompson's Dead Peasants
Dead Peasants by Larry D. Thompson
Posted by Josh Olds On November - 15 - 2012
Genre: Legal Thriller
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Publication Date: 10/2/2012
Reviewed by Paul Pessolano
While the title Dead Peasants might bring to mind an medieval take of a murderous Queen, this novel by Larry Thompson is actually a legal thriller that deals with the shady practice of employers taking out insurance policies on individuals who no longer work for their company. The hope is that the employer can then collect on the individual’s death without them ever knowing about it. When high-profile lawyer Jack Bryant begins investigating a series of unexplained deaths, it appears that certain employers have taken the unscrupulous legal shenanigans to deadly lengths.
Bryant, fresh off of a stellar case, has decided to retire, move to his hometown of Forth Worth, and live off the money he’s made. He purchases a mansion and falls in love with his Realtor, but, due to some secret from her past, ignores his advances. But retired life is boring, leading Bryant to open up a pro-bono business. And that is when things begin to go awry. When one case leads them to dead bodies, it appears as if they are due to an employer to collect on his “dead peasants.”
This is a great story for those who like a good lawyer based book that has both courtroom drama and old fashion gum-shoe investigation. The book is well written and suitable for any audience.
December 14, 2012
AEI Client Royce Buckingham Featured on The New York Daily News Blog
Mischief, mayhem and minions: Author Royce Buckingham introduces readers to the life of a Demonkeeper
BY Wathira Nganga
[image error] Tsunamis that wipe out entire towns. Doors that creak when no one is there. Earthquakes that split the ground open. The world is full of uncontrollable phenomena, big and small, which threaten the order of civilization that humans have so carefully built up over millennia.
In Royce Buckingham’s most recent fantasy series, demons personify the chaos that plagues mankind. The three books in the series follow the adventures of Nat Grimlock, a young Demonkeeper.
Demonkeepers are a secret order that has been policing and controlling demons for centuries. 17-year-old Nat suddenly inherits the job after his mentor dies under mysterious circumstances. Soon afterward a powerful demon escapes from Nat’s basement in pursuit of a homeless boy named Ritchie.
Nat’s race to recapture the rogue demon and save Ritchie in time sets in motion a bizarre series of events that sends Nat from the streets of Seattle to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Along the way he meets some allies as well as foes, including a vengeful Demonkeeper, known only as “the Thin Man,” who’s after his position.
In “Demonkeeper” and its sequels “Demoneater” and “Demonocity,” Buckingham has not created an alternate fantasy world, but a fantastical view of the mundane, where rust demons consume metal and demons in the form of sculptures come to life.
Demon encounters can be humorous, like the demon Gloop that can disguise itself as a booger, or deadly, like the water demon Drench that threatens to engulf the city of Seattle.
The human characters, however, are not always as clear cut as the demons. Buckingham does reveal Nat’s past throughout the trilogy, including the death of his parents and his natural ability to see demons when other humans can’t.
But the readers don’t know much about his love interest Sandy, or the street boy Ritchie. [image error]Ritchie at least seems to mirror Nat’s personal story, at least from the little Buckingham reveals about him. He has had the ability to see demons from an early age. But how he ended up on the streets, or any part of his life before the action in “Demonkeeper,” is a mystery.
Ritchie plays an extremely important role when he reminds Nat of his duty in the second book in the series, "Demoneater." When Nat realizes a wind demon called Flappy was the storm that killed his parents, he tries to take revenge. Ritchie calmly reminds him demons are only creatures of chaos with no will of their own.
“You taught me not to kill,” he says to Nat. “Even the dangerous ones. They know not what they do, right?”
Ritchie exhibits maturity as the series progresses, as do Sandy, who occasionally helps him catch a demon, and Lilli, a fellow Demonkeeper from San Francisco. Buckingham hints that they all have fascinating backgrounds, which are in most part kept hidden from the reader.
Although the demons do create chaotic situations for their human keepers to create suspense and drive the plot forward, Nat’s friends could have had more depth if the reader knew their full stories. “Demonkeeper” and its sequels is a good fit for middle-grade readers who love urban fantasy and….did anybody hear that door creak?
Royce Buckingham answered a few questions for Page Views about his work:
Page Views: When did you first realize you wanted to write fantasy novels?
Royce Buckingham: I was traumatized by Jaws and Alien on the big screen as a kid. As I grew older, I learned that things that invoked strong emotion were artistically inspiring. Love. Rebellion. Despair. Heartbreak. For me, unfortunately, the strong emotion from my youth was abject terror. So now I write monster stories.
Add to the mix that I was also an old school Dungeons and Dragons nerd in the 70’s. I think the idea that I could create my own stories started with creating my own monstrous adventures in the medieval world of D&D.
PV: Demons are usually depicted as evil beings in religious works and popular culture. How did you come up with the idea to make them not good or evil, but personifications of chaos?
RB: Great question! “Demonkeeper”was inspired by a street kid I used to prosecute in juvenile court. I imagined the chaos of the streets as a monster that would eat him up, as it does with so many lost children. The generalized theory that demons are born of chaos grew from there.
I purposefully stayed away from “devils” and any religious connotations.Ironically, and sadly (for me), my care was for naught. At its peak of sales in the U.S., “Demonkeeper” was considered for the Scholastic Book Fair circuit, which would have taken the novel’s exposure up to the next level.
But Scholastic, in its wisdom, felt the word “Demon” in the title was not appropriate for schools (Demons = evil = bad = devils = Satan = some parent complaining without reading the book). So the title alone eliminated about a zillion fans (and an entire income stream). Whoosh, right out the window.
Of course, now Scholastic Book Fairs carry The Hunger Games, where kids massacre each other. But hey…it’s a crazy, senseless semi-art industry, and barely missing the big score is part of the fun, right? (insert boo-hooing here).
PV: Did stories of witches and witch burnings inform your narrative of the Demonkeepers’ backgrounds, particularly the hostility they usually encounter when people learn they handle demons?
RB: I haven’t really gone the persecution route. I mention it as a historical obstacle for early Demonkeepers, but I haven’t given it much page time in the contemporary setting. But I should! Great idea! The history certainly informs the narrative in the sense that it keeps our Keepers quite secretive about their profession.
PV: Ritchie is as important a character as Nat, yet the reader doesn’t really find out his back story. Did you want to focus more on Nat as a protagonist than on Nat and Ritchie as a team?[image error]RB: I am mostly Nat-centric in “Demonkeeper” (and “Demoneater”/ “Demonocity”), but I did give Ritchie his own character arc to play with. I am experimenting and trying to figure out how many points of view makes a good story. Although, now that I’m reading Game of Thrones, I figure as many as you want is fine, so long as you can wrangle them.
PV: Do Sandy’s parents, who don’t appear in the stories, ever wonder why she’s always gone for long periods of time when she’s helping Nat capture demons?
RB: Nice spot. That’s a kid-world device. Kid characters are often allowed to wander unsupervised in fiction, and I take advantage of that conceit. They probably wonder, but like the monotone parents in classic Charlie Brown, they probably don’t interfere.
PV: Movies often associate demons with possession and exorcisms. In Nat’s world, would a demon possession be possible? How would a Demonkeeper exorcise demons from a person?
RB: Sure. Chaos consumes The Thin Man in “Demonkeeper,” so he’s an example of exactly this concept. Order is the enemy of chaos. Introducing order into the life of a child (or adult) that is consumed by chaos can save them from going down that road to a destructive place. Note that not all chaos is bad in a person’s life (a little craziness makes life interesting), but too much can kill.
PV: The city of Seattle is the setting for most of the action in the “Demonkeeper” series. Have you lived in Seattle your whole life?
RB: I have lived in Seattle at times, but I grew up in eastern Washington by a nuclear plant, where my ghost story novel “The Dead Boys” is set. Currently, I am about an hour and a half north of Seattle and go into the city as often as possible for a busy father of two boys.
PV: If you were a Demonkeeper, where would you most like to travel to find demons?
RB: I love the ancient demons, so Germany, England and old Europe. If I knew more about the Far East, I’d go there. If I was on the job, I’d look in war-torn countries where they have the most chaos.
PV: Some demonic manifestations are things like lamps or pieces of furniture. Since demons have been around at least as long as humans, would “household” demons appear as more period appropriate objects over time?
RB: Absolutely. The demonic butter churn is a good example. Who knows what sort of havoc that could wreak! The original flying broom was a demon, and the keeper seen wrangling it was unfairly deemed a witch and burned, drowned, or both.
PV: Will there be more “Demonkeeper” books to come? Any chance of a prequel about previous Demonkeepers?
RB: “Demoneater” and “Demonocity” are now out on Kindle. I believe they are $1 and $4, so they are a great bargain. I wrote some prequel material for “Demoneater,” but it didn’t make it into the final version. The trilogy is complete at this time, but I’d be open to writing a full prequel novel in the DK series.
PV: Are you working on any other stories outside of the “Demonkeeper” series?
RB: Good golly, yes! I have my YA thriller “The Terminals” with St. Martin’s Press coming out in 2013 or 2014. I’m also writing an adult legal thriller for St. Martin’s. And I have finished a 500 page medieval fantasy “Mapper” for Random House in Germany that will be out in summer of 2013 in Germany. Can’t wait to find a buyer for “Mapper” stateside and share it will all of my fans here at home!
BY Wathira Nganga
[image error] Tsunamis that wipe out entire towns. Doors that creak when no one is there. Earthquakes that split the ground open. The world is full of uncontrollable phenomena, big and small, which threaten the order of civilization that humans have so carefully built up over millennia.
In Royce Buckingham’s most recent fantasy series, demons personify the chaos that plagues mankind. The three books in the series follow the adventures of Nat Grimlock, a young Demonkeeper.
Demonkeepers are a secret order that has been policing and controlling demons for centuries. 17-year-old Nat suddenly inherits the job after his mentor dies under mysterious circumstances. Soon afterward a powerful demon escapes from Nat’s basement in pursuit of a homeless boy named Ritchie.
Nat’s race to recapture the rogue demon and save Ritchie in time sets in motion a bizarre series of events that sends Nat from the streets of Seattle to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Along the way he meets some allies as well as foes, including a vengeful Demonkeeper, known only as “the Thin Man,” who’s after his position.
In “Demonkeeper” and its sequels “Demoneater” and “Demonocity,” Buckingham has not created an alternate fantasy world, but a fantastical view of the mundane, where rust demons consume metal and demons in the form of sculptures come to life.
Demon encounters can be humorous, like the demon Gloop that can disguise itself as a booger, or deadly, like the water demon Drench that threatens to engulf the city of Seattle.
The human characters, however, are not always as clear cut as the demons. Buckingham does reveal Nat’s past throughout the trilogy, including the death of his parents and his natural ability to see demons when other humans can’t.
But the readers don’t know much about his love interest Sandy, or the street boy Ritchie. [image error]Ritchie at least seems to mirror Nat’s personal story, at least from the little Buckingham reveals about him. He has had the ability to see demons from an early age. But how he ended up on the streets, or any part of his life before the action in “Demonkeeper,” is a mystery.
Ritchie plays an extremely important role when he reminds Nat of his duty in the second book in the series, "Demoneater." When Nat realizes a wind demon called Flappy was the storm that killed his parents, he tries to take revenge. Ritchie calmly reminds him demons are only creatures of chaos with no will of their own.
“You taught me not to kill,” he says to Nat. “Even the dangerous ones. They know not what they do, right?”
Ritchie exhibits maturity as the series progresses, as do Sandy, who occasionally helps him catch a demon, and Lilli, a fellow Demonkeeper from San Francisco. Buckingham hints that they all have fascinating backgrounds, which are in most part kept hidden from the reader.
Although the demons do create chaotic situations for their human keepers to create suspense and drive the plot forward, Nat’s friends could have had more depth if the reader knew their full stories. “Demonkeeper” and its sequels is a good fit for middle-grade readers who love urban fantasy and….did anybody hear that door creak?
Royce Buckingham answered a few questions for Page Views about his work:
Page Views: When did you first realize you wanted to write fantasy novels?
Royce Buckingham: I was traumatized by Jaws and Alien on the big screen as a kid. As I grew older, I learned that things that invoked strong emotion were artistically inspiring. Love. Rebellion. Despair. Heartbreak. For me, unfortunately, the strong emotion from my youth was abject terror. So now I write monster stories.
Add to the mix that I was also an old school Dungeons and Dragons nerd in the 70’s. I think the idea that I could create my own stories started with creating my own monstrous adventures in the medieval world of D&D.
PV: Demons are usually depicted as evil beings in religious works and popular culture. How did you come up with the idea to make them not good or evil, but personifications of chaos?
RB: Great question! “Demonkeeper”was inspired by a street kid I used to prosecute in juvenile court. I imagined the chaos of the streets as a monster that would eat him up, as it does with so many lost children. The generalized theory that demons are born of chaos grew from there.
I purposefully stayed away from “devils” and any religious connotations.Ironically, and sadly (for me), my care was for naught. At its peak of sales in the U.S., “Demonkeeper” was considered for the Scholastic Book Fair circuit, which would have taken the novel’s exposure up to the next level.
But Scholastic, in its wisdom, felt the word “Demon” in the title was not appropriate for schools (Demons = evil = bad = devils = Satan = some parent complaining without reading the book). So the title alone eliminated about a zillion fans (and an entire income stream). Whoosh, right out the window.
Of course, now Scholastic Book Fairs carry The Hunger Games, where kids massacre each other. But hey…it’s a crazy, senseless semi-art industry, and barely missing the big score is part of the fun, right? (insert boo-hooing here).
PV: Did stories of witches and witch burnings inform your narrative of the Demonkeepers’ backgrounds, particularly the hostility they usually encounter when people learn they handle demons?
RB: I haven’t really gone the persecution route. I mention it as a historical obstacle for early Demonkeepers, but I haven’t given it much page time in the contemporary setting. But I should! Great idea! The history certainly informs the narrative in the sense that it keeps our Keepers quite secretive about their profession.
PV: Ritchie is as important a character as Nat, yet the reader doesn’t really find out his back story. Did you want to focus more on Nat as a protagonist than on Nat and Ritchie as a team?[image error]RB: I am mostly Nat-centric in “Demonkeeper” (and “Demoneater”/ “Demonocity”), but I did give Ritchie his own character arc to play with. I am experimenting and trying to figure out how many points of view makes a good story. Although, now that I’m reading Game of Thrones, I figure as many as you want is fine, so long as you can wrangle them.
PV: Do Sandy’s parents, who don’t appear in the stories, ever wonder why she’s always gone for long periods of time when she’s helping Nat capture demons?
RB: Nice spot. That’s a kid-world device. Kid characters are often allowed to wander unsupervised in fiction, and I take advantage of that conceit. They probably wonder, but like the monotone parents in classic Charlie Brown, they probably don’t interfere.
PV: Movies often associate demons with possession and exorcisms. In Nat’s world, would a demon possession be possible? How would a Demonkeeper exorcise demons from a person?
RB: Sure. Chaos consumes The Thin Man in “Demonkeeper,” so he’s an example of exactly this concept. Order is the enemy of chaos. Introducing order into the life of a child (or adult) that is consumed by chaos can save them from going down that road to a destructive place. Note that not all chaos is bad in a person’s life (a little craziness makes life interesting), but too much can kill.
PV: The city of Seattle is the setting for most of the action in the “Demonkeeper” series. Have you lived in Seattle your whole life?
RB: I have lived in Seattle at times, but I grew up in eastern Washington by a nuclear plant, where my ghost story novel “The Dead Boys” is set. Currently, I am about an hour and a half north of Seattle and go into the city as often as possible for a busy father of two boys.
PV: If you were a Demonkeeper, where would you most like to travel to find demons?
RB: I love the ancient demons, so Germany, England and old Europe. If I knew more about the Far East, I’d go there. If I was on the job, I’d look in war-torn countries where they have the most chaos.
PV: Some demonic manifestations are things like lamps or pieces of furniture. Since demons have been around at least as long as humans, would “household” demons appear as more period appropriate objects over time?
RB: Absolutely. The demonic butter churn is a good example. Who knows what sort of havoc that could wreak! The original flying broom was a demon, and the keeper seen wrangling it was unfairly deemed a witch and burned, drowned, or both.
PV: Will there be more “Demonkeeper” books to come? Any chance of a prequel about previous Demonkeepers?
RB: “Demoneater” and “Demonocity” are now out on Kindle. I believe they are $1 and $4, so they are a great bargain. I wrote some prequel material for “Demoneater,” but it didn’t make it into the final version. The trilogy is complete at this time, but I’d be open to writing a full prequel novel in the DK series.
PV: Are you working on any other stories outside of the “Demonkeeper” series?
RB: Good golly, yes! I have my YA thriller “The Terminals” with St. Martin’s Press coming out in 2013 or 2014. I’m also writing an adult legal thriller for St. Martin’s. And I have finished a 500 page medieval fantasy “Mapper” for Random House in Germany that will be out in summer of 2013 in Germany. Can’t wait to find a buyer for “Mapper” stateside and share it will all of my fans here at home!
December 13, 2012
December 12, 2012
NEW DISCIPLINE FROM JEFF RIVERA FREE TO STORY MERCHANT FRIENDS
Success as a writer is 90% work and 10% talent. No matter how talented you are, if you do not do the work, if you do not roll up your sleeves, none of your dreams for greatness as a writer can ever come true. That's just reality.
The challenge is that today's writer is, quite frankly, distracted. It goes beyond simply wanting to wash your windows and walk the dog instead of writing.
Nowadays, the biggest time zapper is the Internet. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter or checking your email 400 times a day, every second you're playing on the Internet is one step further from your goal as a writer. In my book, A Writer's Time: Making the Time to Write, I talk about how imperative this step is.
That's why when I was introduced to a new tool my good friend Jeff Rivera is beta-testing, I had to share it with you. It is a software that will prevent you from using the Internet without finishing your daily word count.
If you're serious about your commitment to writing, I highly recommend it.
Download Write the Damn Thing now!
STORY MERCHANT CLIENT DENNIS WALSH'S NOBODY WALKS STELLAR REVIEW ON KIRKUS
NOBODY WALKS
Bringing My Brother's Killers to Justice
Author: Walsh, Dennis M.
Review Issue Date: December 1, 2012
Pages: 304
Price ( Hardcover ): $26.99
Publication Date: February 5, 2013
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-1-250-00548-9
Category: Nonfiction
Pulpy, engrossing account of losing a family member to a senseless murder and retribution delivered through the criminal justice system.
Attorney Walsh was the only one among his four brothers to follow the straight-and-narrow path, perhaps due to the example set by their father, a Cleveland cop turned mobster. But none of them were prepared for the death of Chris, the youngest, at the hands of fellow denizens of the meth-and-gangs subculture on the fringes of Southern California’s pornography business. Walsh lived a sibling’s nightmare, asked to identify Chris’ decaying body. Street gossip quickly pinpointed the killer, David Steinberg, Chris’ former roommate, who was an associate of white supremacist prison gangs. Despite fears that he might pre-emptively sabotage eventual prosecution, Walsh began sniffing around Chris’ friends, a motley group of drug users, porn stars and entertainment-industry hangers-on. Many agreed to cooperate with him, given the implied threat of his more criminally inclined brothers’ thirst for vengeance. The narrative is sensibly straightforward, following the turns as police, prosecutors and Walsh make efforts to gather evidence on, arrest and successfully prosecute Steinberg and his cronies. As the author himself might agree, he is in some ways too close to the material. The narrative is populated by a surfeit of underworld figures who don’t really come alive as fully developed characters, but instead seem caricatures of seamy decrepitude. Still, Walsh captures the arc of his family’s involvement in an act of senseless malice, calling into question the cultural endurance of macho violence within certain subcultures and the difficulty of holding men responsible for horrific acts within the legal system’s overtaxed framework.
Gritty, effective, personalized tale of the outlaw lifestyle and its consequences.
December 10, 2012
Gabookguy Reviews Dead Peasants
“Dead Peasants” by Larry D. Thompson
published by Thomas Dunne Books.
Category – Mystery/Thriller
When I first saw the title of this book I thought it must be the story of a medieval King killing off his serfs. The term “dead peasants” is actually a legal insurance term for when an employer takes out an insurance policy on his workers and continues to pay the premiums even after his dismissal or retirement. The employer hopes to collect the benefits upon the person’s death. This practice has been deemed illegal in most states.
Jack Bryant is a high profile lawyer who has just won a monumental decision that will allow him to retire. He moves back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas.
He purchases a mansion and falls in love with his realtor but the relationship must remain plutonic as his realtor is hiding something from her past.
Jack finds life a little boring and opens up a “pro bono” business. One of these cases has Jack, his son, and his realtor looking into several unexplained deaths in the surrounding area. They all seem to have a common thread and several attempts are made on their lives.
This is a great story for those who like a good lawyer based book that has both courtroom drama and old fashion “gum shoe” investigation. The book is well written and suitable for any audience.
December 8, 2012
NEW DISCIPLINE FROM JEFF RIVERA FREE TO STORY MERCHANT FRIENDS
Success as a writer is 90% work and 10% talent. No matter how talented you are, if you do not do the work, if you do not roll up your sleeves, none of your dreams for greatness as a writer can ever come true. That's just reality.
The challenge is that today's writer is, quite frankly, distracted. It goes beyond simply wanting to wash your windows and walk the dog instead of writing.
Nowadays, the biggest time zapper is the Internet. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter or checking your email 400 times a day, every second you're playing on the Internet is one step further from your goal as a writer. In my book, A Writer's Time: Making the Time to Write, I talk about how imperative this step is.
That's why when I was introduced to a new tool my good friend Jeff Rivera is beta-testing, I had to share it with you. It is a software that will prevent you from using the Internet without finishing your daily word count.
If you're serious about your commitment to writing, I highly recommend it.
Download Write the Damn Thing now!
12-12-12
A
signed copy on this once in a li...
12-12-12
A
signed copy on this once in a lifetime date!
THE
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HARD COVER $25, SOFT COVER $15
To order write to: drwarrenwoodruff@comcast.net
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MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!
December 7, 2012
Book Daily's Today's Emerging Author Features The Messiah Matrix ... Read Sample Chapter
The Messiah Matrix
![The Messiah Matrix [Kindle Edition]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1381565717i/5041994.jpg)
Anyone passing Ryan McKeown, S.J., on his morning walk down Rome’s Janiculum, would have witnessed a worried-looking young man with dark shadows under his eyes. His usual composed countenance had disappeared and his furrowed brow revealed the burden he now bore. Images of the penitent’s death plagued him, more so because of the man’s extraordinary confession and enigmatic last words, “Find Father Ryan…memory in ashes of Jasius…in the Gesù.” Why did this mysterious monsignor use his last breath to deliver this strange message to his killer? What was he trying to tell me?
It was appalling even to entertain the thought that Holy Mother Church might have ordered the killing of a monsignor. It was just too horrible to contemplate. Surely the Albanian was mistaken?
Not only was he wrestling with the shock of dual murders but Ryan’s doubts about his faith now consumed his every waking moment and haunted his nights. It was mind versus spirit, and the mind threatened to destroy every feeling his spirit flourished on. Ryan’s mind was filled with a jumble of questions in a jumble of languages—English, commendably fluent Italian, and an ancient dialect insiders would readily identify as the vulgar Latin spoken almost exclusively at the highest ecclesiastical levels in Vatican City.
The names flashing through his brain—Eusebius, Philo Judaeus, Lactantius, Origen, Tertullian—were an esoteric litany of historians, poets, biblical scholars, and philosophers—all from the infancy of Christianity. Ryan’s obsession with tracking down the origins of the Catholic faith permeated his consciousness.
The area spanned by Via Garibaldi was a living postcard of tiled roofs, bell towers, cupolas and gardens set off in breathtaking contrast against the cloudless turquoise sky. But this morning the young American priest, lost in ruminations about the fateful confession and his biblical doubts, had been oblivious to the spectacular view--and to the breeze ruffling his curly brown hair to more than usual disarray. It would be difficult to recognize Ryan as a recently ordained priest in his casual street clothes and comfortable black Reeboks, much less one enrolled in the pontifically authorized Society of Jesus, known to the world as “Jesuits.”
Ryan’s questions about troubling inconsistencies in traditional Catholic doctrine had only grown more confusing as he’d turned from his graduate studies of the Latin epic poet Virgil to a temporary stint teaching a course on early Christian theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. At that time he was a Jesuit scholastic, getting in-the-classroom experience, and testing the demands of his calling. Now that his priesthood had been consecrated through the sacrament of Holy Orders and he had been dispatched to the Eternal City to study the New Testament and its commentaries, Father McKeown’s personal doubts and scholarly perplexities were, he feared, all too close to becoming a neurotic disorder.
“How can I accept ordination with all this uncertainty?” he’d once asked his confessor, a functional octogenarian alcoholic, one of the cadre of emeriti that staffed the Woodstock seminary.
“How do you feel about your faith?” the old man asked.
“I feel wonderful,” Ryan admitted. “When I smell the incense in the presence of the Holy Sacrament, I feel…holy…I feel right.”
“Then act as if you were certain,” the old priest had advised. “It is a corollary of Pascal’s wager. There’s no such thing in this world as absolute certainty. So accept that and go forward acting toward the best outcome no matter what.”
As the days before his ordination became cluttered with crucial commitments and endless ceremonies, Ryan found he had no more time to entertain his uncertainties. The trouble with me, he ruminated, is that I’ve always had too little time—for everything. Things just keep happening before I’ve got them figured out. He’d always wished there could be an off-calendar eighth day of the week to do nothing but consolidate what you actually think, hopefully believe, and truly feel.
It was all, to Ryan, a bit overwhelming—especially for a young man who was still intent on figuring out, one piece at a time, the immense puzzle that was the Roman Catholic Church, the religion into which he had been involuntarily baptized as an infant, willy-nilly confirmed as an adolescent, and hesitantly ordained as a priest of its most militant order.
Now it was too late, as far as the priesthood was concerned. He had been confirmed in that direction and, following his old confessor’s advice, determined to make the best of it. To his grateful surprise, even after his ordination his immediate superiors not only encouraged him to continue following his scholarly nose investigating the origins of the Church, but had also mysteriously arranged the residency in Rome.
Whenever his scholarly path seemed to disappear before his eyes, he returned to the simple basic questions that had inspired this quest: How could it be that Theophilus, one of the earliest Christian apologists, wrote nearly 30,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning Jesus Christ? How come the name “Jesus Christ,” in fact, doesn’t appear in any Greek or Latin author until after the Council of Nicaea? Why was it that the only near-contemporary account that mentioned Christ, a suspiciously precise paragraph known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, had been proved to be a patent insertion into that historical narrative? How could Jesus have been born in 1 A.D. when the Gospels say he was born before Herod the Great died—and King Herod’s death could be pinpointed to 4 B.C.? Even Philip Cardinal Vasta, now known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, had lamented that the greatest obstacle for spreading the Catholic faith today was that the historical existence of Jesus could no longer be made credible. If Ryan could somehow find a way to stamp a measure of documented authenticity on the career of the Church’s founder, he would be serving the Holy Father as well as his own wavering vocation. If he could make that tangible contribution to the church, he might justify his own doubt-ridden existence and give himself a break.
If he could find evidence to prove objectively that Jesus really existed as a human being, he’d be able to reconcile all the contradictions. Without that proof certain—that had eluded scholars for some two thousand years—every thread of the tapestry of biblical scholarship became just another loose end and his profession based on an allegory at best, at worst, a phantom.
Continues...
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Anyone passing Ryan McKeown, S.J., on his morning walk down Rome’s Janiculum, would have witnessed a worried-looking young man with dark shadows under his eyes. His usual composed countenance had disappeared and his furrowed brow revealed the burden he now bore. Images of the penitent’s death plagued him, more so because of the man’s extraordinary confession and enigmatic last words, “Find Father Ryan…memory in ashes of Jasius…in the Gesù.” Why did this mysterious monsignor use his last breath to deliver this strange message to his killer? What was he trying to tell me?It was appalling even to entertain the thought that Holy Mother Church might have ordered the killing of a monsignor. It was just too horrible to contemplate. Surely the Albanian was mistaken?
Not only was he wrestling with the shock of dual murders but Ryan’s doubts about his faith now consumed his every waking moment and haunted his nights. It was mind versus spirit, and the mind threatened to destroy every feeling his spirit flourished on. Ryan’s mind was filled with a jumble of questions in a jumble of languages—English, commendably fluent Italian, and an ancient dialect insiders would readily identify as the vulgar Latin spoken almost exclusively at the highest ecclesiastical levels in Vatican City.
The names flashing through his brain—Eusebius, Philo Judaeus, Lactantius, Origen, Tertullian—were an esoteric litany of historians, poets, biblical scholars, and philosophers—all from the infancy of Christianity. Ryan’s obsession with tracking down the origins of the Catholic faith permeated his consciousness.
The area spanned by Via Garibaldi was a living postcard of tiled roofs, bell towers, cupolas and gardens set off in breathtaking contrast against the cloudless turquoise sky. But this morning the young American priest, lost in ruminations about the fateful confession and his biblical doubts, had been oblivious to the spectacular view--and to the breeze ruffling his curly brown hair to more than usual disarray. It would be difficult to recognize Ryan as a recently ordained priest in his casual street clothes and comfortable black Reeboks, much less one enrolled in the pontifically authorized Society of Jesus, known to the world as “Jesuits.”
Ryan’s questions about troubling inconsistencies in traditional Catholic doctrine had only grown more confusing as he’d turned from his graduate studies of the Latin epic poet Virgil to a temporary stint teaching a course on early Christian theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. At that time he was a Jesuit scholastic, getting in-the-classroom experience, and testing the demands of his calling. Now that his priesthood had been consecrated through the sacrament of Holy Orders and he had been dispatched to the Eternal City to study the New Testament and its commentaries, Father McKeown’s personal doubts and scholarly perplexities were, he feared, all too close to becoming a neurotic disorder.
“How can I accept ordination with all this uncertainty?” he’d once asked his confessor, a functional octogenarian alcoholic, one of the cadre of emeriti that staffed the Woodstock seminary.
“How do you feel about your faith?” the old man asked.
“I feel wonderful,” Ryan admitted. “When I smell the incense in the presence of the Holy Sacrament, I feel…holy…I feel right.”
“Then act as if you were certain,” the old priest had advised. “It is a corollary of Pascal’s wager. There’s no such thing in this world as absolute certainty. So accept that and go forward acting toward the best outcome no matter what.”
As the days before his ordination became cluttered with crucial commitments and endless ceremonies, Ryan found he had no more time to entertain his uncertainties. The trouble with me, he ruminated, is that I’ve always had too little time—for everything. Things just keep happening before I’ve got them figured out. He’d always wished there could be an off-calendar eighth day of the week to do nothing but consolidate what you actually think, hopefully believe, and truly feel.
It was all, to Ryan, a bit overwhelming—especially for a young man who was still intent on figuring out, one piece at a time, the immense puzzle that was the Roman Catholic Church, the religion into which he had been involuntarily baptized as an infant, willy-nilly confirmed as an adolescent, and hesitantly ordained as a priest of its most militant order.
Now it was too late, as far as the priesthood was concerned. He had been confirmed in that direction and, following his old confessor’s advice, determined to make the best of it. To his grateful surprise, even after his ordination his immediate superiors not only encouraged him to continue following his scholarly nose investigating the origins of the Church, but had also mysteriously arranged the residency in Rome.
Whenever his scholarly path seemed to disappear before his eyes, he returned to the simple basic questions that had inspired this quest: How could it be that Theophilus, one of the earliest Christian apologists, wrote nearly 30,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning Jesus Christ? How come the name “Jesus Christ,” in fact, doesn’t appear in any Greek or Latin author until after the Council of Nicaea? Why was it that the only near-contemporary account that mentioned Christ, a suspiciously precise paragraph known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, had been proved to be a patent insertion into that historical narrative? How could Jesus have been born in 1 A.D. when the Gospels say he was born before Herod the Great died—and King Herod’s death could be pinpointed to 4 B.C.? Even Philip Cardinal Vasta, now known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, had lamented that the greatest obstacle for spreading the Catholic faith today was that the historical existence of Jesus could no longer be made credible. If Ryan could somehow find a way to stamp a measure of documented authenticity on the career of the Church’s founder, he would be serving the Holy Father as well as his own wavering vocation. If he could make that tangible contribution to the church, he might justify his own doubt-ridden existence and give himself a break.
If he could find evidence to prove objectively that Jesus really existed as a human being, he’d be able to reconcile all the contradictions. Without that proof certain—that had eluded scholars for some two thousand years—every thread of the tapestry of biblical scholarship became just another loose end and his profession based on an allegory at best, at worst, a phantom.
Continues...
