The mysterious realm of spiritual warfare plays a vivid part when a madman enters a church, opens fire on hundreds of young people, killing seven and wounding others. Award-winning author Roger Elwood lifts the veil between the natural world and the supernatural. In this latest sequel to the original Angelwalk novel, he creates a new genre, blending reality with the literary techniques of his internationally best-selling series. True-life human drama has never been more compelling. Expect to be startled...shed tears...rejoice.
Roger Elwood was an American science fiction writer and editor, perhaps best known for having edited a large number of anthologies and collections for a variety of publishers in the early 1970s. Elwood was also the founding editor of Laser Books and, in more recent years, worked in the evangelical Christian market.
I don't want to damn Elwood with faint praise, but I also don't want the review to be longer than the book. Which seemed to be plotted like he was trying to finish an all-nighter and make a page count. Elwood uses the characters of his Angelwalk novels, Steadfast and Darien, to attempt to dramatize the mass-murder at Wedgwood Baptist Church in the fall of 1999. He does so, but only barely. And much of the work is appendices on spiritual warfare and theodicy. I found them worthwhile, but I'm sure a good percentage of that is confirmation bias, so someone else might take a different tack. In the end, the writing was an unpleasant mishmash of plain journalism and overwrought sentimentality. One star for writing it down; one star for Jesus.