Pretty Terrible
Pop Culture Criticism by Natalie Luhrs
Bad Life Decisions: Chapters 11 & 12

Written by Natalie Luhrs

I'm a lifelong geek with a passion for books and social justice.
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June 25, 2015

Furiosa in the Desert

This is pretty much how I feel.

It’s that time again. Time for two more chapters of Theodore Beale’s Eternal Warriors™: The War in Heaven™. As of this writing, we are but a mere $315 away from me having to read the Whole Damn Thing.

And don’t forget the nifty-awesome stretch goal!

Chapter 11: People of the Dawn

(this explains everything)

Seriously, I cannot even with this chapter. It’s word-soup. Beale is writing this assuming that the reader knows a lot of the background to the cosmological concepts he’s presenting and, well, no. This reader doesn’t and this reader knows a fair bit about the general shape of premillenial dispensationalism if not the specifics.  This chapter, in particular, needs a lot more fleshing out of what exactly is going on and how all these different things fit together.  Because it really just doesn’t make sense to me.

Again, I boggle that this book was published by Pocket Books. What were they smoking when they acquired it?

Chapter 12: Jaws of the Wicked

(What I was trying to say here is that Beale uses different pronouns for this character in different forms: he/it for the snake form, she for the demon-angel form. Which is vaguely interesting? But still not that interesting.)

Chapter 12 was a little bit easier to get through than Chapter 11 and I suspect that’s because of a couple of factors: Jami and Holli aren’t nearly as repellent as Christopher is (they’re slightly drawn but not objectionable) and because there was some actual action happening instead of a lot of talking about action.  What’s happening mostly makes sense and there’s not a lot of theological word-soup.

I’m just about halfway through this book. It is very much not a good book. I am trying to note the good bits as I come across them, but they are few and far between–most of the characters are unpleasant and cardboard-ish, I keep waiting for Jesus to show up but He’s apparently too busy hiding in my couch cushions or something, and unless Beale is trying to tell us something about blind faith with this omission, I just don’t see how he can call this a work of Christian fantasy.  There’s a narrative obsession with all the details of evil, of the different demons, to the point where he’s shoving in random details that are totally unnecessary, like the Zodiac lords nonsense that I still don’t understand.

I think the literalism here is just making my head hurt. I don’t get the sense that any of this stuff is meant as a metaphor and it’s causing some cognitive dissonance and my disbelief cannot be suspended like it can with a really stellar work of fiction. I get stuck in these weird little details and fall down a Google hole and it’s just frustrating and tedious.

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2 Comments

  1. Charlotte
    Charlotte on June 25, 2015 at 6:30 pm

    my mind is now horribly stuck on “thickly liquid splash.” I am not able to make this mean anything, but on the other hand I know what he’s trying to say. Do things that aren’t liquid ever get to splash? (“the body hit the ground with a thickly solid splash”) If you are a thick liquid, do you do something more substantial than splash???? Am very bothered by it all.

  2. Fiord
    Fiord on July 1, 2015 at 2:08 am

    you’re a better woman than I am! Stay strong!

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