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A Witch In The Wardrobe  (Intro continued)


.X...Shannon flees to the cellar and escapes through a window. The killer and his band take off with the manuscript. Shannon vows revenge.

Shannon grew up in Belfast as a Catholic and was trained by a Republican militia up to the 1998 Peace Agreement. Her search for the American killer takes her to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she recruits an evangelical professor of Romantic literature for her vendetta. Against his better judgment, thirty-four-year-old Simon Magister is drawn to her by scholarly curiosity and personal chemistry

While C. S. Lewis has been dead for nearly fifty years, contrasting legacy myths collide. Mainstream evangelicals would canonize him as their first Protestant saint. But enraged fundamentalists demonize the man as an agent of Satan himself, who, through his magical world of Narnia, infiltrates Christian homes with the Occult. This results in violence.

Meanwhile, news of the document discovery spreads to opposing parties, and rumors of its contents abound. The anti-Lewis fundamentalists already believe C. S. Lewis to have been a practicing Occultist, and the Belfast Papers would be hard evidence they need to expose Lewis's true identity as a witch.  While evangelical publishers think this to be crazy talk, their industry would be financially ruined if it were all true. Thus, before any can read them, they must destroy the documents to preserve their lucrative cash flow.

Shannon and Simon enter a dark world where two forces connive for possession of the controversial documents. They meet foes ready to kill to seize ownership, and Simon and Shannon narrowly escape death several times as others die in their wake. They meet an unlikely companion, Bob Wynveen, a naive fundamentalist. Like David of old, he dares to take down the evil Goliaths in the publishing industry whose gigantic power and money have employed a clandestine meta-force called UNIKORN. Through dialogue with Bob, Simon explores aspects of literary Romanticism and how the fiction of Lewis can overlap with esoteric Christianity. Shannon and Simon enter into a romantic relationship, forcing Simon to deal with repressed sexuality from his evangelical past. 

All forces converge to a climax at the Holy Hill Shrine near Milwaukee. Shannon finds her grandfather's killer and takes action. In the end, the reader hears the stories of all who live and die, as well as the final fate of the Belfast Documents.

Witch in the Wardrobe is an over-the-top novel aimed at C. S. Lewis’s vast American readership. Lewis himself is not the target. The author seeks to provoke by focusing on how American evangelicalism has hijacked this great writer's legacy into its own mythology. At times a hyperbolic parody, the action of this thriller is nuanced with an intelligent depiction of contemporary religious cultured in America.

Read Sample chapters

Sample 1  How it all began  (3570 words)

Sample 2  Simon meets Shannon (5250 words)


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