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Go to L. D. Wenzel's website: Here
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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)
Contact: wenzel.ld@gmail.com
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