By September 2008, when some 3.8 million copies were in print, I suspect that many of those publishers were having some painful second thoughts. Undaunted by rejection, Young and friends scraped together funds to produce a self-published initial run of 10 thousand copies. Despite encouragement from friends who believed heartily that the novel had potential, no publisher felt the same (a Frank Peretti redux, so to speak, Peretti being the author who kicked off the conservative Christian fiction phenomenon with This Present Darkness in the mid-1980s).
The back-story about the book’s conception has become widely known as well: the author ’s means of processing through a personal faith crisis resulting from an affair with a friend of his wife. This is a fairly significant accomplishment by itself for a first novel. There is enough in the book to intrigue anyone (with the exception, perhaps, of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) and – at some point – anger everyone. It is not difficult to understand why: the story is a veritable hodge-podge of every family’s worst nightmare (the kidnapping and murder of a young and innocent child), a highly novel presentation of Christian theology, an array of philosophical and theological discussions concerned mainly with the problem of evil and the difficulty of forgiveness, with several Eastern and “New Age” concepts thrown in for flavoring. It had not yet become the best-selling phenomenon that word-of-mouth and media hype made it eventually, and the few people that I could find who had read it had very diverse opinions.
I became aware of The Shack by William Young (Windblown Media, 2007) the way I learn about many new books that I would probably never hear about otherwise: the father of one of my students sent me the novel via his daughter along with a request for an evaluation of its contents.
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