Stephen King and supernatural intervention

More than 100 million Americans say they believe in theistic evolution. According to Gallup polls, the percentage of people believing that humans evolved with divine guidance has declined a bit in recent years, but there's still more than a few who say that's what happened. These people look at nature and natural processes and see, à la Intelligent Design, that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process."

One of those 100 million Americans is named Stephen King.

King, the 66-year-old master of horror fiction who has sold more than 350 million copies of such works as Carrie,  'Salem's Lot, The Shining, It, Cujo, and now Joyland, is obviously no stranger to the idea of the supernatural. But supernatural intervention into the normal course of events isn't, apparently, just a plot mechanism for King. He also sees signs of supernatural intervention in the world around him.

Interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR this week, King said:

If you say, 'Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God,' then you're missing the stars in the sky and you're missing the sunrises and sunsets and you're missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But, at the same time, there's a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, 'Well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar,' and you have to wonder about that guy's personality -- the big guy's personality.

King notes he's not too worried about being consistent, and says he's not sure there's evidence for God but he's chosen to believe anyway. He offers a version of Pascal's wager. "I choose to believe it ... there's no downside to that."

King also talks about the religious influences of his youth in the interview. He says he watched a lot of televangelists as a child, specifically Oral Roberts and Jack Van Impe, who he calls "a real hellfire guys." He went to a Methodist church as a child, and says it was like a "bottle of soda with the cap off for 24 hours," real "Yankee religion."

"They tell you you're going to hell," he says, "and you're half asleep. What kind of preaching is that?"

Christian interpreters of Kings work have long noted the religious undertones. In King's work, when he tells you about hell, you're not falling asleep. And when the supernatural intervenes, the author thinks that might not be so unusual.

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Jerry Jenkins' vanity press

Jerry B. Jenkins is the consummate hack.

The man knows the Christian fiction market and he works it.

I'm not very interested in the moral and aesthetic disapproval that's normally implied by calling a writer a hack. I am quite interested in how book markets work, though, and especially how the Christian fiction market works. So I'm very interested in hacks. Hacks consciously and actively respond to the market as they find it. In some ways, they are just more pure. They're untroubled by fantasies that artistic quality correlates to commercial success, unbothered by the sense of aesthetic justice that insists artistic quality should correlate to commercial success. Hacks write for the world as it actually is.

Hacks write like it's their job.

They know that writing is their job, and they embrace that, and embrace all the marketing analysis and economic acumen necessary to succeed at that job. Jenkins, for example.

"I make no apologies for writing for the masses," he once said. "I am one of them."

He has always had an eye for the markets with mass potential, such as Christian children's series and Christian athlete biographies. He has authored or co-authored 220 books, by my count, or about 3.4 for every year he's been alive. Fourteen of those books have been New York Times bestsellers. He accepted the deal to co-author Left Behind where others would have balked (and did balk), and he wrote the first book of the series in under 24 days. Left Behind sold as many copies as Catcher in the Rye, and it's never been required reading for high schoolers. Jenkins stayed on for 12 more books, plus three prequels, and he cooperated with lots of spin-offs, including a series of 40 children's books. He was pretty consistently smart about how and where to push the franchise -- in one case, at least, smarter even than the people who actually made the marketing decisions.

So, when Jenkins takes up a new project, it's likely that that says something about the way the Christian fiction market is evolving. He's not necessarily innovative, but he's paying attention to the market, and responding to it. When that project, further, is explained specifically as a response to market conditions, it's especially worth noting.

His new project is a vanity press, Christian Writers Guild Publishing. They will be charging would-be authors nearly $10,000 to put their works in print.

Thus speaketh the consummate hack: this is the fiction market now.

His explanation for the vanity press -- which he doesn't call a vanity press -- is that authors now need well-established "platforms" to get published, and that the $9,995 will help aspiring writers get that platform. For the cost, Jenkins' group provides proof-reading, cover design, e-book formatting, an ISBN number, and a package of promotional material, "everything the writer needs for a successful book launch."

The vanity press does not itself sell the book, nor promote it, nor take any financial risk or responsibility for actual marketability, which is pretty much the definition of a vanity press.

Jenkins told Publisher's Weekly that "good, passionate authors are ignored because they're unknown," but that they can "prove their worthiness in the market."

There are a number of self-published authors who have became very successful that are kind of the model being promoted here. They chose an alternative route, built a fan base, "proved their worthiness," and became very successful. One noted recent example is Hugh Howey, who's self-published e-book sic-fi series Wool has become a phenomena. He reportedly has made as much as $40,000 a month while selling his e-books for as little as $1.99 apiece. Another is E.L. James, whose cultural juggernaut, Fifty Shades of Gray, started out as Twilight fan-fiction, available free online, and was then published by a vanity press, and was then picked up by a traditional publisher. In the Christian fiction market, the main example of this route to market success is William Paul Young. The first printing of Young's book, The Shack, was an edition of 15 -- photocopied at Office Depot. About one million copies of the book were sold before the rights were bought by a mainstream publisher.

There's a difference is a difference between self-publishing and a vanity press, but Jenkins' is kind of eliding the distinction. The promotional material for the press positions it as an aid to self-publication. Jenkins' claim is that his company can help aspiring writers follow this path to popular success, mostly by helping them produce a product that isn't as obviously terrible as most self-published fiction is. A decent edit job, a good cover, and a little marketing advice could make all the difference. Or so it seems is Jenkins' proposition.

That's the hope that costs $9,995.

Jenkins, of course, is not the only one who sees that the shrinking book market is accompanied by an expanding market of aspiring authors willing to pay for the chance to see their words in print. The Christian publisher Thomas Nelson -- owned by NewsCorp, FOX New's parent company -- has also recently launched a vanity press. Now, manuscripts rejected by the publisher may be referred to the WestBow division, where would-be authors can pay to have their books printed by the vanity press division of a major publisher. There's also a Catholic vanity press, which promises to provide "proper checks" to "ensure that authors' works are free from doctrinal or moral error," but which appears to charge extra for editing.

Many observers are skeptical of the self-publishing and vanity press models. Michael Ann Dobbs, at io9, writes that, "Once a sign of slightly deluded grandiosity, self-publishing now looks like a reasonable move for writers," but, still, even after these very public successes,

self-publishing landscape threatens to become a vast wasteland for authors too. They have few ways to get recognition and little to no support. They risk spending years trying to sell books no one seems to want, when a good editor or few more drafts could have made the books successful.

The numbers are pretty dismal. The average book published by a vanity press sells between 40 and 200 copies, according to Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works. Self Publishing Resources reported that one vanity press with 10,000 titles had seen an average of 75 copies sold per title. If the would-be authors that use Jenkins' service have similar sales, they would pay between $50 and $200 per copy sold, recouping just a few dollars with each sale.

A survey of self-published authors found that over half of them never even sold $500 worth of books.

None of the reports on Jenkins' vanity press or the press' promotional material give any indication for how things would be different for the aspiring authors who use this service. It is true that those who get help with editing, cover design, etc., generally sell more copies than those who don't. Not $9,995 worth of more copies, though. Even if a lot of Jenkins' authors do better than half the self-published authors out there now and sell, say, 168 digital copies on Amazon at $2.99 each and make a gross of $500, they'll pay Amazon 30 percent of that, net $350, and still be more than $9,000 in the red.

This is a vanity press, too, so all the burden of selling will fall on the author, which has led some to call this whole thing a scam.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware doesn't use that word, but seems a little flabbergasted by the audacity of this enterprise. There's little to nothing in the way of a plan that would vault one into the ranks of a Hugh Howley or an E.L. James or a William Paul Young. She writes: "Can [Christian Writers Guild Publishing] really be expecting authors to pay nearly $10,000 for a path to publication that doesn't even get their books into retail channels? .... Even with distribution, $9.995 is a hell of a lot of money." According to Strauss, Jenkins' vanity press is expensive even when compared to other vanity presses.

The man who has himself has has more than 200 titles published by traditional publishers responded to such criticism when asked about it by a reporter from Christianity Today. He said the cost is "reasonable only for those who can afford it and want the quality we offer."

And it seems reasonable, of course, to those who believe that this is their way to prove their worthiness to the market, the money understood as a sign of good faith and fealty to the book market's gods.

There's not a market for all the Christian fiction books that are being written right now. But there is, clearly, a market of aspiring novelists willing to pay for the chance, the promise, the hope, of breaking into the little market that there is. Readers may not be consumers, but with a vanity press, books aren't the product, authors' ability to call themselves authors is the product. And there's a burgeoning market for that. This is the first conclusion about the market for Christian fiction that can be drawn from the new project of the always-saavy Jerry Jenkins: there's money to be made off of those who want to be the next Jerry Jenkins.

There's also a constriction of opportunities for traditional publishing. Publishers are just making fewer bets on the unknown, these days. Christian fiction publishers especially.

This isn't entirely new. It's always been the case that Christian fiction presses have been incredibly cautious and tended to put their resources into known commodities. Series have always been popular, new names have always struggled for recognition, and there's always been strong support for established genre fictions and a great leeriness of anything that doesn't have an established audience (i.e., market). But with the book industry as a whole suffering, those tendencies have become even more acute.

Add to that the third thing that can be concluded from Jenkins' latest project, the reality that's inducing angst among publishers and aspiring authors alike: it's just not clear that there's a standard model for success in publishing, anymore. As late as the '90s, it seemed clear what worked. There were paths, routes. Popular fiction publishing seemed like a business with rules, and there was a belief it was possible to know who had the potential to be the next Steven King, the next Danielle Steel, and possible to know what to do with a book that had that potential to launch it into the upper echelons of bestsellerdom.

Jenkins, for one, knew what those rules were, and followed those rules, and reaped his success. He embraced his inner hack, and was willing to do what he had to do to move books.

Now it seems like no one knows what the rules really are. Those who are willing to offer a sacrifice to the market don't know what sort of sacrifice they should be making. If someone tells them the required sacrifice is $10,000, that's at least can seem like a definitive answer.

The bestselling authors of the last decade on the other hand don't seem like they offer models for success, but really seem to be flukes. Stephanie Myer's story is the most traditional, but even it depends on a bit of an accident, where the person who reviewed the manuscript for the agent didn't realize the book was significantly too long and should have been rejected out of hand. E.L. James' path to success is stranger and less likely to serve as a decent model than Meyer's; Steig Larson's success doesn't really seem easily emulatable; and Hugh Howley does not even appear to know how he did what he did, much less what someone else should do if they wanted to do what he did. It all seems very anarchic, right now, like no one knows exactly what one has to do to get a chance to prove worthy of the market.

Which is why some will willingly do what a consummate hack says, and pay that hack $10,000, since he at least has a history of knowing the market and really working it.

Even if "working it" now means selling a different sort of fiction.

But to see how he does it is to see something state of the Christian fiction market right now.

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E-books & the changing market for Christian fiction

The data on digital books, the market for e-books and e-book readers, is kind of conflicted at the moment. Prognosticating the future of reading is for the most part futile, anyway, but the tea leaves right now are especially mysterious.

Sales of e-readers dropped by about 36 percent, apparently due to the popularity of tablets and devices that do more than reading, leading some industry experts to predict the waning of the Kindle moment.

The rate of e-book buying has also slowed. The market's soft. About a third of those who read e-books haven't bought one in the last 12 months. This might be because they haven't read the ones that are already on their digital devices. An analyst talking to the New York Times called it the "overloaded night stand" effect: "someone isn't going to buy any more books until they make a dent in reading the ones they've already acquired."

On the other hand, the percentage of Americans owning an e-reader went up in the last year, from 10 percent to 19 percent, and the percentage who owned any kind of device that can be used for reading digital books increased by 15 points, so now more than one third of Americans could read e-books if they wanted.

Which they do: as of November 2012, about 30 percent of people who read had read an e-book in the last 12 months.

I don't know what to make of that. What's happening or what's going to happen. It's not clear whether the whole trend has crested or whether, as others say, the digital book future is just beginning.

The market, however, has already changed the way people read and what people read. The effects can be seen in the market for Christian fiction, which looks different now than it it did in 2007, and different in ways that can be directly linked to digital books.


For one thing, in the last five years, the sorts of Christian fiction that are available, the genres and sub genres, has dramatically diversified. The market has opened up so that, for instance, a novel about Reformed Christians on an alien planet in the future fighting a guerrilla war to defend "New Geneva" against invading Khlisti, a new religion described as "incorporating revamped Marxism, Islam and a dash of New Age spirituality," can now not only get published, it can reach number nine on Amazon's chart for science fiction sales. As the author of that book said, "The advent of e-books changed everything."

For another thing, in the last five years, the sorts of people reading Christian fiction has diversified. Where once only a dedicated customer could have found Christian fiction at a special store devoted to evangelical products, now people are stumbling across these books, picking them up (virtually speaking) on a whim, reading them without knowing really what they are or what they are about. This can be seen in the backlash against Christian fiction's lack of a label, though presumably not everyone who found themselves surprised to be reading Christian fiction was angry about it.

Both of these changes -- diversifying readership and diversifying genres -- can be traced the change in the ways e-books are sold.

As NPR's Zoe Chace reports:

The price of an e-book isn't fixed the way it is with physical books. Ten years ago, a publisher would have sent out its books to the bookstore with the price stamped on the cover. After that, it was done — the publisher couldn't put it on sale to sell more books.

'The exciting thing about digital books is that we actually get to test and price differently,' [Sourcebook President Dominique] Raccah says. 'We can even price on a weekly basis.' Once publishers have this tool, the ability to adjust prices in an instant, they can do whatever they want with that tool — like use it to get publicity. That's what Little, Brown did with presidential historian Robert Dallek's book on John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life.

In the middle of November, Little, Brown dropped the price from $9.99 to $2.99 for 24 hours — the digital equivalent of a one-day-only sale. 'That sparks sales; it gets people talking about it,' says Terry Adams, a publisher with Little, Brown. 'You've just expanded the market.'

Dropping the price of An Unfinished Life did get people's attention. 'Here, we had an opportunity to increase the audience,' Adams says. The book — originally published in 2003 — launched itself back onto the best-seller list. And because Little, Brown could raise the price again, it wasn't stuck with a money loser.

This kind of promotion leads to discovery, something that used to just happen in brick and mortar bookstores. But with fewer of those around, publishers are using price to create discovery.

That strategy has been very popular with Christian fiction publishers. It's not uncommon to see whole lists of evangelical novels being sold on Amazon for $2.99, $.99, or even being given away in a promotional blitz.

Such strategies have changed the shape of Christian fiction, as the genres adjust to the market and make use of the market that's there. In the past, the Christian fiction market has taken the specific shape it had because of other developments in how books are produced and distributed. Christian romance emerged as a distinct genre only after a distribution network of retail outlets was organized, catering specifically to evangelicals, and especially evangelical women. Christian fiction only breached bestseller lists and broad cultural recognition after big box retailers such as Wal-Mart began carrying Christian fiction titles such as Left Behind and The Shunning, embracing the idea that buying such books was act of cultural identification that left customers more strongly allied with the cultural politics of the corporation.

Digital books, Kindle and Amazon, have likewise transformed the market, so what Christian fiction is, and who reads it, and how many, have been changed by how books are sold.

These latest developments to the market may well also determine the shape of the Christian fiction market in the future. How, of course, remains to be seen, but then, even the ways that market developments of the past have already had an influence on the markets for Christian fiction is only very poorly understood.

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The postmodern technique of the most-sold Christian novel of 2012

The Harbinger begins by addressing its own problem of unbelievability.

It opens by directly dealing with the readers' likely problem of suspending disbelief for this novel. The subtitle is The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America's Future. The first page begins with that same phrase spoken as dialogue -- a bit of dialogue that could be between the author and the reader, or the author imagining that conversation, acting it out, playing both parts, his and the reader who's going to read this. And it starts by repeating that line:

'An ancient mystery that holds the secret of America's future.'
'Yes.'
'What would I think?'
'Yes, what would you think?'
'I'd think it was a plot for a movie. Is that it? Is that what you're presenting ... a movie manuscript?'
'No.'
'A plot for a novel?'
'No.'
'Then what?'
He was silent.
'Then what?' she repeated.

It is the plot for a novel, actually, though within the fiction-world of the narrative the "ancient mystery" isn't fiction, as the character named Nouriel Kaplan insists twice on page two. And as the author Jonathan Cahn has also said in multiple interviews outside the fiction-world of The Harbinger.

On a Christian, apocalypse-oriented radio program, he said "the form is a narrative" but "90 percent of it is non-fiction." On a Charismatic TV show, he repeated the message of the book without any reference to narrative or a novel or fictions of any sort, but only to the "prophetic message known as The Harbinger." The host represented the work as revelation from the Holy Spirit, a characterization Cahn didn't dispute. In an e-mail interview with a Charismatic podcast, Cahn said,

[The Harbinger] reveals things that believers have felt in their hearts but without the evidence to back it up. It reveals a biblical mystery of specific template of judgment that is now playing out in America, before our eyes, lying behind everything from 9/11 to the crash of Wall Street, biblical harbingers of judgment appearing in New York City, Washington, D.C., involving some of the highest of American leaders, the replaying of an ancient drama of judgment, even giving exact dates.

This is also all presented in the dialogue in the first few pages of the novel, meaning the author, a messianic Jewish minister from New Jersey, contends that he is presenting non-ficiton as fiction, but within the fiction, the main character is arguing that the story seems like fiction but "it's not fiction -- it's real."

It's a fascinating bit of metafictionality, I think.

A similar thing happened in Left Behind, where criticisms of the book, specifically that it was badly written and unbelievable, were written into the book. Left Behind briefly calls attention to its own status as fiction, predicts the readers' response, and makes that response a part of the narrative, thus re-framing its own problem of plausibility as the readers' struggle with belief. The problem of believing that God is directing the apparently chaotic events of history, and that the Bible is relevant to todays world and to an individuals life, is collapsed into the problem of suspending disbelief to read a novel.

The Harbinger does the same thing, but more so, and more directly. Here the very postmodern technique of self-reflexivity is used, and used aggressively, but to a very different end.

This has caused some deal of controversy among those who, actually, are open to the idea of the imminent return of Christ at Armageddon to reign for 1,000 years.

I wouldn't want to say that this is at all related to that, but that novel, The Harbinger, is the only Christian fiction to make it onto Amazon.com's list of 100 most-sold books of 2012. It comes in at number 23 for the year -- ahead of J.K. Rowling's foray into adult fiction, the Steve Jobs biography, and John Grisham's latest.

Many would likely scoff at that news, a response that's expected by the text and anticipated, written into the story. "I don't expect you to believe me yet," the main character says. "But hear me out!"

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John Bunyan's accident of fiction

"When at the first I took my pen in hand
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.

"And thus it was: I, writing on the way
And race of saints, in this our gospel day,
Fell suddenly into an allegory"

-- John Bunyan, "The Author's Apology for his Book," Pilgrim's Progress

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Partial & elusive truths: The aestheic values of Ron Hansen's 'Christian fiction'

Ron Hansen is a Christian fiction writer. Except, with him, the sense of "Christian fiction writer" is that he's a Christian who writes fiction and a writer who writes fiction that's informed by and shaped by his faith, not that he belongs to the genres or markets generally referred to by the term.

He has, perhaps to make that exactly that distinction, criticized the genres of Christian fiction with criticisms that are fairly broad, fairly sweeping. Hansen has said he dislikes Christian fiction because it "is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing."

In another context, Hansen has expanded that critique, and challenged, even, the Christianness of Christian fiction. In A Stay Against Confusion, he writes: 

"So-called Christian fiction is often in fact pallid allegory, or a form of sermonizing, or is a reduction into formula, providing first-century, Pauline solutions to oversimplified problems, sometimes yielding to a Manichean dualism wherein good and evil are plainly at war, or offering as Christianity conservative politics. We cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no skepticism, nothing to cause offense."

Whether or not that's a fair critique of Christian fiction, it does get at the sense of the aesthetic expression of Christianity that Hansen values.

Or rather, doesn't value: Pallid allegory, sermonizing, formula and over-simplification are the negative terms. On the other side, the positive terms of his specifically Catholic aesthetic measures are more ambiguous. Not that he doesn't or hasn't articulated them, but that they're still pretty vague, even articulated, and it's just not really clear what these values would mean in the context of a novel -- or how they work out in the context of his novels.

In a PBS segment, Hansen talks about how attending mass is part of his writing process and he views his fiction as sacramental, in a certain sense, in that "It's a witness to what God is doing in the world."

Speaking specifically of how one of his better known works, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a "witness," in this way, he says, "I wanted to have this sense of, how do you, once you've done that, how do you redeem yourself?" The PBS interviewer notes that there are allusions in the work to the Biblical story of Cain and Able, implying the work is religious at least in that sense, but asks, "Does Bob Ford really find redemption?"

Hansen says, "He doesn't, no."

That's true -- he doesn't. And it's exactly this ambiguity that undercuts the clearly articulated aesthetic of fiction that's Christian that Hansen holds.

The Assassination is a good book, but, as literature, is very open-ended, short through with ambiguities, and often rather uncertain, actually, about the possibility of redemption in human history.

Hansen holds that "Fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons." In The Assassination, though, who the models are and what they show is not at all clear.

It's not clear, for example, why Ford killed James, what his motivation was.

Ford tells himself and those around him a continually shifting set of self-justifying stories. In one late scene, the aging Ford says he killed James because he had to, because James was going to kill him. Then adds that also there was the reward money, that that was the reason. Then adds that he "thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery" and he thought he'd be hailed as a hero for killing James, and that that was why he did, because he wanted to be famous. "I thought they would congratulate me," he says, "and I'd get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn't see how it would look to people." The reader, at the end of this, does not really know why Ford killed James, nor does it seem that Ford knows either.

If anything, the text endorses the idea that the human heart is mysterious, most especially to itself.

There's good Catholic doctrine backing up that idea, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions about where, exactly, Ford went wrong. It would seem he's to be the example of immorality, of what not to do, but what he does is conflicted and confused. He idolizes James, and that seems to be the error, but then he reverses course and goes after the outlaw like an iconoclast with a hammer. And that seems to be error too. In some parts of the story he is self-aggrandizing. In others, he supplicates and grovels. He uses violence. He eschews violence. He longs for glory. He accepts his lot. He accepts abuse. He resists abuse. He snivels and whines that the universe is just slated against him, and then attempts actually to take control of his life and his fate, and both courses of action, like everything Ford does in this story, take him further and further from redemption.

The character is prone to self-delusions, and the story, told in the third person, never offers the sort of omniscient account of the assassin's real reasons that a reader could latch onto. Even at the moment it seems like the reader is being offered a good explanation, a way clear of Ford's confusion, it's then framed as, most essentially, the way Ford is justifying himself. Hansen writes, for example, that Ford

"was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn't been necessary."

What starts out as Ford's seeming moment of self realization, and possibly a kind of confession and moment of redemption, turns out to be only Ford offering another insufficient account of things. The moment of clarity turns out to be just another set of self-justifying delusions, more of the same shifting, shuffling confusion.

The same non-conclusion.Which, in the work, is presented as the better interpretation. It's contrasted with the cheap, false stories Americans told themselves about Ford, where

"Everything was exaggerated and magnified -- if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course the consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and stinging judgement of history -- even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning."

The same confusion is at work with the other characters. James is no less conflicted. No less confused a model or more a witness to anything clear.

This is not to criticize the ambiguity of the morality and immorality modeled by Ford. It's the character's confusion and self-delusion and subverted realizations and general messed-up-ness that make this book good.

Bob Ford is, here, human.

He's human precisely in the way that those promoting and making claims for literature would want a literary character to be. He is, that is say, human in a way that demonstrates important aspects of what it means to be human, that can show or teach readers "what it's like to be human." He has real psychological depth. It's these literary qualities of the character that make him a really terrible model for morality, though.

Because it's all so ambiguous.

In The Assassination, this is depicted again and again by contrast, as the story Hansen is telling references or repeats other stories of the era about the same situation and subject. The narrative without a clear moral or model for morality contains numerous representations of narratives with unambiguous points. These other stories are always clear. They have morals. They have pointed lessons, and the sermonizing Hansen will criticize as not really Christian in the aesthetic sense he wants to use that word, but also in the sense he'll make use of when wanting to argue for the right way for fiction to be Christian, as a "witness" and "model." Those stories that take James and Ford as models for morality, though, are consistently contrasted to the story Hansen is telling, which is about humans and the confusions of human life, priveledging complexity over the neatness of allegory. 

Hansen, one could even argue, takes the authorial position in this work as the antagonist, the opponent of the historical author who heroized Jesse James, John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was an avowed and unreconstructed Confederate who wrote up James as a folk hero, a savior and avenger of Southern whites, a model for moral resistance to the regime that freed slaves, undercut the "birthright" of white privilege, and supported the corporate interests of railroads and the burgeoning of capitalism over and against the agrarian and yeoman ideals of late fuedalism. In Hansen's account, Edwards is willfully blind to the complexities of humans and history, always casting his characters in terms of models and witnesses. Edwards writes, after the assassination, that James' only real transgression was that he "refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters." Edwards, in Hansen's novel, writes that "such a cry of horror and indignation" at the way James died "is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself."

In all this, Edwards is the prime example of the aesthetic of Christian fiction Hansen opposes, with weak and easy allegories and wrought-up sermons supplanting story. He is, however, also an example of the sort of aesthetic Hansen says he supports: Edwards is very interested in exactly the kind of "show[ing] you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life" that Hansen, though he affirms this, never really gets around to in The Assassination.

His aesthetic, in practice, in this novel, whether one considers it "Christian" or not, is different from the positive values he articulates to PBS and in essays on how fiction can be sacramental. If his work works as a witness, it's not a very clear one. If characters are supposed models from which to take lessons, Hansen failed.

It's possible, though, to put aside what he says he thinks he likes, and detect a different set of aesthetic values in The Assassination. Hansen values complexity and ambiguity. He prefers his themes oblique. He wants to render the humanness of characters, their confusions and self-contraditions, their intermingled wheat and tares. He represents them as, most essentially, born concupiscent and morally deformed and also bearing within themselves, at the same time, the divine. He values showing humans as creatures mystified by themselves, and the world as a place also thus mystified. History, for him, is best presented as a stage where humans act on their inveterate, incontrovertible belief in personal redemption and beatification -- redemption and beatification they do not easily find. 

Hansen will say, if you ask him, that fiction "helps us to know we believe," that it "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretations, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive."

In practice, though, in this book, his aesthetic seems rather to value the partial, the elusive, the truths that are not simple, so easy to turn into sermons. Whether that means his books, his aesthetic values and the fiction he writes, are more or less Christian than the genres that go by the name "Christian fiction" is probably a matter of personal tastes and definitions.

This is the alternative sense of "Christian fiction" one finds, though, in the worked-out aesthetic preferences of the faith Hansen has that shapes and informs his stories.

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