The Fall of Lucifer by Wendy Alec

The Fall of Lucifer by Wendy Alec. Lake Mary, Florida: Realms, 2005. ISBN: 1-59185-814-3

I can't believe I read the whole thing! This is a book that I should have stopped reading before I got to page 50. If I had really applied Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, I certainly wouldn't have read the whole thing. One of the reasons I kept on is that I was a kind of captive audience. I had the book on my exercise bike's book rack, where I spend 30 minutes most mornings before showering, breakfasting, and heading off to work. And somehow I just never got around to bringing it in, and substituting something else in its place.

But I also had a small, albeit horrified desire to find out just how the author dealt with the story at hand. What's the story? The classic evangelical view of the fall of Lucifer; the transformation of the Angel of Light into Satan, the angel of darkness. In other words, a retelling in fictional format of the events in heaven that preceded the creation of this earth and the “fall” of mankind.

Now that, in and of itself, isn't an entirely bad basis for a novel. I even had delusions of grandeur myself when I was young and incredibly naive and reading my first science fiction. I thought that “The Great Controversy,” as it's called in Seventh-day Adventist circles, would make a good theme for a SciFi novel. Not that I ever had the skill or patience to write something like that myself.

But back to the book at hand. The problem is that it's done so horribly, horribly badly. The prose is so over the top purple, and the descriptions of heaven so overdone and overwrought that it's ridiculous, silly, even absurd. I mean, the first paragraph of the first chapter is as good an example as any:

The reflection of the twelve palest-blue moons glistened on the First Heaven's tangerine horizon. Shooting stars and lightnings arced over the silvery crystal sea, the pearlescent white sand on the celestial beach shimmering, it seemed, into infinity. And with each wave, clusters of luminescent diamonds the size of pomegranates washed up onto the glistening sands. Toward the eastern horizon lay Eden, its magnificent, lush hanging gardens and amethyst waterfalls barely visible from the sea's edge.

Yes, the entire book is full of such excessively extravagant language. The story revolves around three brothers, the three heavenly chiefs among the archangels, Gabriel, Michael and Lucifer. They ride magnificent horses, they enjoy endless bouts of brotherly camaraderie, and they attend to their meaningless made up heavenly duties.

The author can't be limited to the normal names for the Godhead. No, God is Yehovah. Not Jehovah or even Yahweh, the more traditional interpretations, but Yehovah. And the Son of God is Christos. Not Jesus, or Christ, but “Christos” which is obviously supposed to have some kind of mystical cachet to it.

Most of the book is filled with meaningless heavenly rituals made up, so far as I can tell, out of whole cloth. When the actual story of the fall of Eve occurs, it is given almost no space at all, a mere handful of pages devoted to what should have been a major piece, if not the centerpiece of the entire story. Adam's fall isn't even mentioned, let alone described.

The book overall has some small measure of interest because of the subject matter, but the execution of it is so pathetically tawdry, so trivially trite, so patently pitiful, that it just beggars the imagination. I can only recommend this book to those devoutly evangelical Christian types for whom the content and subject matter completely overrule any artistic criteria, or literary standards, as this book has none, meets none. I was dismayed to learn that one or more sequels are planned, but I shall do my utmost to avoid taking any notice of them, and I sincerely recommend that others do the same.