Guest Post | "Faith in Fiction" by David Towsey

Today it's my pleasure to host a guest post from David Towsey, whose "bloody biblical" debut I reviewed late last week. I spoke quite openly about my faith, or lack thereof, in that article, and indeed, I came away keen to know more about the author's approach to the touchy subject above.

I knew it'd be a big ask, but belief is as powerful a pivot-point as it is provocative, so I cast caution to the wind and touched base with David to see if he'd be interested in discussing his particular perspective. He took the subject seriously from word one, and came back to me with the guest post below.

What follows, then, are the thoughts of "an enthusiastic novice" on faith, and how it factors into fiction.

***

When Niall asked me to write a guest post about my faith and how it informed Your Brother's Blood, I was at first reluctant. To be honest, I was terrified. I imagined my blundering sentences being examined and then torn apart in great detail, counter-posts exclaiming what a terrible person I must be, and worse. Religion is a difficult subject; it's a lot of things to a lot of different people and that can make it very hard to talk and write about. It's part of the trifecta of topics that in my house were not suitable for discussion at the dinner table. 

As a writer, I'm acutely aware that when I involve religion in my work I'm going to be creating problems for some readers. But as Your Brother's Blood isn't on sale in the UK as I'm writing this post, it is obviously hard to gauge reader-response. Perhaps readers will be more inclined to focus on the zombie-esque characters than the treatment of Christianity, but I understand both may raise questions. Questions like: how did my faith inform my debut novel Your Brother's Blood?

The short answer is: it didn't. And that's because I don't have a faith. I am a kind of lethargic atheist. I grew up in a non-religious household. I did attend a Church of England primary school. For assemblies we would file into the church that was next to the school. I can remember very little except the songs. 'Dance, dance, wherever you may be...' That was a favourite. As was the one that said the word 'naked'. [I find myself singing 'He's Got the Whole World in His Hands' with alarming regularity - Niall] Some of the teachings must have sunk into my subconscious. But that's my subconscious, and I prefer to leave that alone.

Lethargic and tolerant atheism. I don't begrudge anyone their faith. In fact, I'm slightly envious of it. Part of me would very much like to be a strong believer in one of the major world religions. From the outside looking in there seems to be a great degree of security and support in faith. But I just don't feel the faith, and I don't think that's the kind of thing you can fake. There are times when I struggle to understand some of the acts that are done in the name of various religions. My failure to understand can sometimes lead to angry words or feelings, but this is not unique to religion. People do things I don't comprehend all the time.

So if I'm an atheist, why write a book that involves a future vision of Christianity? Firstly, the Bible fascinates me. I tried to read it once, cover-to-cover. I found it impossible and am in awe of anyone who has. But I approach the Bible as a writer. That is worth emphasising. I am not looking for spiritual guidance. My fascination comes from the amazing stories and characters in the text. More so, there are some fantastic turns-of-phrase. For me, it's a great resource. And I am a child of the digital age. Instead of having a paper copy of the Bible on my desk, I have www.biblegateway.com bookmarked. Completely searchable, with many different versions of the Bible available, I spend hours on this site. Search the word 'flower' and there are thirty-four results. Brilliant. You can view the passages in context, or see the whole chapter, in just a single click.

Secondly, I believe that, in a challenging world like that of Your Brother's Blood, there would be many people who turned to religion for answers. This is something people have done for millennia – some might even argue it is the whole reason for organised religion. Answers for all the big questions, but also answers on how to live day-to-day. Over the course of the Walkin' Trilogy, I show how different people and communities handle the issue of the Walkin' – a kind of undead population. Your Brother's Blood focuses heavily on the town of Barkley that is fairly hard-line in its belief systems. I don't condemn Barkley for its beliefs. Despite the fact that if there is a villain in the novel then they are from Barkley, the same is true of the hero of the book. The difference is in the individual – something I think is true of all world religions and their believers.

Lastly, there is what I like to think of as the 'writers in space' argument. I write in the SF/F genre – I'll let you decide which Your Brother's Blood is – and that means approaching subjects that are unknown to me as an author. If friends of mine can write about space travel without being an astronaut, it seems odd to shy away from writing about religion as an atheist. Both demand a level of research. Both expose a writer to criticism from greater or more learned minds. It's no doubt obvious at this stage that I'm no Bible scholar. At best I'm an enthusiastic novice. At worst... 

[SPOILER] The Bible features heavily in all three of the Walkin' Trilogy books. It is an important part of the McDermott family. Some characters are happier about that than others. I like to think I treat the subject even-handedly. But I probably don't. If the books contribute to a debate on how writers approach or utilise religion then I don't think that's a bad thing. I'd like to be part of that conversation.

***

Thank you, David, for addressing my question so seriously and sincerely. Despite your doubts, I'm sure everyone here will agree that it's been a real pleasure having you on The Speculative Scotsman.

Book Review | Your Brother's Blood by David Towsey

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Thomas is thirty-two. He comes from the small town of Barkley. He has a wife there, Sarah, and a child, Mary; good solid names from the Good Book. And he is on his way home from the war, where he has been serving as a conscripted soldier. 

Thomas is also dead - he is one of the Walkin'. 

And Barkley does not suffer the wicked to live.

***

To believe in something, utterly and unconditionally, even or especially when everything else we understand goes against it, is, I think, a powerful thing.

I often wish I had it in me, that capacity. But a leap is needed — a leap of faith into the great unknown — and I... I like to know where I'm going well before I get there.

The appeal, however, is clear, even to me. Belief begets a sense of purpose in a world that often strikes this critic as poorly plotted. Belief reveals meaning in the seemingly meaningless. Belief changes us; rearranges us; makes us more, ultimately, than we were, or would have been. But with great power comes great responsibility — as a great man mooted a great many years ago — and inasmuch as faith can be freeing, when wielded without kindness or compassion it can, of course, be a weapon as well.

In case you were wondering why I'm banging on about the sensitive subjects above: blame David Towsey's daring debut. Faith is the fire at the beating heart of Your Brother's Blood. It's what sets the small town of Barkley apart in a world that's fallen to fear and loathing. It's what keeps its people decent, centuries on from the dawn of the Walkin'...

Debate continues over the cause of Automated Man's fall from scientific grace. War would be an obvious cause. Regardless of man's level of sophistication, time has proven him to be an aggressive creature. We can only imagine what kind of weapons would have been at his disposal. 

Perhaps man outgrew this world and journeyed to the star? Leaving nothing but scraps — both human and otherwise — behind. Abandoned by science, those remaining lived as best they could, resulting in the societies of today. A neat [...] theory. 

Yet, despite finding no obvious flaw in this hypothesis, my personal preference leans towards another explanation: the resources that fuelled man's domination ran out. 

For all his subtleties, he was finite. It is the pattern of humanity: like the moon, their influence waxes and wanes. Mechaniks, magic, the power to fly, are all hollow trinkets; nothing can escape the pattern. (pp.vi-vii)

In Your Brother's Blood, humanity as you and I understand it is gone, and all but forgotten. Yet the world still turns — and there are still people peppered upon it, albeit not in such numbers. The last of us, for they are thus, have had to go back to basics. The bare necessities are they need, really: food, friendship, protection from the elements, a few rudimentary tools.

And faith. In Barkley especially — an insular community modelled after a man who believed the Walkin' were symptomatic of a second Fall — faith is pervasive. Everyone, but everyone, attends sermons on the Sabbath, to hear Pastor Gray preach about the evils of these others: a belief shared by many beyond Barkley. Here, however, the flock is taught to tar the first-born with the same destructive brush: "The gates of heaven are closed to the kin of those damned souls. They are left to walk the earth; abominations; fouls creatures of the night. Twisted husks: they fester instead of finding eternal joy." (p.7)

In recent years, this cruel and unusual commandment has been enough to keep the Walkin' from coming back to Barkley, yet at the outset of Your Brother's Blood, one man does exactly that. Poor Jared Peekman is promptly burned to death — again — as a mob bays for his blood. The same mob doesn't know how to handle the cold-blooded murder of Jared's seven year old son, whose throat Luke Morris, the Pastor's devoted disciple, simply slits.

Meanwhile, far from home, in a pit of half-burned bodies, Thomas McDermott comes back from the dead. He remembers the end, the bayonet buried to its hilt in his chest... yet here he is. No two ways about it: he's one of the Walkin' now. To wit, his darling daughter Mary may also bear the taint.

A Barkley man born and bred, Thomas's faith is desperately tested by this fate worse than death. "Would there ever be a punishment?" he wonders.

Was there anyone, the Good Lord or otherwise, to judge him and mete it out? Had he done anything wrong? He'd wanted an end to these questions, an end to the uncertainty. To spill [it all] out onto the orange soil at the bottom of the canyon. (pp.46-47)

In the end, Thomas can't bring himself the commit this mortal sin. Instead, he grapples with an impossible choice: to go west or escape into the east. He could return home to Barkley, though he's well aware of what awaits him there — of how his reappearance could endanger his wife and child — or traipse towards the secret Walkin' commune on Black Mountain.

He heads home, of course.

It, uh... doesn't end well.

This is hardly surprising. From word one on, Your Brother's Blood is harrowing, haunting and all too human. Towsey starts his book boldly, with a scorching sermon about the wickedness of the Walkin' presented in canny parallel with Thomas's repugnant reawakening — courtesy a tickling carri-clicky which burrows through him as he claws his way out of a mass grave. It's stomach-churning stuff, one sequence as much as the other. And these awful things are but the beginning.

To be clear, the Walkin' are zombies of a sort, but they aren't interested in brains; they're just dead men that move, have memories and want what they've always wanted. For Thomas, that's first and foremost the safety of Mary and Sarah, however if he's to spend his second life in hiding, he wants to see them one last time. So though his return to Barkley might be misguided, Thomas is so smartly characterised we sympathise entirely.

The supporting cast are more of a mixed bag than our profaned protagonist. Some obvious shorthand — I speak of a peeping Tom, primarily — marks the bad guys from the good. Amongst the latter camp, several seemingly central individuals serve no discernible purpose; a number are marginalised by the narrative; still others are left to languish in the last act. Your Brother's Blood doesn't chronicle an ensemble, either. It's a slight novel, and hardly action-packed.

Much of this, I'm moved to moot, is down to the fact that Your Brother's Blood is but the inaugural volume of The Walkin'. That's all well and good — though the rise of the saga is at times a tiresome trend, I could hardly call myself a genre fiction fan if I weren't willing to forgive the format. Indeed, I'll certainly be reading the next novel in this series, given that Your Brother's Blood affected me, in the main, in much the same way Alden Bell's melancholy debut did... which is to say immensely.

Be that as it may, the decision to close the book on book one when Towsey does left me feeling — I won't beat around the bush here — cheated. But only because I cared so much about Thomas and Mary and Sarah. Only because I had invested heavily in what is from the first a fascinating, emotionally enrapturing narrative, and immersed myself in the pitch-perfect, undead western setting of Your Brother's Blood.

I might be an unbeliever, but I have faith in David Towsey to tell the rest of this tale well. I only wish he'd had the good grace to follow through in more ways than the one he undoubtedly does in this book too. Nevertheless, Your Brother's Blood is a tremendously memorable debut, and a striking start to what promises to be a bloody biblical trilogy.

***

Your Brother's Blood
by David Towsey

UK Publication: August 2013, Jo Fletcher Books

Buy this book from
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Recommended and Related Reading

Quoth the Scotsman | David Towsey on the Distance of Difference

I've been feeling my age of late.

Given the content of the last Quoth the Scotsman, you must've imagined as much. Continuing along those lines, then, I came across a particularly perceptive passage in David Towsey's debut, which I'll be reviewing in full on the site soon, discussing how time affects our understanding of distance.

And vice versa, because distance, I find, also influences our perception of time. But we'll leave that subject for another day, eh?

What follows is an excerpt from Councilman Cirr's lecture to the attendees of the Black Mountain Common Consensus: a punctuated prologue of sorts that has — worry not — little bearing on the book's plot. 

An appreciation of distance is always framed by an understanding of time. To a human child, tomorrow could seem a hundred miles away. A twenty-minute walk, from one side of a town to the other, is a vast and tiring expedition. But as they grow, the world around them shrinks. Over the years they shift their expectations of time, of what could and should be achieved in a single day. They begin to think of the future and the past. They lose a minute-by-minute existence, an immediacy of needs and wants. This is the transition from child to adult. 

And then, everything is reversed. The world shrinks again. It takes twice as long to walk anywhere; confined in their homes, only the most essential journeys seem worth the effort. Thoughts turn to making the most of their time. The past holds too many memories; the future, only an end. This is the transition from adult to elder. 

An example: a boy dreams of the Redlands. They are an expanse of adventure and possibility. As he grows into a man he discovers that the map of Pierre County disagrees — the Redlands are a set of lines the size of a thumb. His adult eyes realise the relative scale: big, but a space that has its limits. Then then man becomes elderly. He looks on the same map again and marvels at the sheer size of that rocky wasteland. 

There is only one disruption to this cycle. For some it is final, for others only moments. To those lucky enough to be born again, time becomes infinite and distance is reduced to nothing. 

This is the transition from human to Walkin'. (pp.99-100)

The very transition Your Brother's Blood's protagonist undergoes at the outset of what must be the most engrossing zombie novel I've read since Exit Kingdom.

Expect more on David Towsey's debut in early September, when he and I plan to put our heads together to talk about faith, before and after the fall.