A New Novel Coming This Summer
"Through the Eye of Old Man Kyle" is the story of Hunter Saint, a staff member at a remote summer camp, and his search for the divine.
Dear friends,
I’m happy to let you know that my second novel, Through the Eye of Old Man Kyle, is coming to you this summer! Honestly, this book project wasn’t really planned. Last summer, I came back home after a year in New York and wanted to start writing daily fictional journal entries from the perspective of a veteran camp staffer based on the summer camp I had worked at two years prior. Two months went by and I had a manuscript of 50,000 words and a story that had morphed beyond my original intentions.
C.S. Lewis wrote about the experience of the “numinous” in the introduction of his book The Problem of Pain. He thought that a sense of a “presence” haunting the natural world was a universal feature of religion. Humans over time have felt, as if by default, that some kind of Being watches us from beyond the purview of the material realm. Whether this sensation is an indicator of the truth or is an illusion was one of the contentions of the Enlightenment project. Here, the main character in this novel, Hunter Saint, brushes up against the numinous and can’t quite shake the experience for the rest of the narrative. He tramps through the woods in search of the runaway prodigal, a new staffer named Jordan, only to be haunted by the loneliness of his own heart and the attendant notion that, despite the dangers and the darkness, there is no such as thing being truly alone. Someone is with him, watching him… Whatever Being, whether it’s Death, God, or the legendary ghost of Old Man Kyle, is eyeing him on his journey, he knows that sometimes the only method forward is to live in the question and trust that he too is in need of a Finder. Through the Eye of Old Man Kyle is my woefully inadequate stab at a story about searching for the Person behind the world we live in. Whether Hunter finds what he’s looking for or ever gets found himself is a question I’ll leave for you to decide.
Here’s the final sample chapter I’ll release before sharing the link to the published novel in a few weeks:
May 29th
The first camp is come and gone, and we’ve got a day off before the next one comes tomorrow. Writing this at an old desk in the attic above the boy’s dorm. You have to lower a trapdoor staircase to get to it. There’s not much else up here except a green bean bag with a human shaped imprint in its center and stuffing emerging from its seams. It’s hot in the attic, but I set up a box fan in the window, which is pretty much cut straight into the plywood. It’s like I’m one of those expatriate writers in Paris. A Hemingway or Fitzgerald scribbling away at the next great American novel. Would you agree, Professor Snodgrass?
I had late night duty refilling the water jugs in the recreation field last night. I was buzzing around in Jenni’s Kawasaki mule vehicle and had the local pellet gun pistol on my hip; ever since Jerry got bitten by a coyote last year in the rec field, Jenni makes whoever is on water-filling duty take the pistol with them just in case the worst happens.
But I had this moment when I had stopped the engine, finished filling the last water jug, and looked up at the sky from beneath the canopy. The flame from the oil refinery blotted out some of the stars on the horizon, but the majority of the constellations remained brightly stippled. It occurred to me, sort of out the blue, that if God really existed—this eternal Being who indwells the everlasting present moment—then He made all that, every single iota and whale and cell, and that by extension He was looking at me, a very small part of that bigness who was nonetheless somehow vital to the health of the whole system. It felt like I was both at the center and periphery of existence at the same time. Charged with significance and dust, kingship and nothingness. It was awesome.
In the end, I don’t think this feeling was very far off from terror. But that idea of the God Personage actually looking at me, and with a smile on His face at that—man, it was almost too much to handle. After what must have been thirty minutes of revery, I zipped back to the dorms high as a kite, like John the Baptist or something, ready to enlighten the world of the impending glory. For the time being, it seemed obvious that nothing in this world can ever really go all that wrong or go so wrong that it can’t be corrected. I almost ran into the dorm room, breathing hard, but no one was there. So, I went into the common area and sat on the couch, catching my breath, squinting at the unfriendly phosphorescent lights, which threatened to lull me back into artificiality. Lorrie came out from the girl’s dorm. Her best friend, Carli, followed her, but then said she was going to the Snack Shack for some ice cream, and walked by me with a smile and a cocked eye indicating that I should behave myself in her absence.
Lorrie sat on the couch across from me. She really is so dang cute when she’s in a pony tail and wearing no makeup. Like she’s about to fall asleep on the couch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, a record player droning with Bob Dylan in the background. She asked me if I was all right and if I’d been playing basketball with the twins.
“No, I was filling the water jug in the rec field, near Jenni’s house.”
“You’re breathing so hard.”
“I just had…a moment.”
She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, those sharp caramel eyes blinking with ambiguity. “You’re weird, and I’ll never understand you.” Then she sat back into the cushions.
“I’m telling you, Lorrie, I just had a moment in the field. It was amazing.”
“Did you bring pot to camp, Hunter Saint?”
“What? No! Of course not.”
She smiled, crossing her arms and popping gum. “I’m kidding. I could never see you doing that. That kid Jordan, however.” We chuckled. “So, what, you…had a breakthrough or something?”
“Something like that.” I told her I filled the last water jug, and happened to look up at the stars, and had this thought that if what we believe about God is real, that we should all be very terrified and happy. That was all.
“Wow,” said Lorrie. She narrowed her eyes contemplatively, suggesting my experience had the powers of transference, and added, “That’s really cool, Hunter. I’m happy for you.”
“Sorry. I must sound kind of nuts. It’s been hard to read the Bible lately, though. Camp Woodward is busy enough, so it’s just hard. And I have to get this writing assignment done this summer—”
She crossed her legs, scratched an arm, tilted her head toward the ground.
It’s so hard these days to be quiet with someone else. Especially when it’s someone you have a lot of unspoken feelings and thoughts about. It’s like silence is never silence when Lorrie and I are in the room alone together. No, it’s the furthest thing from silence.
“Well,” she said. “I’m glad you had that moment tonight. God is good. I wish that would happen to me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. And…I’m sure it will. Go out to the rec field at night. You’ll see.” But by then, the original glory had somewhat ebbed away and given into a fraught scramble for repossession, and Jordan slinked into the common area and into the dorm room behind us. Lorrie added, “I still haven’t talked to him.”
“Yeah. Me neither, really.”
For further reading: Experiencing the Numinous | WORLD (wng.org)