"The Shack" by William P. Young: A Review

Reviewed by:
Edward Gordon
See my video review at http://www.thenovelreport.com/BSPbookreviews.html

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I will say this about The Shack by William Young (Windblown Media, December 6, 2007). It has changed my views on religion. In fact it’s left me with a kind of post-traumatic religious shock. After reading this book, part of me feels like I want nothing more to do with God or Jesus Christ ever again. All I want to do is run away from the whole idea of them. I have never been so close atheism as I have after reading this book.

But then I have to remind myself that it’s only Young’s opinion. It’s only the way in which he sees God. It’s not at all the way Jesus Christ or God is presented in the New Testament. I have to remind myself that if Young wants to make grotesque monstrosities of pseudo-love out of the Holy Trinity, that’s his business. But oh what a monster he’s created!

The story is about a man (Mackenzie) who has lost his daughter to a serial killer who snatched her from a campground they were staying at. Confirmation of her death is made by the FBI at an old shack where the girl’s bloody dress is found. The killer is never caught, but one day Mack receives a letter in the post requesting a meeting with him at the shack. It’s signed “Papa.” Papa is the stickily inappropriate name his wife uses for God. So the man contemplates whether it is God calling him to the shack, or perhaps the serial killer.

As luck would have it, it is God. And when he gets there, he sees the blood stains are still on the wood floor where his girl was slaughtered. For some reason, he falls into unconsciousness on that spot and at that point the entire shack and surrounding property turn into a kind of Garden of Eden ranch where God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit have come to talk with Mack.

For no particular reason other than an obvious tokenism on the part of Young, God is a black woman who is always cooking things in the kitchen. She is unabashedly and unoriginally presented like the oracle in the movie “The Matrix.” Jesus, on the other hand, is a bizarre, most likely gay, Middle Eastern man who likes to work with wood (I guess you can take the Messiah out of carpentry, but never the carpenter out of the Messiah.), and the Holy Spirit is played by a ghostly erotic Asian woman named Sarayu who likes to sing a lot.

There is no good way to detail the plot from this point forward, because it devolves into merely contrived conversations that serve to espouse the personal beliefs of the author. The scenes that follow are too emotionally saccharine to be real, and yet they become disgustingly sweet and particularly horrifying when we realize that God is in fact the one who allowed the main character’s little girl to be murdered in the first place.
Papa-God never explains this fully to Mack, but instead tells him that he simply can’t understand the love that was involved in such an act. Frankly neither could I, and in truth I would prefer a malicious god who says, “I let her get tortured to death because I wanted to.” At least there’d be honesty in that kind of deity. The way Young presents God, you’re not sure whether God is the devil or just totally perverse.

At one point Jesus is talking to Mack about the murder of his daughter and says, “Mack, I don’t think you want to know all the details. I’m sure they won’t help you. But I can tell you there was not a moment that we were not with her. She knew my peace, and you would have been proud of her. She was so brave!”

Eventually, Papa-God asks Mack to forgive the serial killer, and Mack ends up doing so in order to please Papa. One is left wondering if Papa is the serial killer himself.

Even the bizarre theology aside, it’s not a well-written book. The long chapters of meaningless didactic drivel that spew forth from Papa-God makes one scream in their head and beg for God to just shut up (which was a new emotion for me). And this points to a problem that always exists when a writer tries to include God as a character in a story: It ruins the suspension of disbelief (which is required in order to read fiction). It breaks the story, because the idea of God doesn’t fit with the contingency the story is based on. God, by definition, is beyond cause and effect, and presumably God is a real entity, not a fictional entity. Furthermore, when that suspension of disbelief evaporates it leaves the author looking like a self-proclaiming prophet, which is irritating at best and sacrilegious at worst. After all, if God is a being who is truly the unlimited reality of the universe, how can He accurately be fictionally portrayed?

Unfortunately this book has sold millions of copies in and out of the Christian community. It was a bestseller for 100 weeks. Books have been written about this book both for it and against it. In this respect it’s is very much like another poorly-written religious book, The Celestine Prophecy.

My opinion is that William Young is an unskilled writer. His dialogue is stilted; the characters are shallow and unoriginally presented, and the plot is slowed down by the didacticism of the dialogue between Mack, Papa-God, Jesus, and Sarayu. Young has written a book to espouse his strange Christian beliefs about God, and while this book has been one of the most popular Christian texts since the New Testament, it is not really worth reading.