The Fire Gospels: A Novel [Paperback]

Mike Magnuson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 1999

The Fire Gospels takes place in the McCutcheon River Valley in Wisconsin during a long-standing drought. Through characters like Grady McCann, a hardworking maintenance man at an old folks' home; his wife, Erica, a strangely evangelic Catholic; and Lucky Littlefield, the local weatherman turned preacher who enjoins his viewers to "pray for rain" at the beginning of each broadcast, The Fire Gospels tells in vivid detail the story of the drought and how the townspeople are seduced into believing that Lucky will pull them through their time of struggle.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Magnuson's strengths lie in his appealingly average characters and his ear for the easy speech rhythms of middle America. His enjoyable second novel (after The Right Man for the Job, 1997) once again features a talented but underachieving regular guy, a typical sort whom circumstances force into atypical actions. Grady McCann, a bright but unmotivated maintenance man, likes to spend his after-work hours drinking in his local bar, the Liquid Forest. Unfortunately, Grady's hometown of McCutcheon, Wis., is suffering a season-long drought, and the oppressive sun has driven the folks in the Liquid Forest?and all over McCutcheon County?into a state of near panic. For relief from the drought, the townspeople have put their faith in the local weatherman, Lucky Littlefield, whom Grady considers a sanctimonious fake?and whom he suspects of sleeping with his wife, who's Lucky's assistant at the TV station. Like the archetypal rainmaker, Lucky, who wears Hawaiian shirts and encourages his audience to pray for precipitation, has ridden the drought to celebrity status. But when a strange meteorological phenomenon sparks a countywide forest fire, Grady, Lucky and all of McCutcheon find themselves fighting just to survive. The cataclysmic, almost biblical fire that occupies the novel's second half brings out the truest nature of Magnuson's cast. At times, however, it devours towns too quickly (is the entire state of Wisconsin devoid of disaster planning?) and draws the focus away from the small interactions that make McCutcheon so vivid. Magnuson's writing is strongest when he shows characters trying to go about their everyday lives?drinking, going to work, trying to get along?and the quiet moments in this book remain the most revealing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

At the center of this apocalyptic novel, set in northern Wisconsin, is a TV weatherman/evangelist named Lucky Littlefield. Although he is an opportunist and a scoundrel, Littlefield comes to be regarded as a kind of spiritual saviour by his viewers during a period of dangerously prolonged drought. Grady McCann, a maintenance worker at a convalescent home, is the novel's working-class hero who recognizes Lucky for the fraud he is and is one of the few people around able to think clearly during this crisis. Magnuson (The Right Man for the Job, HarperCollins, 1997) concludes the novel with an Old Testament-style cataclysm?a firestorm with 200' flames that sweeps through the parched countryside, leaving it both devastated and cleansed. Although the plotting in this novel occasionally strains credibility, it is nonetheless enjoyable and sustains drama. Recommended for libraries with large modern fiction collections.?Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community-Technical Coll.,
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (June 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060930101
• ISBN-13: 978-0060930103
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,611,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnuson is the pre-millenial King James, May 18, 1998

By 

David Seiter - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fire Gospels: A Novel (Hardcover)

Mike Magnuson made a respectable splash with his debut novel, impressing many of the right people with Right Man For The Job. A wiser, safer man would follow-up with something similar. But Magnuson is not that man. Oh, he's smart despite the blue collar act he likes to put on, especially at the bar where he will hold forth savvily on the intricacies of Proust. Nonetheless, he wrote The Fire Gospels instead of Right Man II.

But it proved to be a good gamble.

One that, if there is any justice in the literary world, will pay big. For, at the very least, The Fire Gospels reveals a breadth and depth to a young writer that is as rare as poetic justice.

Magnuson's apocalyptic follow-up is an irregular tale of irregular weather; perverse religious fervor; ironic love and unchecked lust in Wisconsin's McCutcheon River Valley, a place where farmers work at life doggedly and cheerfully, pausing only to gaze up at the northern lights on clear summer evenings. A place where folks shovel snow from the sidewalks, go to church on Sundays, and pinch their pennies for retirement. A place where Grady McCann, a comfortably married man, fixes sticky beds in a nursing home by day and visits his favorite watering hole by night, chatting about the fall of the Roman empire with Lennart, the portly and homosexual bartender, until his first opportunity to put the unimaginable "French Clamp" on a college co-ed named Kate. Things aren't quite as pastoral and pedestrian as they first appear.

McCutcheon is jumping with folks gone crazy by a summer-long drought and desperately depending on the savior they've found in their southern-bred, Hawaiian shirt-wearing meteorologist. Lucky Littlefield appears nightly on the local cable news, predicting more sunny, cloudless days, and exhorting his parishioners to pray for rain. And they do. They tune-in religiously to pray with Lucky. They gather about town to pray. But the rain never comes.

Instead, a massive and furious wall of fire rushes their way one Saturday morning, sweepi! ng down from the neighboring town where a falling star on a brittle field provided the spark that was waiting to happen. The rest of the novel is aflame with human scrambling for physical and emotional survival, until the twisted judgment, meted out by God and layman alike, seems the natural course of history.

Magnuson is clearly having fun as he turns brimstone upon believers-much more fun than a Sunday morning sermon, though it ought to be taken seriously as a sermon. Magnuson tackles the big questions of truth, morality, and responsibility. But instead of preaching, Magnuson succeeds by creating a fantastic world of extremes, populated by players more characature than character, folks that are somehow both utterly quotidian and larger than life, even slightly cartoonish. Its expansiveness is its hook, serving to wake readers, force them to pay attention and notice something about the human race they wouldn't otherwise see. Things like our herd mentality. The sad, hurtful things we do to each other. Fears less face-able than the fear of death. Desires more inextinguishable than the will to live. Things like the core, indomitable strength of men and women in crisis. The novel's fantastic elements serve both the storyline and its issues.

The Fire Gospels spells out the frantic end of the world for all but a handful of McCutcheon residents and these are our heroes left to rebuild the imperfect lives we first found them with. They are not the same people in the aftermath. But then again, they just may be-deep down, below the superficial transubstantiation-the same fallible humans they ever were, as they refuse to abandon their disastrous ways, preferring any charismatic, cardboard leader to autonomy. The opening epigraphs-taken from contemporary accounts of the destruction of Pompeii, London, and Rome-and the last sentence, "...this is the world without end," work powerfully together to bookend the bleak cycle; people just go on doing what they do, ignoring history, ignoring the signs of their imminent dem! ise.

But The Fire Gospels is not entirely without redemption. Magnuson infuses his novel with, as the twelve-steppers say, a higher power-not the God we know or have invented but something somewhere great. The Fire Gospels is not The Good Book but if any living writer could produce such a scandalous and equivocal opus, Magnuson is our pre-millennial King James, nailing the musical, vulgar language of the everyman. It's a colloquial voice. An unashamed voice. A voice not unlike Mr. Magnuson's: smart but unpretentious. Charming, if not frightening. And in the end, McCutcheon's last shall be first and its first shall be last, as Lennart proves to be most prophetic.

In his second coming, Magnuson delivers a text much more ambitious than Right Man for the Job and every bit as accomplished. For the escapists who want a gripping yarn, this one will turn pages. And for the high-minded who want to furrow their brows and examine life through a microscope, there is plenty of real grit and tangle to muddle through, life-living to make sense of.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Fire Gospels, November 22, 2002

By 

Jessica Orr (Monterey, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fire Gospels: A Novel (Paperback)

I'd remarked one or two chapters in that THE FIRE GOSPELS was 'very pro-Christian.' I didn't mean that in a derogatory or sardonic sense, but boy did I eat my words anyway.

In some ways, it reminded me very much of Sheri Reynolds' THE RAPTURE OF CANAAN as well as THE SCHOOL OF BEAUTY AND CHARM (whose author currently escapes me). Similar veins of middle class Christians struggling with harsh dosages of reality.

Mike Magnuson's THE FIRE GOSPELS is very harsh indeed, and lambasts any assumption I made (and shouldn't have made) judging by the first few chapters that it had anything to do with belief. Rather, it slaps you in the face with the degradation of belief, the destruction of faith. I am left, having just finished the book, feeling empty and raw.

THE FIRE GOSPELS is quite thought-provoking and may not be exactly what you first think.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Realistic characters seek grace under pressure of a drought, June 11, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (jacksonville, fl) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fire Gospels: A Novel (Hardcover)

In describing famous conflagrations, Pepys in Picadilly (1666) and Pliny in Pompeii (AD79) foreshadow plenty of disaster in Mike Magnuson's new novel. THE FIRE GOSPELS enchanted this reader because it depicts realistic characters with a callus on their palms, and sometimes, their souls. Condensing the action to one long, firey weekend, and writing in the present tense, Magnuson shifts the perspective among Grady McCann, his wife Erica and his fantasy girl, Kate. This reader believes the words and actions of each. None of them has fingers long enough to scratch irritating questions about the efficacy of prayer, the nature of faith, or having faith in nature. All act out answers to the big question of what happens to grace under the pressure of a drought. This reader admires these characters because they act rather than reflect. Grady rails against the false promises of that contemporary prophet, the weatherman. This villain, named Lucky, preens before the camera, uses words to mislead and gets his comeuppance. I admire old-fashioned stories where motive replaces minimalism and characters fortify themselves with a shot and a beer, not with a decafe latte, before they confront real problems. I urge others to read this book now, in the long days of summer. Reading it near the fireplace or the woodstove may induce nightmares.