Customer Reviews

The Fire Gospels: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

I agree with our reader friend from McCutcheon; the book is a tad on the short side. It strikes me that there is a lot going on in the text, maybe more than Magnuson was fully prepared to handle. Some of the thematic elements could have used a little more development. Overall, however, I believe that this story, a story about a couple facing marital issues and a town possesed and lead by a charismatic weather man who attains televangelist-style esteem, is one of a gothic and primeval nature set in a land sterotypically seen as a place of ham, cheese, and beer, hey.

The pending naturtal disaster which carries the story is, in concept, much like the work of main-stream novelists such as King or Chrichton. The difference is that Magnuson knows how to write -- and well. His treatment of the craft, on a level defined by the enjoyability of each individual sentence, is one which shows that the text itself is only a cloudy hint at the literary genius he could one day unleash on us.

Largely, this book is one that you could read quickly and enjoy, but is one worth reading slightly more slowly and marvelling at the time put into the formation of each line of text.

If it had been polished and fleshed out a little, it would have been a much better read. With its short length, I was able to take in the whole thing in a single sitting, and I wanted more. There is so much more life and detail that the characters in this story are give. I casn tell that there is a lo of thought behind this story, which raises it up a notch. It is a good book, but ends much too soon.

Having had Mike Magnuson as a prof @ Mankato State for the Comp 102 class, I had the opportunity to read a segment of "The Right Man for the Job" back when it was still entitled "The Cheese Stands Alone"...bought myself a copy as soon as it hit shelves. I picked up "The Fire Gospels" last night and read, literally, until I fell asleep. I'm only through the first 5 chapters, and I can't wait to get the f--k out of the office today and get back to this book. (Hey Mike! I wound up switching from Computer Science to Creative Writing!)

Add to the register of explosive literary subgenres a new category exclusively for Mike Magnuson's latest novel The Fire Gospels: Wisconsin Gothic. Magnuson blends dark, dark comedy (a town's spiritual leader is its TV weatherman) with apocalyptic fantasy (a meteorite sparks a devastating, city-swallowing fire) and very real human drama (the workaday struggles of a beleaguered maintenance man and his acquaintances) to create a book perfect for our age of millennial anticipation/paranoia and its onslaught of mindless disaster films, nuke-testing crises, teen killing sprees, and televised suicides (coincidentally a key moment in Magnuson's first novel The Right Man For The Job).

Magnuson seems to be asking, What would we be as we faced annihilation? Would we be heroes, as we, the opiated masses, like to pretend we would be while we lay around watching TV? Or would we be worms, looting convenience stores, hurting others, or ourselves in a game of dumb survival or surrender? Would we be sheep, clinging to "God's bosom as our pillow" like in the old Carter Family song "When the World's On Fire"? If I knew that a wall of fire was coming, or say, an earthquake or a nuclear bomb, would I confess my love to that girl I'd pass leisurely otherwise? Would I move to save my marriage? Would I hunt down my enemies? Would I help a stranger in need? These are some of the questions that the characters in The Fire Gospels ask themselves.

The heroes in The Fire Gospels aren't the people preaching escapist hope, but the people who accept the world as it is, a place where "husbands beat their wives, wives beat their children, children beat their dogs, and the dogs howl at their screen windows, mournful trombone notes into the windy night." This is not a book for the naive or the blindly idealistic, because the characters in The Fire Gospels do what real people do: they curse, they lust, they pout, they depurify, they lie, they hate, they dread, and they love, however hopelessly. Some may! call this view bleak, but it is honest. And thus, we determine redemption according to The Fire Gospels: this world is bleak, but it is our home.

The book is a stylistic showpiece, as various modes of linguistic flair battle it out like ships caught in a storm. It is as if Magnuson the composer, like his main character the Wisconsinian Everyman resisting society's attempts to define him with religion and TV and work, is staving off a myriad of influences in an act of (literary) self-definition. Among the many styles competing for dominance in The Fire Gospels, one picks up whiffs of Flannery O'Connor, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Voltaire's Candide, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Harry Crews, and of course, the rhetoric of the King James Bible and American evangelism. But what ultimately emerges is a style all Magnuson's own, a kind of poetic grit or edgy lyricism that lends itself to mournful, serpentine sentences with haunting, uncanny refrains.

This book is the swiftest epic you will encounter. People face their last day. Some stay dead, some die and are born again, onlyto learn that their deaths were phantasms, delusions. A scholar of history quotes chronicles of past calamities that chillingly drive home the point that none of this is without precedent. And God never shows up. But this is by no means a work wallowing in despair--remember, "gospel" means "good news"--this book is about the dignity of the unheroic truth. The world doesn't end, it just tumbles on and on. Bangs and whimpers are distributed on a case- by-case basis.

The Fire Gospels sheds a scorching light on how much is at stake every day, how cosmically asunder each and every one of us is. And beyond its philosophy and its death-grip on the zeitgeist, it's a damn good read. It's Art as Entertainment as Manifesto as Testament as Commentary as Indictment as Celebration as Art as Entertainment. It's a disaster movie with a brain and a wounded soul.

In Mike Magnuson's second book, he takes on the subjects of God, adultery, drunkenness, and smalltown celebrity--blasheming all four in the process. There is much in this book to offend; but much more to entertain, consider, and read over and over. Again, his images and language are the freshest and most vivid of any writer working today. When book burnings become fashionable again, the holier than thou powers that be will likely soak Fire Gospels in kerosene, torch it, and fling it into the pile of imitations to get the rest going. Magnuson would burn there with D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Erica Jong. I am sure the author would glorify in the prominence, and he would likely lug in a keg a Leinenkugels and crate of marshmallows to enhance the glow.

Magnuson uses words like a blue-collar Joyce. He delights in such neologisms as "eyelock", "boyguilt", "titch", "crotch-stir", "gack", "eyefade", "wingflex".

Samples: "Grady sits up straight on his stool, wingflexes his shoulders, presses his palms flat together, and checks himself out in the bar mirror." "He gets an eyelock with Erica in the mirror, and he winks." "Grady walks behind her with a hipsore limp and with that boyguilt she wants him to feel." That latter expresses how many woman exercise power over their men. Delicious.

In Mike Magnuson's second book, he takes on the subjects of God, adultery, drunkenness, and smalltown celebrity--blasheming all four in the process. There is much in this book to offend; but much more to entertain, consider, and read over and over. Again, his images and language are the freshest and most vivid of any writer working today. When book burnings become fashionable again, the holier than thou powers that be will likely soak Fire Gospels in kerosene, torch it, and fling it into the pile of imitations to get the rest going. Magnuson would burn there with D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Erica Jong. I am sure the author would glorify in the prominence, and he would likely lug in a keg a Leinenkugels and crate of marshmallows to light up the crowd.