From N. D. Wilson's Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent:

This world is all incarnation. Words made flesh. Words. God has seen and God has said. His imagination is bone-shaking and soul-shivering, and He has never groped for words to capture (and be) those things. He imagined galaxies and clogged drains and sharks and harmonies and emotions and running and villains and foes and fungus and that heavy marriage of airs that we call water that can skip rocks and light and wind, that can quench and freeze and baptize. He imagined and felt the ache of a mother's love and the mortal yearning caused by the thrust of time and the speed of a falcon and the fear of a hare and minor cords and the smell of carpet glue. And none of these things were as good as ideas. They became words. Sounds mouthed by the Infinite. Rhythms, verbally and fleshed and shaped by the divine. They were spoken.

I write violent stories. I write dark stories. I write them for my own children, and I write them for yours. And when the topic comes up with a radio host or a mom or a teacher in a hallway, the explanation is simple. Every kid in every classroom, every kid in a bunk bed frantically reading by flashlight, every latchkey kid and every helicoptered kid, every single mortal child is growing into a life story in a world full of dangers and beauties. Every one will have struggles and ultimately, every one will face death and loss. 

The goal isn’t to steer kids into stories of darkness because those are the stories that grip readers. The goal is to put the darkness in its place.

N. D. Wilson, quoted in Justin Taylor, "Why N. D. Wilson Wants to Scare Your Children"

This article by N.D. Wilson is a few years old, but it's a great rationale for why Christians should appreciate fantasy stories.

Christians believe that this world is so much more than a mechanical soulless machine. And yet, we tend to tell our children stories that (we hope) will only speak to their intellects. We want to give them a list of facts to tick off, like we’re trying to communicate a party platform to new recruits, like they’re nothing but brains ready for programming. We feed their souls sawdust and are surprised when they drift away to other cooks (with different tales about reality).

Kids (and adults) don’t just need the truth in their heads — they need it in their bones. They need to know what courage looks like and tastes like and smells like before they ever have to show it themselves. They need to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly — heroes and villains can show them why. They need to loathe the darkness and love the Light.

N. D. Wilson, "Stories Are Soul Food: Don't Let Your Children Hunger"

From N. D. Wilson's Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl

"God never seems capable of moderation or of understanding the basic concepts behind supply and demand. He constantly devalues His own products. Give me one [snowflake], a cool room, and a magnifying glass and I will admire its artistry.  But right now, I’m sitting by my window on a Christmas night, staring out at winter wastefulness in the extreme. Miles of clouds, clouds larger than states, have turned into crystal stars and now streak silently past my window to their deaths.  . . .

Try counting the flakes. Really count them. I’ll step back outside for a quick estimate. Let’s be conservative. Assuming that we’re in the middle of this storm and it only stretches ten miles in each direction (Ha, says the weather man), and assuming that the storm is a tiny one hundred feet tall, and skipping the preexisting ground accumulation, and eyeball estimating the frenzied blizzard’s air content at a meager ten flakes per cubic foot, then we are looking at about . . . 11,151,360,000,000 flakes in the air above a small patch in Idaho at one particular moment on Christmas night at the end of the year 2007. Just this storm, this tiny little slice of winter could divvy out seventeen hundred flakes to every person on this planet. More impressively, that number has the US national debt beat by trillions.

I look out my window at the proud Christmas tumble. Ye flakes, do you care what I think? Hearken to my insults: You’re totally devalued—like stars and galaxies and insect species. For all your balance and your beauty and your impossible symmetry, you’re each not even worth a buck. Or a cent. If I could get a penny for each of you, then I’d make the Forbes rich-people list (somewhere below the Wal-Mart heirs).

We all know that each flake is different and unique, because we’ve all been to preschool. Each one is beautiful, yeah, yeah, we know that too. But how can we possibly value these things when their maker slings them around like so much trash? Actually, I’ve never seen anyone sling this much trash. Doesn’t He realize that people will curse this tomorrow? That they’ll shovel it and salt it and SUV it into gray slop? Does He know that my daughters are going to roll in it, melting thousands of flakes with their flushed cheeks and tens of thousands with their tongues?

In Virginia there lived a man named Roy Sullivan. He was struck by lightning seven times. I’m told the rough odds of this happening are 1.6 x 10 to the 25th (sixteen septillion). Which is like one man winning the lotto four times, though the luck is of a different stripe.

…After the fourth time Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning, he allegedly told a reporter that a higher power was trying to kill him.

 That’s ridiculous. A higher power was not trying to kill him. That would have been easy. Every last one of us is bagged in the end. The more impressive trick is striking someone with lightning seven times and keeping them alive.

 Have you ever had something so annoying happen, something so impossibly coincidental, that you know there must be a God, and that He must be laughing? Do you want to be the character in the movie who can't take a joke, who can't laugh at the awkward, at the uncomfortable? Worse, the character who can't laugh at himself?

 If you discover one morning (with moist toes) that the toilet bowl has been covered with plastic wrap, do you deny the existence of your roommate?

 Ask yourself this question: who invented your roommate, and decided to give him a role (along with certain impulses and sensibilities) in your life? Complain. Whine. Be a fusser. The story needs those as well, because every butt needs a joke, and the audience must laugh. Whether they (and God) laugh at or with is up to you.

N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl

Rumor has it that most normal men send at least eight million “forward swimming” sperm looking for an egg every sexual act. Don’t even bother adding in egg variation, or the total number of sperm that may have had a fighting chance during your mother’s days of fertility when you were conceived (or the possibility that she might have taken her friends’ advice and shunned your father). Keep it simple and wildly conservative. Your chances of being here were about one out of eight million. Funny. Those were my odds too. The chances of us both being here? One out of sixty-four trillion. The chances of us both being on the same round planet, leaning far enough away from the sun that our nostrils freeze shut but we don’t die? The chances of us both being on the same round planet buzzing around the same star, with six billion other very particular people all simultaneously in existence? It makes me tired, like the cold. And I don’t know what numbers bigger than a googolplex are called, especially since a googol is supposed to be bigger than the number of elementary particles in the “observable universe” (whatever that means), and a googolplex is a one with that many zeros after it. I’ve been told that the whole concept was invented by a nine-year-old named Milton.

But I’m not letting it rest. Not yet. One more round of odds. Start with your grandparents. What were the odds of all four of them blinking, crying, and discovering that they existed? Assuming that surviving, finding each other, and getting married was a sure thing (and keeping the variables limited to a single procreative act), what were the odds of both your parents being conceived? Assuming that finding each other and getting to work on you was also a sure thing, what were the odds that you would be the result?

One out of 2.097152 . . . wait . . . I think I just screwed that up. Duodecillion? No. That only has thirty-nine zeros. Should we just go with umpteen? You get the point, don’t you? You basically have no chance of being here and you should quit trying already. Getting your hopes up will only make it hurt more when you don’t happen.

We are a world of lottery winners. For every one of us here right now, in every begetting, there were at least 7,999,999 losers. They don’t even know how almost they were.

 “I wish I’d never been born,” the adolescent moans.

 “Shut up, Randy. There are eight million other kids who would be wishing they could be here right now if only they were here to wish.”

 N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-whirl

The Dragon's Tooth by N.D. Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've said this before, but N. D. Wilson reminds me in some ways of C. S. Lewis. Both have a sense of magic and wonder in their stories. Both show that this world is infused with meaning, with a battle between good and evil. And both write stories in which characters must learn what it means to show virtue and courage.

But at the same time, Wilson's stories are very different from Lewis's. Wilson includes a lot more action and a lot less preachiness--the story tends to do the talking more than moralizing characters in the story. And Wilson's target audience is a little more mature than Lewis's, although he's still aiming for kids.

The Dragon's Tooth is nothing like the 100 Cupboards series, but I found it more exciting. It has more action, and I am simply fascinated by stories about secret organizations that have been around for centuries protecting the world.

As I read, I was reminded of National Treasure (secret underground/hidden passageways, secret organizations entwined with history, etc.), Harry Potter (Cyrus and Antigone, the main characters, become part of a school that is similar to Hogwarts in some ways), and even a couple of Pixar movies (Up, in some aspects of its WW1 era explorer/adventure culture, and Ratatouille, since there's a crazy woman in a pink bathrobe with a shotgun at the beginning of the story).

Finally, I think I see the influence of C. S. Lewis--particularly his sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength. There's an evil, supernaturally powerful Weston-like scientist who does nasty experiments on people and animals, and there's a scene near the end of the book in which I think Wilson may be consciously alluding to one of the final scenes of That Hideous Strength.

As in the 100 Cupboards series, the story gains depth as we continue to read. I love how Wilson gives us deeper and deeper levels of the background as the story unfolds, and how he connects his story to history and legend (as in National Treasure, we find out that several members of the secret organization were people that all of us learned about in history class).

Finally, I really enjoyed this book because it's set in Wisconsin. It begins in Oconomowoc, which is a town fifteen minutes from where I live and a place where I take my family all the time. So it was fun for me to imagine the book's action happening right around the corner from here.

This was a great book for me to read for no other reason than to enjoy a good story. I look forward to the next book in the series.

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The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not try to pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they have grown, they will pollute the shadows.

N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl