Episode Details

What if eternal life was a curse, and the Tree of Life was reappearing in a place even angels dare not tread? What if you didn’t know whether you’d killed your own father? And most recently, what if you escaped from captivity but left your brother behind? Novelist Shawn Smucker explores such mystic challenges at the margins of life, and he’s our guest on today’s episode.

Exploring memory and magical realism with Shawn Smucker

Two-time Christianity Today Book Award winner Shawn Smucker captivated readers with his genre-bending novels The Day the Angels Fell in 2017 and Light from Distant Stars in 2019. Now, Smucker is back with his newest novel, These Nameless Things, a stunningly distinctive contemporary novel that grapples with the hard question, Is there a limit to the things we’ll do to assuage our own guilt and rescue the ones we love?

Once held captive and tortured on a mysterious mountain, Dan was lucky to have made it out alive. But freedom comes at a cost. Left with little memory of the horrific ordeal, Dan remembers one thing—his escape meant having to leave his brother behind.

With each day that passes, Dan waits with other survivors in hope of his brother’s escape. But just as long-forgotten memories start rising to the surface, the sudden appearance of a wounded woman throws everything further into question. As Dan struggles to know whom to trust, he is caught once again in a paralyzing moral dilemma—but this time, will he choose to save his own life or his brother’s life?

A poignant tale of the bonds of brotherhood, These Nameless Things will have readers frantically flipping pages for answers in this thought-provoking narrative.

Shawn Smucker is the author of The Day the Angels Fell, The Edge of Over There, Light from Distant Stars, as well as the memoir Once We Were Strangers. He lives with his wife and six children in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You can find him at ShawnSmucker.com.

We ask questions such as:

1. Shawn, how did you discover biblical truth and fantastic imagination?
2. Your latest novels skirt the edge of the fantastical. For example, in Light from Distant Stars there’s a strong element that I would call magical realism, especially with the Beast and two mysterious children. Yet most of the story enhances Cohen’s traumatic and happy memories to a level beyond mere “contemporary” exploration. How would you describe this element?
3. You said your first novel, The Day the Angels Fell, started with the question, “Could it be possible that death is a gift?” How do themes of life and mortality drive your thematic pursuits?
4. Which images and ideas drove you to create These Nameless Things