Book Review: Field of Blood - Eric Wilson
I’ll just say it from the outset, I don’t read a lot of fiction. Typically when I do though, I will either read a novel quickly or give up on it quickly. With Field of Blood, I probably would have done the latter, but because I was obligated to write this review (because I am a part of the Nelson Book Reviewer program), I stuck with it - and I would have to say I am mostly glad that I did.
This novel is not your typical “CBA Fiction” - complete with altar call. In fact, I wondered when a Christian publisher was going to try and capitalize on the recent fascination with vampires that has been stirred by novelist Stephenie Meyer, and I guess you could say that this is it. Eric Wilson does a decent job of tying history and biblical mythology together to come to some level of message that can be connected to Christian thought. However, I kept running up against this idea that very young and uninformed Christians (call them cultural Christians if you will) might read this and actually think that this is how demonic spirits actually operate.
That may sound crazy, since this is a novel and all, but novels can altar people’s perception of the truth (consider The Shack). The villains in this book are spirit-beings called “Collectors” who inhabit physical creatures, both human & non, to go about sucking peoples blood for sustenance and seeking out members of the “Nistarim” - a group of 36 righteous people on the earth (from mystical Hasidic Judaism) that have procreated - in order to destroy them and bring an end to the reign of the Nazarene. I know, it sounds like a far stretch, but the author does a good job of tying into real-world events such as the Romanian HIV outbreak of 1989 and the Olympic bombing in Atlanta to help bring this all to life.
In the end, this book was entertaining. I found the historical and geographical components of this book fascinating, they taught me things I wouldn’t have otherwise known. The author does attempt to use the book as a learning platform and even offers a learning guide on his website (which was hard to get to). However, if people are reading this book hoping to gain some tremendously edifying spiritual content, I think they will be hard pressed. I give it 3 starts out of 5.
One final thought I have yet to figure out - if spirits are non-corporeal (no physicality), how is it that they are controlled by the wind in this story?
