You’re driving along a deserted, out of the way, back-woods road in the middle of Alabama, estranged wife at your side. What’s left of your marriage is doomed to failure; everything you’ve ever treasured in life is slipping away, right through your fingers. You’ve fought, pleaded, and prayed, all to no avail.
Your life is going to be changed forever; the prospect of the yawning chasm in your tortured heart is too much to take, making you feel like a drowning swimmer gasping for air, taking in nothing but brackish, stained pond water.
That’s when you realize that just as you’re lost in life….you’re lost on a backwoods road in the middle of Alabama. That’s when your shiny blue Mustang blows all its tires running over a deviously laid metal strip of road-teeth. That’s when you stumble into a bizarre, twisted game of guilt and sin; life and death.
That’s when you make the mistake of entering the House.
One Game. Seven players. Three Rules.
Game Ends at Dawn.
Novelist Jack Singleton and his budding country-singer wife have unwittingly become part of a deadly game that has never seen any winners, and they are pitted against an evil, malicious entity called the Tin Man. The Tin Man; or Barsidious White, has played this game countless of times, with the same result: the dead are piled high, as he walks leisurely on to the next house.
The rules are simple: this is Barsidious White’s house; and he pulls the strings. The participants of this twisted little game will be forced to face their worst nightmares come to life, and it’s anybody’s guess who will survive the night.
This is the novel Christian fiction has been waiting for, perhaps marking a turning point in the development of the Christian supernatural thriller. The result of pairing Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti produces the expected: a vivid, tense pace; a story-line guaranteeing nothing but the unexpected and an unflinching look at the things inside us that makes us unworthy of grace.
However, as usual, Dekker and Peretti use this to further highlight the importance of God’s loving mercy, and the product is something that many Christian fiction-lovers have undoubtedly been long awaiting, this reviewer included; a novel that is unpredictable and unique, where the “magician” doesn’t reveal all of his tricks at the end of the show, but the result is still something edifying and glorifying to God.
Readers of Showdown will also sense the potential connection between such bad guys, (which Dekker once again lets slip away at the end of the novel; a refreshing twist), as Marsuvees Black and Barsidious White. It leaves the reader wondering if Dekker is verging on some sort of epic cross-over storyline, which is also something much needed within Christian fiction today, in this reviewer’s opinion. Perhaps the next evil villain’s last name will be Red?
Either way, if you pick up House at Arrowhead Christian Book Store on Harry L. Drive in Johnson City, NY, you can be assured of two things:
1. you will be pulled along for the ride, joining the poor victims of this game in their frenzy; 2. you will have no idea from which direction the next hit will come.
Will you make it to dawn?
Ted Dekker: www.teddekker.com
Frank Peretti: http://www.frankperetti.com/
