Dark Bride: 3 Gates of the Dead—Book II
Jonathan Ryan
Open Road Integrated Media
April, 2015
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
The second installment in Jonathan Ryan’s 3 Gates of the Dead series, Dark Bride, caught my attention on page one and kept it for nearly 340 more pages…but not for the reasons I might list for most novels generally classified as “horror.” In fact, the first sentences—“The church is a whore. The church is your mother”—seem to link the story more to theology than to monsters, gruesome deeds, or uncanny situations.
Nor do the next few pages suggest the directions the story will soon take. A small group, referring to themselves as “Scoobies,” have met in a local pub for their Sunday-evening get-together, where they discuss matters relating to religion, not unsurprisingly since one of them is a Presbyterian pastor and another an Anglican priest. Also among those present is the “resident skeptic,” a physics professor from a nearby university, whose self-appointed purpose is to keep thinks from becoming too ethereal, too other-worldly. For much of the time, they simply chat.
A summary such as this sounds rather insipid, until one realizes how adroitly Ryan is using the time—to establish essential characters through their actions and their speech rather than by merely describing them; to suggest the commonplace, largely ordinary locale for the story—mid-west America; and to leaven those introductions with touches of humor that humanize every participant, especially with the mention of the “curse jar” into which each drops a quarter for every bad word, the contents to go to charity.
But more than that, and almost without the reader noticing it, Ryan surveys the key actions and consequences covered in the first volume of the series, 3 Gates of the Dead (2014). In lesser hands, such information would probably have ended up as undigested lumps blocking the current narrative; in Ryan’s it forms a seamless part of a dialogue that ends abruptly with the intrusion of the supernatural.
With the second chapter, things become complicated. There is a sacrifice evoking a voodoo ritual. Eerie events at a local farm that rapidly escalate from spectral lights to physical assaults and spiritual sieges. One man’s seemingly innocuous flirtation with computer sites best left unviewed that gradually entwines everyone in the story in a perilous web of fear, terror, and horror. The discovery of an ages-old secret society devoted to hunting down and destroying evil…actually, of two of them, one bluntly physical and the other partaking of the mystical, yet both essentially seeking the same ends. There is a world in which “the fight against evil is a real fight, with real casualties and real sacrifices.”
By the end of Dark Bride much has been accomplished in that fight…but much more remains, presumably to form the core of subsequent books.
Dark Bride is, to me, a remarkable novel for what, on the surface, seems a rather unremarkable reason.
It is a difficult story to categorize precisely. The first novel in the series has been described as blending “theology, murder mystery, horror, and paranormal investigation,” which might serve as an overview of Dark Bride, except that stringing together the names of so many disparate genres and sub-genres suggests that Dark Bride might be more patchwork than integrated pattern—and it certainly is not. It is focused, unswerving, and precise in what it sets out to do and how it achieves its end.
More generally, Dark Bride might be called simply “horror,” but to do so would miss multiple layers of complexity, several almost as important to the novel as are its eerie happenings, gruesome deaths, and inexplicable appearances. And while that single word might be the tag assigned by a bookstore as a convenient sales strategy, it would ultimately not be true to the novel.
Lest anyone think I have lost sight of my earlier sentence, I haven’t. Trying to pin the novel down to a specific “kind” leads directly to the reason I found the story so remarkable. Let me explain.
Several months ago, I published a short study of C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) titled, unsurprisingly enough C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. In it I attempted to show that one of the most direct ways into the three novels was by seeing each as Lewis’s attempt to use different literary forms to achieve a single end. Out of the Silent Planet, I argued, seems superficially science-fictional, when in fact it opens itself more completely when read as essentially fantasy. Perelandra is so strongly tied to mythic backgrounds, particularly the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, that it seems difficult to see it through any other lens except that of Myth (meaning the ultimately true Stories we tell ourselves to explain the universe). And That Hideous Strength…well, that one is almost always the sticking point for contemporary readers. It is science-fictional, yes, but then there is also that untidiness, almost an unpleasantness, with Merlin, with Planetary Overlords descending to Earth (also read: angels), with the Tower of Babel, with the Fisher King…with any number of things that basically have nothing to do with science fiction.
And that, I concluded, is the “secret” to the novel. It is science fiction, but of a sort that encompasses not only scientific innovations but—gasp!—God and Angels, Myth and Religion, as functional components of Lewis’s narrative reality. That Hideous Strength can incorporate theology, murders, elements of horror, and the supernatural and still claim to be science fiction because it is SF of a particular sort: Christian Science Fiction.
Wait a moment…. “Theology, murders, elements of horror, and the supernatural.” Given a slight difference in wording, those are the same characteristics readers have found in 3 Gates of the Dead and will find in Dark Bride. And the reason is as unremarkable as the novel is remarkable: Jonathan Ryan is writing, not just contemporary horror or yet another supernatural thriller, but Religious—even, perhaps, Christian—Horror.
Actually comparisons between Ryan’s story and Lewis’s Ransom novels are quite apt. There is a tone to each, a matter-of-factness that elevates them above the superficialities of their genres and allows readers to enter their worlds completely, especially its religious elements. Neither Lewis nor Ryan overtly preaches, although the theological underpinnings are always present. Neither presents a merely one-sided view of humanity, nature, and the universe; hence, the presence in both stories of an objective, dispassionate rationalist. Rather, both accept from the inception that great evils exist—supernatural evils—that must in the end be combatted by mortals. But a key addendum to that acceptance is a parallel assumption. In the words of a seventeenth-century writer, “If witches, then God; if no witches, no God.” In other words, if great evil exists, even if only for narratives purposes, then so does supernal goodness.
Dark Bride deals with mere mortals confronting immortals…or, at least, entities whose lives seem not to fall under normal rules. Ryan’s characters know that they represent righteousness; but they do not sit back and wait for God to take care of them. Nor do they behave as do the stereotyped priests and ministers of much horror, who seem content to thrust a cross in the face of a vampire and expect the creature to self-implode; Stephen King destroyed that cliché in ‘Salem’s Lot decades ago.
Instead, they set out to meet evil on its own grounds but steadfastly refuse to play the game according to its rules.
