Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

I really think I gave the book a fair shake. When I heard that Anne Rice was writing a book called "Christ the Lord", I was intrigued and a little shocked. Anne Rice? Anne Rice? The Queen of the Damned herself? The lady who writes all those vampire books is writing a book about Jesus? And it isn't going to be about Vampire Jesus? This I have to read for myself.

And I tried. "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" covers some of the time when Jesus is a 7 year old boy. He is just realizing that he has these extra powers, like he accidentally kills a boy and then heals him not realizing quite what he is doing but knows that the "power" has "gone out of him". But most of this book is more of the ordinary life of the young Jesus as his family moves out of Egypt after Herod dies and back to Nazareth. We discover what Jesus knows of his family and what he knows of who he is as he hears the whispers of a prophecy and angels coming to his mother and a connection between John (the one who I believe will be "The Baptist") Jesus.

It just didn't seem to amount to anything. It was so dreadfully dry and dull that I could only make it 150 pages into this 300 page book. This book is supposed to be the first volume of three about Jesus, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to read them. Or maybe the adult Christ will be more interesting and worth trying out. "Out of Egypt" is just not very good.

I respect that Anne Rice has become a Christian and is striving to use her writing gifts to honor God. This is fantastic news and I'd rather Rice be a Christian than continue to write vampire novels and not believe. But if we still have to judge the book of its own merits, I can't recommend this one at all.

Of course, this whole thing may be an elaborate set up and we'll find out in the last volume that Zombie Vampire Jesus will destroy the world.

But I doubt it.

1 comment:

Amanda said...

I was wondering about that. I saw the book, but for some reason I wasn't all that excited about reading it. Hmm..