Just over a decade ago, my daughter had a school assignment to write a letter to a living author she admired. She was stumped. She loved reading but had an innocently misinformed feeling that all the best authors were long deceased.
Little did she know, a new wave of Christian fantasy fiction was already rising. In the first two decades of the new millennium, books like 100 Cupboards, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, and The Green Ember hit the shelves. At the leading edge of that wave was Jonathan Rogers’s The Wilderking Trilogy. First published in 2004, this series about a shepherd boy’s adventures (and misadventures) on the way to becoming a king has been rereleased in 2024 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first book, The Bark of the Bog Owl.
The Wilderking Trilogy has held up for two decades because the series tells the truth in creative ways, celebrates goodness, and reveals grace. These books provide a template for Christian fiction that serves readers well.
Rediscover Reality
Good fiction helps us to see the truth with new clarity. It pulls back what C. S. Lewis once called the “veil of familiarity,” presenting familiar concepts in unexpected ways.
The Wilderking Trilogy retells the life of King David in a fictional kingdom a lot like the American Southeast—think Georgia with castles and kings. The shepherd boy here, Aidan Errolson, confronts alligators and pumas while defending his flocks. Instead of fighting Philistines, Aidan proves his loyalty in The Secret of the Swamp King by hunting for a mysterious orchid to cure the king’s melancholy. Some of Aidan’s earliest supporters aren’t exactly mighty men, like the ones who coalesced around David in the wilderness, but instead a group of quirky swamp people called Feechiefolk, who “grabble and rassle” cottonmouth snakes, catfish, and each other just as readily as they battle enemies (131).
Rather than diminishing their source material, the Wilderking stories make David’s real adventures seem all the more remarkable. Why would an army of fighting men send a child out to battle a giant? How is it possible for the leader of a coup d’état to be loyal to the king he’s overthrowing? I had to turn to 1 Samuel at various points, wondering, Did Saul really act like that?—and I was reminded the source material is even more shocking than the novels. In fiction, as Lewis says, “We do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”
Rather than diminishing their source material, the Wilderking stories make David’s real adventures seem all the more remarkable.
Adventuring Heirs
Fiction also prepares readers’ hearts for action and reorients their thinking on the daily challenges they’re already facing. With humor and high adventure, The Wilderking Trilogy celebrates loyalty, friendship, repentance, forgiveness, and kindness as the characters make choices and respond to hardships in ways that inform and inspire.
The books point readers to the joy and adventure in their own journeys. “I made a conscious choice,” Rogers says, “to write ‘fantasy’ stories without wizards or elves or dragons, in large part because I was very interested in the idea that the world where we live is pretty fantastical already.” He populates his stories with alligators because, he says, “they remind us that this world, the one where we live and move and have our being, is still a place of myth and marvel. Here be dragons.”
Like David, Aidan receives an outrageous prophecy early in his life that he’ll inherit a throne one day. When Aidan is uncertain how to respond to the destiny assigned to him in The Way of the Wilderking, a prophet tells him, “Live the life that unfolds before you. . . . Love goodness more than you fear evil” (181). Aidan’s story reminds readers that Christians are improbable heirs in Christ’s kingdom from the moment of salvation. We’re right in the midst of the tremendous adventure of living out the destiny we’ve been given.
Ending Happily
As Christian readers, we often want literature that points toward moral truth. Ultimately, we hunger for stories that remind us of our gospel hope, which is easily forgotten in everyday life. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” he explores what draws people to fiction narratives that, like The Wilderking Trilogy, have astonishingly happy endings brought about by unexpected events. He concludes that these stories draw us to a reality beyond entertainment and even beyond mere morality. They deny “universal final defeat” and give “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” They paint a picture of the gospel.
Ultimately we hunger for stories that remind us of our gospel hope, which is easily forgotten in everyday life.
Good fiction lets us explore and love truth. But most of all, it reminds us that at the darkest moment in all history, an unexpected event changed the world through God’s love and that grace can still burst unexpectedly into our everyday lives, almost like magic. It’s a story worth reading and telling, over and over.
Twenty years after that epistolary assignment, my daughter would have a hard time choosing just one author to write to. People like Andrew Peterson and Kathryn Butler are publishing tales that make the life of grace feel like the adventure story it is. The story of grace, as the Feechiefolk say in The Secret of the Swamp King, “gets better every time [we] hear it” (159). That’s why The Wilderking Trilogy is worth revisiting after all these years.
The Gospel Coalition