I’ve been living in the world of the Old Testament prophets for a long time now. The Eyes of Gehazi took me deep into the strange, volatile orbit of Elisha and his servant, Gehazi. The Prophet and the Queen dropped me into the exhausted, visionary mind of Jeremiah, taken hostage to Egypt. Both of those novels ask a lot of their readers — they’re long, layered, and they don’t apologize for it.
So I wanted to build a door.
The Unknown Prophet is a 17,000-word novelette — long enough to sink into, short enough to finish in an evening — and it’s free this week (Amazon won’t let me keep it free forever, but I’ll price it as low as they’ll allow after April 12th).
It fictionalizes one of the strangest and least-discussed episodes in the entire Old Testament: the unnamed man of God from 1 Kings 13 who walks north alone, confronts a rebellious king at an idolatrous altar, watches God split stone and restore a withered arm, and then gets betrayed on the road home by an older prophet who should have known better. The story ends with a lion and a burial and a grief that has no clean resolution.
What I love about this story is what it doesn’t explain. The biblical text gives us almost nothing about who this man was, what he was thinking, or why he made the choice that killed him. That blank space is where I live.
If you’re new to my Prophetic Series, this is the place to start. If you’ve already spent time with Gehazi or Jeremiah, you’ll find the same world — the same dust and wind, the same God who is present and terrifying and not always easy to understand.
You can grab the ebook free starting Thursday, April 9th. If it finds you well, I hope you’ll wander further in.
OTHER LINKS you might find interesting:
The Halls of the Shadow King: Brittania Calls – Learn all about this fourth novel in the Halls of the Shadow King series!
Tod’s thoughts about the damage that Post-modernism has done to modern literature
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