The Land of Empty Houses

John L. Moore

I haven't yet figured out whether to be amused, intrigued, or distressed by this book. The distress is minimal, but there; anyone even remotely familiar with the white power movement is likely to have alarm bells going off in their heads when reading this (especially Moore's sporadic referrals to the Zionist Occupied Government, an almost ubiquitous term among with white power crowd). We'll give Mr. Moore the benefit of the doubt and assume he, and his many rave reviewers are naïve to the present connotations of the term.

The Land of Empty Houses is set in post-plague Middle America sometime in the twenty-first century. Daniel, an AWOL Ranger, and Robert, a ZOG-employed assassin, hunt one another over the landscape. Daniel learns from an insane acquaintance that a pretty-eyed woman named Deborah is looking for him. She finds him soon enough, and asks him to guide her to the various tribes that haunt the wasteland now known as the Interior. She is a missionary, a healer, an evangelist, and basically the last Christian west of the Mississippi. Their journey, and how it affects Daniel, is the meat of the novel.

As I've come to expect from Christian fiction, the message greatly overwhelms the medium far too many times. Which is something of a shame, because Moore spins himself a fine adventure yarn when he gets going. The book is an easy read, the characters are well-drawn (though Daniel, for all his not being willing to either search his own soul or ask questions about Deborah's mission, seems a little too lucid for his own character), and the pacing is letter perfect. Once you reconcile the idea with the setting—and really, the healer bringing her gifts to the great unwashed is a pretty common fantasy figure—the book has the potential to become an above-average futuristic fantasy. It should be obvious to the well-rounded reader of Christian fiction that it's possible to write a good fantasy novel and still get one's evangelical point across (C.S. Lewis' trilogy that begins with Out of the Silent Planet is an obvious example). Moore, like the vast majority of writers both amateur and professional, is unconvinced of this. He is determined that subtlety is lost on the masses, and in order to get his point across, he must wrap it around a week-old fish stew and hit us in the face with it. Repeatedly.

Despite the excess of evangelism (which despite the above does confine itself to a few pages at a time here and there), the book is, quite simply, a fun read. I wish I could say it makes you think, but it would prefer to do your thinking for you. If you're looking for good Christian allegory that's exceptionally presented, you're better off with Lewis, Mauriac, or even Tolkein; if you want to turn your brain off and relax a while, and can allow the evangelism to roll off your back, Moore's just the ticket for a good adventure tale.