Dear Fellowship Readers,
Every book has a journey that brings it from the first seeds in the author’s mind to the physical copy you are holding. Some journeys are short, others are long and meandering and take numerous detours along the way. The Faithful Dark is one such book.
The first vision of The Faithful Dark came to me in 2018 amidst the rising tide of Christian Nationalism in the United States. I wanted to write about how faith can be weaponized, how institutions can deem some worthless while still seeking to exploit them, and the dangers of unquestioned belief. I wanted to write about what might be the biggest question of all for a person of faith: Why, if God exists, does He allow His institutions to do such harm?
It likely won’t surprise anyone who reads this that I am such a person, whose experience of church comes with a strong sense of social justice and responsibility to the community. And yet even in my sheltered upbringing in liberal congregations, it is clear that the charity and the command of the church are too enmeshed to be easily separated. What does it mean for an institution to say we will care for you, but only if you obey?
These contradictions spun themselves into the characters of mercy worker Csilla, whose soft kindness is first rooted in religious duty, and inquisitor Ilan, who uses that same duty to justify his enjoyment of control and pain. The book explores other themes as well; the lengths people will go to to assuage their grief and guilt, the difficulty of stepping away from what you were raised in to make your own choices, the responsibility that comes with opening your eyes to the world’s suffering. One of the beautiful things about fantasy is we can take these difficult topics and wrap them in story and magic, letting readers come in slant-wise to find illumination.
Regardless of where you stand on whether religion is good, we know that people can be, when they choose to. The Faithful Dark is, at its heart, a book about that choice.
With warmest regards,
Cate Baumer
