The Elder Statesman

The Shack
By William P. Young
Windblown Media
Hardcover $24.00
Paperback $14.99 

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review 

William Paul Young of Portland might be called the reluctant writer. He says he wrote “The Shack” for his children, and never meant it to be published. For whatever reason he wrote it, it became a best seller in 2007 and it has stirred a religious controversy not seen in the literary world since Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code,” or the J.K. Rowlings, “Harry Potter” series. To readers of the Christian persuasion he is either a saint with prophecy for modern man, or said a writer who has written “undilutated heresy” as Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said.

“The Shack” is Young’s only published work. “I wrote the book out of obedience to my wife, Kim,” he says. “She had been after me for years to write something for my six kids, a sort of legacy,” because as he explained in an interview, she wanted to understand the way he thought about things. His story is about a man named Mackenzie Allen Philips, whose youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted during a family vacation and law enforcement finds evidence that she may have been brutally murder in an abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness.

On first glance he plot seems a strange legacy to leave for children, but in truth Young’s protagonist, “Mack” is wrestling with the question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?” Young’s spent the first decade of his life with his missionary parents as the only white child among the Dani, a New Guinea stone age tribe. At the age of 10, his family moved back to Canada and, because of the influence of his parents, tried to follow in their footsteps by studying religion. He graduated summa cum laude from Warner Pacific College in Portland where he met and married, Kim.

Young, who prefers the name Paul, said he did not consider himself an author, although professionally he was a business writer. The publishing of “The Shack,” is one of those

oddities of the publishing industry. When friends urged him to publish the book it was rejected by Christian book publishers as being “theologically edgy,” and secular publishers found it too preachy.

Two friends, Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings both published authors of religious genre, read the book for a critique and after convincing Young he had to do some rewriting, and then agreed to form the Windblown Media and publish the book. Even those two authors were shocked by the phenomenal sales that put the book on a bestseller list. Young still can’t quite get his head around the success, especially since “The Shack” is currently in the pre-production stage of a feature-length film.

Young said the shack is a metaphor in his life and the story is a parable. “My life crashed and burned when I was 38-years-old and the shack became my symbolism of a place where we get stuck, or where we’ve made really bad choices, or where we’ve piled up a lot of stuff in our lives that we don’t want to go back and deal with,” he said.

In the story, Mack is a grief stricken father, who can’t forgive himself for what happened to his 6-year-old daughter, Missy, whose remains have never been found. Evidence of foul play have been discovered in the shack. It is the conclusion of law enforcement that the child has been murdered. The murder tears the family apart. Four years after her disappearance Mack receives a suspicious note telling him to go to back to the shack. The type written note is from someone called “Papa,” his wife’s nickname for God. It is initially, thought to be from a sadistic prankster, but it forces him to go to the shack.

It is inside the shack that Mack comes face-to-face with God. To say the least this encounter is tense and the dialog and description of God is what the fundamentalist Christians find offensive and almost across the board they have condemned the book. The writing is outstanding in my opinion, particularly the description of Oregon’s Wallowa Lake State Park and the surrounding wilderness area.

I found it difficult to believe that such a story could be written as a children’s story because it is definitely not a bedtime story. Young said he wanted his children to know that God is good and is involved, although there is terrible pain and great sadness in the world. “I wanted them to know that God is on our side. I want my children to be in love with God as I am.”

That message came through in the story, but for all those critics of the book, I simply would remind the reader that it is fiction.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)

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