The Mysterious Furies of the God in a Tent

About the Book

It is unusual for a novelist to choose God for the main ghost character of his book. Yet any truly literate reader of the Hebrew Bible will discover that the Bible is a literary book whose central character is the personality of God. The Bible opens with His revealing his powerful presence by saying “In the beginning,” and going on to declaim who He is and what He has done. All the central episodes of the Biblical stories, while involving narrations of those who peopled his plans and activities, are centered on his words and his deeds. These are the main elements of the Bible even though human stories abound. Indeed, on can posit that this book is an extraordinarily long, one act drama in which there is only one character who soliloquizes his experiences of being the Father of the universe. He retells with great emotional involvement what happened to Him when He decided to make a natural world full of creatures and then decided to add surrogate beings to share it with Him. Here the soliloquy becomes very dramatic because humans rebelled in their very first instance of their being and thus became alien to him. He became angry, took destructive actions that demonstrated his powers but often produced compliance driven by fear. Despite this blemish, He tells the reader He was not ready to let go of His absolute Fatherhood. So He began to undertake prodigious but eventually frustrating efforts to win human love and allegiance. He chose one tribal family as His witness to His supreme divinity. His strategic goal was to specially develop a family covenant with a chosen people; He would be their one and only Father- counselor in all aspects their of lives. In return He would give them their own tribal land and a kingdom. It was a troubled covenant. This tactic brought Him into many human conflicts that forced Him to become variously a liberator, a general, a destroyer, even a conqueror and executioner, often a peace maker. His plan succeeded for a period, His wishes fulfilled. At least one human tribe truly witnessed Him and Him only. But again the human side of the covenant failed, His chosen people dispersed once more into the spiritual deserts of the alien world. So full of sadness, frustration, and disappointment, the voice of the divine soliloquist falls into near silence. His soliloquy is now remembered through the echoed, hailing words handed over to his prophets. The ghost text of this Divine comedy was written down in a book called the Bible. Can these third person words have their divine author’s mysterious, furious powers of his Word?

The novel, “The Mysterious God in a Tent,” is about the spiritual struggle that occurs when a very dedicated reader, near his death, encounters this powerful Biblical soliloquy, the voice of a deific personality whose voice is the essence of this story-- the majesty of words and the Word.

About the Author

David Anton began writing novels and short stories as a corollary with his writing, editing, and publishing literary books, essays, and reviews during the years of his university lecturing. His first published novel is titled, The Belle of Cripple Creek Gold, a historical novel about the tragicomic life of seeking the riches of discovering gold. His second novel, Angel in Wax, is a love story about a monk, a writer, and a priest who come to know and love a woman because of her radiant, wonderfully expressive personality. His third novel is called, Sailing: Inside Passages. It is the story of self-discovery on a European cruise to the Western Mediterranean during which six guests dining at the same table experience fresh possibilities for the renewing their lives. David Anton’s full authorial career and achievements can be found under the surname of Downes in the Dictionary of International Biography and Writer’s Who’s Who.