Behind “Nephilim”

The Bible does not describe a merely material world. It has more categories than my high school biology and physics textbooks. It depicts a creation afflicted by the moral failure of Adam and Eve in Eden. It describes humans who house evil spirits that Jesus can expel and “sons of God” who interact with God as created, powerful spiritual beings. This world is not a purely material place containing only time, space, and matter. The same creation that contains IPhones and the Swiss Alps and my Fila tennis shoes and Steph Curry also contains the archangel Michael, the demons Jesus cast into a herd of pigs just east of the Jordan River, and the ancient rebel angel Satan. There isn’t a “real” world in which we commute to work and send emails and go to the pharmacy and then, separate from that, a subjective, personal world where we can practice private religion or have some sort of mere imagination and call it “faith.” The Jesus who died on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem is the Jesus who resisted the real being called Satan in the Judean wilderness. We are on a material-spiritual stage, and every one of us is a composite material-spiritual being.

With that reality wedged neatly in between my mind and my writing hand, I undertook to answer this question: “What if some of the old, old stories of grave robbing and desecrations were owed to something other than mere men?” My Bible doesn’t give me much warrant for believing the gaudy, unrealistic vampire myth as such, but it does tell me that at one point “sons of God” took “daughters of men” as their wives, and that in those days the Nephilim were on the Earth. And it also tells me that Satan, sin, and death are all organically connected. And so the idea of the desecrator of graves in a rural, nineteenth-century New England town began to take shape in a way that seems to me in line with the world God actually made. The story is fictional, but it is not false.

Death is the villain in this novel. It employs a particular mercenary, one that has carved out a home in millions of acres of woods stretching out towards Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. The haunt in this book is a twisted, old lover of death. He spends what time he has enjoying its ugliness and flavor. I started with that simple question concerning old stories of graveyards and missing bodies. By the time the story had thoroughly unfolded, it held older questions, along with the men and women of a town called Sunbury who had to ask them on a few nights in the 1800s, when everything was at stake.