The Ballad of Scabbard Pete--review

Cap'n: Are ye ready, kids?
Kids: Aye-aye, Cap'n!
Cap'n: I can't heeear you...
Kids: Get a hearing aid, you stupid geezer!
Cap'n: Close enough. Who lives in a ship barely a-top the sea?
Kids: Scab-bard Pe-tey!
Cap'n: Obnoxious, sneaky drunkard, he!
Kids: Scab-bard Pe-tey!
Cap'n: If piratish nonsense be what ye wish...
Kids: Scab-bard Pe-tey!
Cap'n: Go read his blog like a goggle-eyed fish!
[musical noise, followed by low murmuring]
Kids: Hey, Cap'n! Your check bounced, so we're off to watch a sponge.
Cap'n: What! Why, I...you... Arrgh! Callow swabs! Don't anyone appreciate good music these days?

[Unidentified voice, sobbing]: I do, Cap'n. It done touched me heart!
Cap'n: Really? And who be ye?
[Unidentified voice, sniffling]: I be Scabbard Pete. But ye may call me "Scabby Petey." 'Tis no more than I deserve.
Cap'n: Are ye sure? Ye sound too snivelly fer Pete.
"Scabby Petey": I've seen the error of me ways, and as penance, I want everyone to call me "Scabby Petey," that's all.
Cap'n [scribbling furiously]: Okay, then, will ye read out this announcement to that effect?
"Scabby Petey": Of course. "I am a demon." What! Blast!
Cap'n: A-har! As I thought: ye be Scabbard Pete's personal demon--like a personal trainer, only meaner.
Scabbard Pete's personal demon: I still want people to call him "Scabby Petey."
Cap'n: But what does we call ye, ye sulphurous swab? Why don't they give ye a name?
Scabbard Pete's personal demon: Because it's embarrassing. Who would take seriously a demon named "Evelyn"?
Cap'n: Evelyn? Ain't that a girl's name?
"Evelyn": Not "Eh-vlyn"! "Evil-in"! It's a pretty good name, really, but people think I'm a girl or a writer.
Cap'n: Well, I thinks ye be fibbin'.
"Evelyn": Hey! I'm a demon! I work for the Father of Lies! If you can't trust me, who can you trust? A politician? ...That reminds me: I need to get off to Washington.
Cap'n: Temptin' people?
"Evelyn": Collecting some debts. Not everyone's as big a challenge as Scabby.
Cap'n: Arrggh! Well, now the demon's gone, it be time for that Ansric swab ta do some blatherin' 'bout the blog.

Well, that was...interesting, for want of a better word. I don't normally review works in progress, but The Ballad of Scabbard Pete by Tony Lavoie is no normal work. It's a novel-in-progress (currently on chapter 13) posted on a blog. It's also very roughly what you might get if Keith Laumer had written Pirates of the Caribbean: fast-paced and funny. It's about a pirate who's trying to stay ahead of the demon that wants to yank him down to Hell. (That gives them both a hobby.) Unfortunately, there's not much more I can say about it without committing a spoiler.

However, I will mention a few points that may bother some people, and my own reactions.

Violence. This is another of those "If you want it, you got it; if you don't want it, you got it anyway" situations. Actually, there isn't much violence, and most of it is cartoonish. The only halfway gory scene I've encountered so far involves using archery on a sea monster. Not a lot of detail there, however, so it's mostly gross if you dwell on it and have a vivid imagination.

Language. Yes, it has language. And here you thought it was entirely in mime! Expletives are pretty much limited to an occasional "damn" or "Hell" (many of the latter being at least partly literal references). Pretty tame by pirate standards or even modern standards.

Moral relativism. Some of Pete's piracy is more or less justified by his using some of the money for good ends and by his decision to target the rich. But that's like arguing that the end justifies the means; it's essentially the same as vigilantism: it's okay to rob or kill someone if he "deserved" it. But who are we to judge, and by what authority do we act?

Theology. This is kind of jokey anyway, so I won't go into the whole business of demons and Hell as portrayed in the story. However, there is some material about the dead getting involved with what the living are doing. It's fairly limited so far, but it does bother me somewhat. We'll see where it goes.

Anyway, it's worth a look, and it's free. I've seen a number of stories lately that were neither, so get over to The Ballad of Scabbard Pete before some publisher stumbles onto it and converts it to pirate gold.

The "Saint Judas" Syndrome

Hope is not enough. Just as the doctrine that God is love can be distorted to eliminate God's justice and eternal punishment, so hope can eliminate the point of no return. But Moses really did lose the Promised Land through one impetuous sin. King Saul forfeited his kingship and life through several acts of what might seem like minor disobedience. Yet we tend to assume automatically that no such line exists, and that's the basis for some bad stories, some of them horror.

The classic example of this is Judas. From time to time, someone comes up with a story about how misunderstood Judas was, how he meant well but messed up, and so on. Some even claim that he was acting on Jesus' orders, so he was saved.

Nonsense. Jesus said he was "a devil" (John 6:71-72), which doesn't sound so innocent. Yet people not only try to save Judas but sometimes even a demon or Satan himself.

Why?

Because we can't bear to say that someone is without hope. And the good news is that if someone's still alive, there's technically hope. (I do believe that there is an unpardonable sin, which involves knowingly attributing the Holy Spirit's work to the Devil, as in Mark 3:28-30. But it's not as easily or lightly committed as you might think.)

Now, in horror, this tends to come out in the idea of the monster in search of a cure. In the old Universal werewolf movies, he was always looking for a cure. I admit I have a theological problem with the standard werewolf concept, as we'll see in a later post, but the idea is that there are some curses you just can't get out of. Ask Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11:29-40)!

There's an intriguing scene in the Hammer film Brides of Dracula, where Van Helsing confronts a woman who has been vampirized by her own son. He says that vampirism is a curse, but she can renounce it and be saved. The problem is that she's dead, so although she does make things right with God, part of that involves submitting to the stake that frees her spirit. The theology is quirky to say the least, but the balance isn't bad: there is hope, but it is the hope of a blessed death and eventual resurrection. Would we accept that kind of hope today? Probably not. But like it or not, hope has its limits.

Fear Factor

I'll be dealing with horror topics through Halloween, with a brief detour to horrify Frank Creed of Flashpoint fame.

One thing you see a lot of about now is churches doing some kind of illustrated sermon about Hell in place of the old haunted house project. There's a slight point to that: they show you how obnoxious Hell is, and maybe you'll repent. Not as likely to happen with a haunted house.

However...

Although Jesus did refer to Hell more than most moderns think, he didn't go into detail very much. The story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 is about as graphic as he gets, and that only says that the rich man is tormented by fire. Elsewhere he mostly just warns us that Hell exists and leaves it at that. Why don't we?

To begin with, we like to be scared, and Hell is a scare you can feel good about. I went to a church once that gave a dramatic presentation wherein people died and went to Heaven or Hell. The piece was at least three times longer than necessary, given that most of the individual vignettes were interchangeable. Worse, Jesus popped out like a character from a game show to tell the lucky contestant what he'd won. You know something's wrong when the demons have better stage presence than the Son of God. As I recall, I originally concluded that only about five or six of the skits were fairly good, which would've cut the time down to half an hour or so. (After sitting through the whole thing, I believed in Hell in a way the writers didn't intend.)

Did it work? Yes, remarkably well. So well, in fact, that when the church had a second presentation about a year later, a lot of the people who got saved at the first one got saved again.

Today's Free Clue: Salvation involves faith in God and love for him. Fear is opposed to both. Sure, we're supposed to "fear" God reverently and based on the fact that he is a consuming fire. But that's fearing who he is, not fearing for our lives.

Fear can lead to a very shallow commitment, and sometimes, by the grace of God, that develops into something deeper. But Jesus and the apostles generally gave their audience a greater scare by confronting them with their sinfulness and need for God. They also used miracles to show that God was willing to help them out--he's not looking for an excuse to throw people into Hell. He already has that.

We'll look at the problem tendency to focus more on fear and evil than on God later this week.