I read Eric O. Scott’s book last night. It’s short, more novella than novel, and it didn’t take me long. I was compelled to finish it and review it as soon as I could. That it compelled me to this much is a point in its favor. The Lives of the Apostates is the story of a youngish Pagan, not unlike the author. I know him from his contributions to the blog site http://wildhunt.org/. Both Scott and his main character are second-generation witches, a concept that fascinates me and catches at my heart when I see it at conventions and festivals. Lou, the fictional witch, is a beautifully layered protagonist. He’s made up of anger and love and responsibility and faith and confusion and brutally honest doubts. His voice and interiority and asides are incredibly genuine. Scott’s voice as a writer is strong and I was taken in by his metaphors and colorful turns of phrase, spiced with a piquant amount of profanity. Lou’s sidekick, Grimey, will ring true and familiar to any of us who hung out with high school Pagans. Grimey is all skinless pain wrapped in black t-shirts, his insecurity yawns before us as he tiptoes around coming out of the broom closet. It’s poignant and painful and a little funny if you see it in the right light. The story follows work and school and desire and the way things fall apart. It is complex enough to remain interesting without following any of the side-stories too far out to find its way back. Lou’s job caring for disabled adults allows us to see him as a compassionate realist, while his academic endeavors give us a deep, glistening view of his intellect. His attempts to woo a girl are germane to our times, fraught with complications and connections formed in the wrong places. However, he never treats his female characters as receptacles or tools or prizes. I expect no less from a Pagan author, but I was on the lookout anyhow. The narrative and the voice are strong throughout and there is no part of this that isn’t wholly believable and even inspiring. Nevertheless, the book is not without flaws. I love the detail and parallel added by the story of Julian the Apostate, the last Pagan Caesar. However, the story runs a little long into the historical details and is sure to lose some readers in a litany of details that runs toward preachy. I like history and I have been known to wax speculative about Hypatia of Alexandria; it didn’t bother me. Other readers may get different mileage out of the lesson. The only part of the story that is damned near irredeemable is a scene that will be familiar to any teenage Pagan/Wiccan/Witch. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “Once, when I was young and probably on the low end of the power differential, I had an incredibly detailed and witty debate with a spiritual authority of the Christian church. I totally stood up to him and told him how wrong wrong wrong he was. I stormed out of his office and made some kind of rebellious gesture. This narrative is central to my personal fable and integral to my spiritual identity.” And the sign flashes for applause. Eric O. Scott may have actually had this experience. The truth is, I had a variant of it myself. I once had to defend myself to the faculty advisers of a Campus Christian club over something I’d published and sat through an hour of them lecturing me on the certainty of going to hell before skipping out, giggling and singing about my destined destination. The problem is that this story is so absolutely rote to the personal conversion narratives of most Pagans that it’s almost as cringe-worthy as the Imaginary Pagan Grandmother. Maybe this is part of being second-generation. Maybe Scott hasn’t had to craft a narrative of conversion and so didn’t see the archetype in time to duck. He carries the scene with authenticity, and it doesn’t end with typical adolescent flouting of law and convention and a convenient evasion of any consequences. I applaud him for that, without the lights flashing to tell me to. I LOVE the ending of this book. It is delicious and deserved, and it made me smile. If you’ve skipped down to the conclusion of my review to get the recommend, here it is: read this book. It asks very little in the way of time and it delivers a wonderful story that is authentic if a little familiar, and exotic to a nation of converts in its native dialect. I don’t tell people to support Pagan authors broadly; there are those who don’t deserve it just for showing up in the their robes and passing the plate. Eric O. Scott has done the work. This book was a very enjoyable read and I can’t wait to see what he comes out with next. ~ Pagan Meghan, http://paganmeghan.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/lives-of-the-apostates-a-fubu-review/

They call it Zeitgeist - the spirit of the times. And like any phantom, it's insubstantial, difficult to grasp. You can sense it, but you can't force it to do anything or to be what you want it to be. The best you can hope for is to be (dimly) aware of it. Millions aren't. They assume that they know what the Zeitgeist is, but it has already passed them by, moved on, and is beginning to express itself in odd places, out on the fringes, far from the mainstream. I've had a few Zeitgeist moments recently: a radio interview about the Baby Boomer generation, an email from my collaborator in New Mexico, a Facebook status put up by a fellow writer in British Columbia, a book about Native American science, metaphysics and philosophy ... But one of the most stirring and satisfying of these glimpses was reading The Lives of the Apostates by Eric O. Scott. The Lives of the Apostates is a novella which will be published very shortly - later this month, in fact - by Moon Books (it's already available on Kindle). It's short enough to be readable in one sustained sitting, but don't let the length fool you: there's plenty of food for thought in those pages. Set in the American Midwest, the book is a first-person narrative. On the one hand, the narrator - Lou - is a pretty normal college student, sharing accommodation with a scruffy friend, longing for his childhood sweetheart and earning a few spare dollars by keeping a night-time eye on a couple of adult males with special needs. But Lou is also a second-generation pagan - his parents raised him in the Wicca tradition. Studying religion and philosophy at college, Lou finds that he is being subtly forced into accepting and reiterating a Christian view of history. Lou's room-mate has gravitated towards paganism, even though his mother is a practising Christian and 'Grimalkin', as he prefers to be called, was brought up attending the very church where Lou's college tutor is also the pastor. And so the stage is set for something of a showdown between different worldviews. Given that this is a first-person narrative, the author inevitably runs the risk of being wholly one-sided (and I daresay that many Christian fundamentalist or traditionalist readers will claim that the book is just that). In fact, I felt that Scott was pretty fair. The narrator's increasing frustration at feeling quietly coerced into participating in the ongoing rewriting of history - the complacent assumption that Christianity, and all that it entails, was and is the only logical development and conclusion of mankind's beliefs; the perennial misrepresentation of what pagan beliefs are, and what pagans actually do - and the subtle persecution of people who can't and don't subscribe to the conformist position, these things are handled with care and sensitivity. And there is much more to the book than a simple debate about different belief systems. It is well-observed and written with wit and verve - and courage, too, given its Midwest setting. Personally, I was much taken with the narrative thread which concerned Lou's determination to write a college paper about the Emperor Julian. The Christians called him the 'Apostate' or the 'Traitor'. Why? Because he was a pagan - the 'Last Pagan', as certain authorities have had the temerity to assert. Julian is a fascinating historical individual (as even Lou's Christian tutor admits) - his family was slaughtered by a supposedly Christian Emperor, who assumed that Julian would reign as a sort of puppet. Julian in fact proved to be an effective general and, were it not for one of those accidents of history, he might have altered the direction of European (and World) history. But it wasn't to be. Lou's attempts to write a fair appraisal of Julian bring him into conflict with his tutor, who insists that Lou present Julian in the way that generations of Christian writers have sought to portray him - regardless of historical accuracy. In that regard, The Lives of the Apostates is not an example of church-bashing so much as an earnest appeal for honesty - about history, about other people's beliefs - which is both long overdue and absolutely what is needed in our fractious, fragmented age. The frustration at being persistently denied this, at being bombarded, time and again, with one side of the story and told to believe it or else, is a major part of what drives the narrative. I've been writing about the Emperor Julian (whom the Christians hated) and the Emperor Constantine (whom the Christians adored, to the extent of forging documents about him) in my book about the Grail - also for Moon Books - so there was a pleasant sense of recognition, and of writers in different continents beginning to ask similar questions of the past. It's that Zeitgeist thing. Maybe - hopefully - this is where we're at, with an increasing number of people desperate to see the truth about our mutual history told. The partisan approach to history favours division and social control. It's a form of brainwashing. But if we are to achieve tolerance, the values enshrined in the US Constitution, and wise, informed, sensible solutions to the problems we all face we must stop telling lies about the past. Understanding the truth about today requires a true understanding of the past. Conversely, lies about history become lies about the present - and our problems simply become more entrenched and intractable, while our capacity to address those problems is handicapped by the falsehoods we have been taught to embrace. Don't get me wrong - Eric O. Scott's Lives of the Apostates is a thoroughly enjoyable read, deceptively easy to get through. And that might be the book's greatest achievement. There are big issues in there, big questions and no easy answers, but they occur to you after you have read the book. And I can offer no higher recommendation than that. ~ Simon Stirling, http://artandwill.blogspot.com/2013/06/lives-of-apostates.html

I liked Lives of the Apostates. I like the title—so blatant, in-your-face bold. I like the academic premise of a philosophy student caught in a hostile course called History of Christian Thought and taught by a preacher. The whole book is edgy. Readers who are first generation pagans may cringe a little, viewing the world through the eyes of their children born and raised with the Goddess. Is that how our kids see us? Well, of course it is. Being pagan is no shield from the distain of the next generation. We were meant to be taken for granted. We are parents. I appreciate the humor of Eric's Scott's wry voice, even when it comes at my expense. Aside from the ironic edge, the book is about conflict. In this first person narrative, Scott writes convincingly of a young man's quiet desperation caught between dreams and expectation. His character Lou Durham wrestles (I use the term purposefully) with at least 7 different relationship conflicts, most of which are reflected by the people around him. The mother-grown child conflict is shared by his roommate Grimey, Lou's would be girlfriend Lucy, and Jimmy his client on the nightshift. His conflict with Jimmy requires special handling. Conflicts with his roommate and Lucy blow up in his face. Conflict with Mike his coworker is less explosive but present in a niggling sort of way. Conflict with his boss Dana remains an unresolved dread. Conflict with Dr. Eccleston his professor sets off the surprise ending which, if you watch out for the foreshadowing, should not be that much of a surprise, but it is. The strength of Scott's writing is in how he manages the mirrored layers of his themes without telling us about it. I admire that. Too many novelists explain what they are trying to do instead of simply getting on with it. Scott juggles his prickly characters all in one short plot line balanced on a quarter and a missile. This book is brief when it could have been otherwise. I recommend it. ~ Dorothy Abramson, http://dorothyabramsonlife.blogspot.com/2013/06/lives-of-apostates-studies-in-conflict.html

“The Lives of The Apostates” by Eric Scott is a piece of fiction first published by Moon Books in 2013. It is available for purchase at www.moon-books.net. With the ISBN 978 1 78099 910 4. Eric Scott, already an author of non-fiction on paganism, draws on personal life experience as well as historical information to bring us his first shocking novella. Written in a colloquial first person, with an underlying theme of religious and spiritual intolerance, “The Lives of the Apostates” is directed towards an audience of teens and young adults interested in Pagan religion. This book follows the life of a young man named Lou attending college and working for the Cheriton Valley home for the mentally handicapped in the small town of Kirksville, Missouri in early autumn. Lou is a modern pagan and a philosophy major who must complete a course on Christian thought in order to fulfill his degree requirements. Lou is cynical, especially about the Christian religion and its followers, and is not the least bit excited about the semester ahead. With the help of his roommate, Grimalkin (“Grimey”), Lou gets to know the professor of his Christian thought class, who is also a pastor at the local church. Lou dislikes him from the start, and the two of them have notably conflicting beliefs about the importance of Julian “the Apostate,” a Pagan emperor in the Eastern Roman Empire after Constantius and the rise of Christianity. Meanwhile, Grimey is a struggling with keeping his religion a secret from his family and friends – all but Lou. Grimey puts on a Christian camouflage whenever his relatives are around, for fear of their blaming him for turning his back on the Christian God. The story comes to a peak when a series of complications involving surreptitious religious choices and incriminating relationships push both Lou and Grimey over the edge. The conclusion of the story is no less riveting than the opening, leaving you surprised and thinking about the profound meaning behind the story he was just presented with. With everything seeming to crash down around them, Lou and Grimey are both overwhelmed by a combination of coming-of-age problems and the hardships of growing up Pagan in a society dominated by Christianity, fear, and ignorance. The Lives of the Apostates is a book written primarily for entertainment that also raises the incredibly real issue of some followers of the Christian religion blindly judging Pagans before they are informed enough to make any rational decisions about Paganism. It is most likely that this is out of a naive apprehension, and I would agree that it happens much too often within and outside of just the Christian religion. The book keeps the underlying conflict between Christians and Pagans, but outside of the story there is a conflict of the same nature between almost all religions. I believe that the effort of coexistence and peace between all people is essential and should be more of a priority, and Eric Scott simply highlights that agenda in “The Lives of the Apostates”. ~ Pagan Edge, http://www.paganedge.com/2013/05/20/book-review-the-lives-of-the-apostates/

Lou, a Pagan college student at Truman University, faces crises in his education, his job, and his friendships in this brief novella. He is forced to take a course on the History of Christian Thought for his major and butts heads with the professor. His job is in danger after one of the disabled men he cares for is abducted by a deranged family member. Lou's attraction for an old friend is unrequited. And his roommate is having problems with his mother after Lou encourages him to tell the devout Baptist woman that he is Pagan. There's a lot of well written story packed in this small book. Of course, I'm a little bit prejudiced since the author is a friend of mine. ~ University City Public Library, http://ucplbookchallenge.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-lives-of-apostates.html

A very gritty book with characters that capture your imagination. A fictional story about a Wiccan guy who has his beliefs and ideals challenged, the writer creates a totally believable storyline that could have or be happening anywhere today. ~ Rachel Patterson, www.kitchenwitchuk.blogspot.co.uk

I've long been an admirer of Eric Scott's nonfiction on paganism. His stories are so smart, so well told, I was surprised to learn that he would be publishing a novella. Now, having read it in one sitting, I'm glad Scott's writing "pagan fiction," too. Only, The Lives of the Apostates is more than that -- at its best, it's a complication of belief and beliefs, the story of a clash between a student and a professor, between religion and reality, between a young man's faith and his circumstances. ~ Jeff Sharlet, Bestselling author of The Family and Sweet Heaven When I Die

Finally, something new under the sun: a midwestern pagan coming of age story that is at once a poignant evocation of young love and a searing meditation on the ancient conflict between faiths. As sharp as a ritual blade, as full as a chalice, The Lives of the Apostates is a great surprise, and Eric Scott a writer to watch. ~ Peter Manseau, Author of Songs for the Butcher's Daughter and Rag and Bone

Eric Scott's "The Lives of the Apostates" is a tone poem of rage and grief at growing up in a world where your very beliefs place you in opposition to the way most of the world is run, to the blunt instruments of religious power and privilege. Scott is a lyrical and powerful essayist whose foray into fiction echoes the very real lives of the apostates among us, and within us. A barbaric yawp from the Pagan soul. ~ Jason Pitzl-Waters, Blogger, The Wild Hunt: A Modern Pagan Perspective

Drawing on his own life experience, Eric Scott allows us to perceive the world through the eyes of a second generation Pagan. The Lives of the Apostates is a gritty tale of culture clash, reconciliation and unrequited love. Scott has a talent for creating characters who are neither heroes nor true villains, but rather realistic people with their own strengths and flaws. ~ Alaric Albertsson, Author, Travels Through Middle Earth: The Path of a Saxon Pagan