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Prospect: Why I Like Nobledark or Grimbright Better than Cheerful and Corrupt

Prospect is a movie I’d recommend over Rim of the World. I both review Prospect and say why I like its type of tale better. · Travis Perry

’During Traumatic Times, We Need Truthful Stories to Help Us Heal’

Lorehaven’s summer 2020 issue has arrived, and thanks in part to the dark magic of pandemics, you can read the entire issue right now. · E. Stephen Burnett

The Deal with the Devil

The trope of making a deal with the Devil has been around longer than Goethe’s Faust. What’s good about the use of this trope? What’s Biblical? And how can we apply what the Bible says to craft a more original take on making a deal with Satan? · Travis Perry

Messin’ With Time

Beyond all my complaints about the time change, I find time an interesting topic, a part of world building, actually, in speculative stories. · Rebecca LuElla Miller

A Case Study in Fictional Magic: Dawn Before the Dark

In Dawn Before the Dark, magic at first glance would seem to stem from gods other than the one Creator. How will this story world of a gender-based curse turn that apparent focus on magic on its head? How does this book link a strong story with a desire to honor God? · Travis Perry

Speculative Or True?

I suppose a good number of other passages in the Bible also read like speculative literature, but the Christmas story seems to have compacted a number of speculative tropes. There are several angelic visitations, for example. Joseph had a conversation with an angel, and so did Mary. But before them was Zacharias, John the Baptist’s dad, and his encounter with the angel of God in the temple. Most dramatic, and perhaps most well know, was the visitation of the shepherds, first by a single angel, then by “a multitude of the heavenly host.” · Rebecca LuElla Miller

A Resurgence Of Epic Fantasy?

Since epic fantasy is a good vs. evil struggle, and good wins in the end, how far can an author flip the script without making evil come out on top? · Rebecca LuElla Miller

Absent Parents in Young Adult Fantasy

What we all want most for our characters is a great story, which often means depriving them of many of our most cherished comforts in life—safety, freedom, or even parents—in order to achieve it. · Laurie Lucking

Body Count Vs. Human Cost

Unless violence and death happen to the main characters in a story, we rarely see and feel the human cost of those deaths, of the families left behind, of the children now orphaned, of the villages and kingdoms without their leaders, of the friends and lovers whose hearts ache for those they can never embrace again. · Mark Carver

Once Upon A Time: If We Tune In

A concise yet biased summary of the last half-season of Once Upon A Time. · Shannon McDermott

The True Story That Reads Like Speculative Fiction

It is Christmas, or nearly so, and naturally my focus turns to the Christmas story. The true, Biblical story. I understand that many people in the world look at the accounts recorded in Luke 1 and 2 and Matthew 1 and 2 as myth. And with good reason. Those passages read like speculative fiction. · Rebecca LuElla Miller

Here There Be Monsters…

Human nature wants to worship something big. King Kong was worshiped by the island natives, volcanoes and mountains have become gods, and dragons rule the realms of fantasy. The gods that are worshiped by the various religions of the world are massive and powerful. · Mark Carver

Are Heroes Passé?

Have our tastes in fiction moved past the good guy? Is there no interest in a character who wants to be heroic and works to be heroic and succeeds at being heroic? Must all our heroes be reluctant or all our protagonists be “bad guys”? Have we come to an end of good guy heroes? · Rebecca LuElla Miller

Wizards, Witches, and The Bible

Can fantasy magic be of God? · R. L. Copple

Should Christians Enjoy Fantasy?

As Christian fantasy writers, how do we handle evil characters? How evil can we go? Can we make our dark characters likeable? Should we? · Pam Halter

Relics, Relics, Relics

Behold the Christian MacGuffin, the Mushi: a quasi-Biblical object with Surprising Supernatural Powers for plot purposes. · E. Stephen Burnett

What Makes Fantasy Work? Part 1

Readers love Narnia and Lord of the Rings, and they love a handful of later fantasies. But a lot of stories don’t go viral, don’t get hundreds of reviews, and in fact get tepid responses. So what makes fantasy work? · Rebecca LuElla Miller

Where Are All The Superheroes?

From the halls of Odin to the exploits of Beowulf, the graphic-art mythos of Superman, the school day victories of colorful Power Rangers—why are superheros so super? · Yvonne Anderson

What Constitutes “Derivative”?

Some scholars claim J. R. R. Tolkien owed a debt of influence where he claimed none. I find this criticism to be thoroughly ironic because the great accusation against writers of high fantasy today is that their work is derivative, a mere shadow of, you guessed it, J.R.R. Tolkien. · Rebecca LuElla Miller

Fantastic Tropes and Where To Find Them

Every story has tropes. Christian speculative stories are no exception. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek collection. · Kessie Carroll
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