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Vicar turned fantasy author
By Bob Smietana

Fat. Middle aged. Boring.

That's how Graham Taylor used to describe his life.

After a series of adventures in his early years-from living in London and hanging out with the Sex Pistols as a teenager to battling with hooligans as a police officer in rural Yorkshire-Taylor had settled down to a quiet life as a country vicar in the village of Cloughton. His only excitement was doing pastoral calls on his Yamaha XV1100 Virago motorcycle, a holdover from his days as a policeman.

But life is still full of surprises, even when you're middle-aged.

In the summer of 2002, Taylor became one of his country's best-selling authors. His self published novel Shadowmancer, about an 18th century evil cleric who tries to take over the world, topped the United Kingdom's best-seller list 15 weeks-despite being released at the same time as the latest Harry Potter book.

Shadowmancer, which has also become a best seller in Spain, Argentina, Poland, and Greece, has sold more than a million copies worldwide. When it was released in the United States in May, it hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

The book was so popular it spawned a new trend dubbed "Shadowmania" by newspapers and is advertised as being "hotter than Potter."

His second novel, Wormwood, was also a bestseller in the United Kingdom, and was released in the United States in mid-September. During a book signing for Wormwood at Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois, Taylor said that he keeps thinking to himself, "this must be a dream."

"I keep thinking that one day I'll wake up and it will be back to March 20, 2000-and I'll haven't had written a word," he told fans at the signing.

Taylor's first parish was at St. Mary's in Whitby, a church that appears in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Thousands of Goths and vampire enthusiasts visit Whitby each fall. Taylor, who was fascinated by the occult as a teenager, says he welcomed them to church services.

He wrote Shadowmancer on a lark. A woman had challenged him to do it after a speech he gave about occult themes in children's books like Harry Potter and the works of Philip Pulman-whose Dark Materials reworks Milton's Paradise Lost so that Satan is a hero, particularly bothered Taylor.

"Pulman says that God is dead, that God is a liar, God is a cheat, God is senile. Well, that really offended me," Taylor said in a phone interview from his home in Cloughton. He set out to write a fantasy novel that would be exciting and scary and show a God who was active in the world.

Since he didn't think anyone would publish his novel, Taylor sold off his beloved motorcycle to pay the 3,000 pounds to have it self-published. One of the original 2,500 copies made its way to Faber and Faber publishers, who bought the U.K. rights. It was being published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in the United States.

Set in eighteenth century Yorkshire, Shadowmancer pits three teenagers-Thomas Barrick, Cate Coglan and an Ethiopian boy named Raphah-against Obadiah Demurral, the vicar of Whitby. Demurral is a shadowmancer-a sorcerer who talks to the dead-who keeps the body of a dead girl in his church and summons her to foretell the future.

Not content with the wealth he's accumulated from oppressing local peasants, Demurral sets his sights on overthrowing God. He steals part of the Ark of the Covenant and uses it to summon the devil, named Pyratheon, to earth.

Raphah's family has been the keeper of the Ark of the Covenant for centuries, and he tries to retrieve it with the help of Thomas, Cate, and a local smuggler named Jacob Crane. Taylor describes their adventures as "Robert Louis Stevenson tinged with J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis."

Shadowmancer's fast-paced plot features a number of fight scenes, also based on some of Taylor's experiences as a police officer in rural Yorkshire. Taylor, who describes himself as a "lumbering Yorkshireman"-about six feet tall, and six feet wide-said he often "flew by the seat of my pants as a cop, with no backup."

Most times it went well. One night, things went bad when he arrested a young man for breaking a shop window. The man's friends-30 or so of them-came out of the pub just as Taylor was putting the man in his police car. Fueled on "drug and drink," they attacked Taylor. As he was getting nearly beaten to death, the man he had arrested kicked out the window of the police car and yelled out, "Where's your God now, Graham?"

"God was there," says Taylor. "God was there with me. If I had died-if I had been murdered-then I would have gone straight to be with God because I am a Christian. I survived, so I believe that God protected me. Though either way, as a Christian, I win. It's that win-win situation. In our suffering, God is with us."

That sense of God being with him sustained him through some heart trouble and a case of pneumonia earlier this year. A self-described workaholic, Taylor was trying to balance being both a pastor and a best-selling author and was failing at it. He become so ill that he sunk into a deep depression-one that didn't lift until he was willing to admit he "wasn't a super-Christian." He gave up his parish this past October, and will work as an interim minister.

"I'll end up filling in for myself till they find a replacement," he says.

He sees his new life as an author as a "new kind of ministry." His favorite part is encouraging young fans at book signings to believe in their dreams. At the book signing in Naperville, he pointed to a young boy named Adam in the front row and said, "You could be president. You can do it."

"And don't let anyone say he can't," he told the audience.

More pressing on Adam's agenda was getting advice on a book he wanted to write: about a boy who discovers a magic door that leads to another world.

While signing Adam's copy of Wormwood, Taylor looked him in the eye and gave him a few pointers. "All you have to do Adam, is sit down and write it. Make the door move somewhere every day-all you have to do is try it."

One of the last stops on his Wormwood tour was at Universal Studios, to discuss plans for a Shadowmancer movie, currently in pre-production (www.shadowmancermovie.com). Universal has bought the film rights to both books, and there are also plans for a rock-opera version of Wormwood for Broadway and London's West End.

"In the last year, my life has completely changed," Taylor said at the end of the book signing. He then added this advice. "If I can write a book-anyone can. Age doesn't matter. Never say, 'I am too old.' I am a Christian, and I know that God likes to work with people with gray hair."

Bob Smietana is features editor of The Covenant Companion and a freelance religion editor based in Chicago. He is the voice of the God-of-Small-Things religion blog (http://god-of-small-things.blogspot.com).



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