GALVESTON COUNTY DAILY NEWS
June 28, 2002

‘Screen Door Jesus’ set in Bolivar

By Manuel Moreno Jr.
Correspondent

CRYSTAL BEACH — As a teen-ager growing up in Port Neches, Christopher Cook got his first glimpse of Jesus Christ. Well, sort of.

Just a couple of blocks down the street from where he lived, an elderly lady discovered her screen door had an image of God’s son miraculously enshrined on it.

“You really had to stretch to see it,” Cook said with a smile.

Thus led to the title of his latest paperback novel, Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories, recently named a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award.

“My personal belief is that miracles are very common and around us all the time,” Cook added. “But we don’t even notice them. Instead, we look for sensational things.”

Cook, also the author of the award-winning novel Robbers, which is partly set in the Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula areas, will be in Galveston on Saturday for a book-signing session of both books at Galveston Bookshop, 317 Tremont (23rd Street), from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

“‘Screen Door Jesus’ is more of a personal exploration of my own religious upbringings,” he said, noting book clubs have received it well since its release earlier this year.

“It’s a conventional book about people who have differences in their religious beliefs,” Cook added. “Yet they live in a small community, so they can’t avoid one another like they can in a city life.

“I think it deals with very personal questions about spiritual meaning, kinds of questions that people struggle with but often don’t admit to other people because they would be self-conscious or embarrassed.”

“Screen Door Jesus,” in fact, is a title of one of the 10 stories in the book.

There, in the fictional East Texas piney woods town of Bethlehem, where churches of various denominations are located on just about every block and the setting of each of the “doing religion” stories, Mother Harper, while watering her gladiolas, sees a picture of Jesus on her screen door.

“You know, I’ve often wondered why God just doesn’t come down and get on television and make a speech, like the president. Or show up at halftime in the Super Bowl. Make an appearance, tell everyone to straighten up and fly right,” says the 13-year-old Houston boy in the story, who while exiled to his grandparents’ house for the summer months pays a visit to Mother Harper’s house to witness the vision up close.

“That’d be the simple and straightforward approach, it seems to me,” the teen-age boy, acting as the narrator of the story, continues. “But no, instead, He’s got to play cat and mouse, hide the thimble. Wants you to look under the rug, behind the couch, like some joker leaving clues in unlikely places.

“That’s how God is, I suppose. But why? Seems like He could step right out in the open, say ‘boo!’ Instead, you got to go looking for Him, like a game of hide and seek.”

Cook, too, would prefer the simpler approach.

“Religious faith, we make it a complicated thing, with all kinds of rules and regulations,” he said. “Personally, I think the beauty of Jesus’ teachings was his simplicity, because it really boils down to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself,’ which essentially is the golden rule.

“Fact of the matter is we don’t want it that simple. It’s hard to follow the golden rule. It requires more self-discipline than we want. When someone treats us badly, we have a choice between forgiveness or seeking revenge.

“Which one is more gratifying? Revenge feels good. Forgiveness requires some sacrifice and effort. Frankly we’re not a culture that believes in sacrifice and effort. We’re more of a culture who believes in drive-through fast foods.”

Mother Harper eventually dies in the story, and slowly but surely so does the vision.

Ironically, the elderly lady’s house in Port Neches still stands, and the screen door remained in tact on the premises. A memorial to the screen door was even built.

“That’s the way it is with a lot of beliefs,” said Cook, who will return to his current residence of Prague, Czech Republic, on Sunday after a month-long book-signing tour.

“One man’s God is another man’s Zeus,” he added. “It’s harder to see your own (belief) in an objective way. But that’s the human dilemma and not just about religion.”

One of his favorite stories in Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories, which is being made into a movie later this summer, is “Star Man,” where three oil drillers driving to work on Christmas Eve encounter a strange child and his mother in a Waffle House in Alvin.

The child, according to the story, is Jesus.

“If you want to believe something, you will,” Cook said. “And if you don’t
want to believe it, you don’t.”

LUFKIN DAILY NEWS
Books Column
March 3, 2002

by JAY MILNER

Christopher Cook is a native of Texas who has lived abroad and now resides in Prague, Czech Republic. He wrote a novel titled Robbers published by Carroll and Graf in 2000 that was praised widely. A New York Times reviewer said Cook has a “lyric voice that sings itself raw.”

I was fortunate enough recently to come across a book of Cook’s short stories titled Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories, a collection I enjoyed and recommend to anyone who likes good writing.

This is a collection of stories, or episodes really, set in East Texas, southeast Texas actually, in the piney woods section. All but one or two episodes are set in the fictional town of Bethlehem, a deep East Texas town where most of the people are deeply involved in a fundamentalist religion. In fact, the one criticism I have of this collection is that everyone in the town and surrounding communities appear to be fundamental religious fanatics.

But maybe Cook is laying it out this way to make a point and make a point he certainly does. He’s a good writer who sets the atmosphere and characters very well. He even lets us peek at the humor of the various situations, which is a relief in some places.

The title short story, “Screen Door Jesus,” tells of a woman in Bethlehem who discovers one day that a portrait of Jesus can be seen on the screen of her front door if the light hits it just right. The word spreads and soon people are driving in from miles around to see the phenomenon. The news spreads faster and farther until her front lawn is trampled into mud and her privacy is destroyed. Her neighbor across the street is selling parking spaces on his lot and people are selling peanuts and sandwiches to the crowds that gather daily.

SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
June 23, 2002 

East Texas life more complex with deeper look

By John Hammond
Special to the Express-News

Christopher Cook’s collection of short stories explores the lives of ordinary people in the fictional East Texas town of Bethlehem. As the town name and story titles suggest, Cook’s themes concern his characters’ religious beliefs and habits, which are frequently unflattering.

Among his introductory quotes which set the tone are: Paul the Apostle, “We are fools for Christ’s sake”; and Blaise Pascal, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

In one story, a successful car dealer wants to retire, so he invites his daughter, just returned from missionary work in Africa, to learn the business and eventually take it over. However, he is a little concerned that she is a member of the town’s “holy roller” congregation, who speak in tongues and behave to his mind in an unseemly way, rubbing elbows with blacks and the poor.

Problems begin when she starts to operate what in his words is a “dirty business,” the way she believes Jesus would run a car dealership: eliminating tricky sales gimmicks that escalate the price and also financing cars for people who normally couldn’t afford a new vehicle.

“Have you ever wondered why we sell cars at discount to people with money and demand maximum price from folks who slave for every penny they earn?” she asks her father, who sees in this philosophy a serious threat to the unwritten business and social rules of his town.

“Soldiers for the Lord” captures a 6-year-old girl’s perspective of her aunt and uncle at work at a gun and knife show. She watches as they interact with camouflage-clad men and boys purchasing weapons, cursing the intrusive government laws, and picking up bumper stickers that say things such as “Jesus Supports the NRA.”

Her aunt and uncle try to play match-maker for the girl’s widowed mother by arranging a relationship with a man at the show. Cook chillingly contrasts their stupidity with the girl’s awareness of the man’s suspicious behavior, realizing he may be the one who killed her father. All the while, his son (her possible future brother) teasingly thrusts a knife at her as she looks into his cold, flat eyes.

Cook’s writing can occasionally verge on stereotyping the rural bumpkin, but more often he depicts humane and generous people who find themselves surrounded by the injustices and cruelty one could find anywhere. We see this in “Star Man,” the name a waitress gave her mentally retarded son born on Christmas Day. An oil rig worker who meets them working in a diner one Christmas sees in the boy someone who will never understand the meaning of Christianity yet essentially embodies the innocent Christ child.

There are a few disappointments in this volume, especially when Cook takes aim at easy targets, but he proves himself a perceptive, reliable storyteller who knows how to express the depth and complexity of people’s lives.