God in the valleys

The Shack by William P. Young is a compelling story of one man and his search for God through the 'The Great Sadness'. Young aptly uses one character to symbolize the entirety of the human race and its quest to find One to ease the pain of the most awfullest of life's experiences.

The climax of the story is in the first few chapters. Mack, a father of five, takes his youngest three children camping. On their last day of vacation the two oldest of the three children take a canoe out on the lake and end up tipping it. Mack rescues the children and all seems ok. Mack then realizes his youngest child, Missy, is missing. It is discovered that she has been kidnapped by a serial killer, a man whose victims have never been found. The trail of the kidnapper is found and eventually leads the police and Mac to a remote shack. Inside the shack Missy's red dress, the dress she was wearing when she was kidnapped, is found in a pool of blood.

"Three grown men, arms locked in some special grace of solidarity, walking togehter, each one toward his own worst nightmare."..."Mack immediately saw what he had come to identify and, turning, crumpled into the arms of his two friends and began to weep uncontrollably. On the floor by the fireplace lay Missy's torn and blood-soaked red dress."

This was the climax of the story because, like Mack, the reader falls into a 'Great Sadness' after the trauma of losing a child to such violent circumstances. Losing a child, especially to circumstances like that, is the most horrific experience a perent could be asked to go through. Young skillfully weaves his story so that the reader can actually feel the fall into depression and the fog that clouds the mind after such a traumatic event. After the early climax Young slowly, and with incredible imagination and insight into the needs of humans, brings the reader up out of the 'Great Sadness' to a point where they can meet God and see him(or her in this case) for what he really is. A living, loving God who uses the evilness of humans and their sins for his greater purpose.

Young's fresh twist on storytelling, using an early climax to plunge the reader into the story and then bring them slowly back to hope, is not only ingenius but so very lifelike. Reality is often a crisis than occurs out of nowhere and then the slow recovery from that crisis. Young captures reality to its fullest.