Beneath the Silent Heavens: A Fantasy

Beneath the Silent Heavens reimagines the story of the Flood and the Ark. Enter a world aglitter with the brightness of decadence: generations asunder, forgotten wisdom lapsing into legend, Earth plagued by monstrous otherworldly evil yet seeming to wish its own doom. Here is tale-telling pageantry: epochs (our own among them) whirled together, populated with patriarchs and hipsters, artists, intellectuals, peasants, high rhetoric and hearthside banter, words of passion and of skepticism, and animals who still have the way of speech—all against the backdrop of Noe (the last who hears the animal speech) struggling together with his family against suspicion and violence. With its eerie atmosphere of doom pervading the many times and customs (human or animal) on display, Beneath the Silent Heavens offers a glimpse of “wonder before the sheer prodigality of creation,” a vision of creation as ecological as it is Eucharistic. It is a story of timeless disaster and hope that will delight readers of The Neverending Story and Till We Have Faces.

“In this retelling of the story of the Flood, Brian Moore reaches into the imaginal realm of wonder and presents us with a tale both familiar and strange, delightful and dire, hopeful and tragic. Writing in the great Christian tradition of fantasy pioneered by Tolkien and Lewis, Moore’s Beneath the Silent Heavens nevertheless leads us into new spaces of the Christian imagination, which is, as we know, inexhaustible.”—MICHAEL MARTIN, author of Transfiguration: Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything

“Although our secular age is so often characterized as disenchanted, disconnected from the numinous, we also witness attempts—many misguided, some perilous—to re-enter a world charged with grandeur and framed by the great questions: what is wickedness, what is sacrifice, what is love, what is faith? With melodious prose and marvelous metaphors, Brian Moore guides us through the right doors, tapping the ancient sap of our longing for Eden and probing the trials piqued by a great chain of creation that groans for redemption. He mixes high fantasy and playful comedy, traditional storytelling and novelistic philosophizing. This epic, transhistorical retelling of the Noah story bids us get our houses—and our boats and our Barque—in order. Yet how shall we do so, sobered by our sharing in the ancient Fall whose consequences even the Flood could not cleanse from Earth’s mysterious face?”—JOSHUA HREN, founder of Wiseblood Books, author of This Our Exile: Short Stories