It’s been over ten years since Canadian author Michael O’Brien started working on his epic series of novels, Children of the Last Days. The apocalyptic series includes the best-selling Father Elijah, Strangers and Sojourners, Plague Journal, Eclipse of the Sun, A Cry of Stone and Sophia House. Authors such as the celebrated Sheldon Vanauken and the prolific writer Peter Kreeft have hailed the books as being not only masterpieces of the apocalyptic thriller genre, but also profound examples of the best sort of fiction.
O’Brien, a professional artist since 1970, explained the catalyst for his novels in a recent interview:
“It began one day in the mid-1990’s, when I was visiting the Blessed Sacrament in my local parish. I was praying for the Church. Suddenly overwhelmed by the reality of how many particular Catholic churches in the Western world have been seduced by materialism and have slid into grave sin and error, I was stricken with a deep grief. Though I am not an especially emotional person by nature, I began to weep….a profound weeping and groaning that was more spiritual than emotional. I begged God to purify and strengthen the Church in my land, in all the
Out of this grief, he had a creative vision, one that he attributes to grace. “Without warning or explanation, into my mind there flashed the image of a priest struggling to make sense of his times, confronted by several layers of struggle, both in his interior life and the exterior situation of compromise.”
This priest became the hero of the first novel, Father Elijah, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has become a Carmelite priest. Summoned to the
The other books in the series follow other characters, interconnected by events and spiritual crises that build towards the apocalypse.
Author Peter Kreeft describes O’Brien as, “A superior story teller… worthy to join the ranks of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh and C.S. Lewis.” Indeed, it is hard to read O’Brien’s novels without Lewis’s That Hideous Strength coming to mind.
Apocalyptic fiction is nothing new. The popular but anti-Catholic Left Behind series has topped the best-seller charts more than once. But what O’Brien has done is elevate the genre beyond the hackneyed, cardboard characters of pulp fiction, bringing us real characters and real situations. The moral struggle of the Children of the Last Days series is our struggle, the battle between good and evil that is evident in the events we witness unfolding around us every day, both at home and around the world.
The latest novel in the series is Sophia House, which acts as a sort of “prequel” to Father Elijah, detailing the story of David Schafer, who will later become the heroic priest, Father Elijah Schafer.
O’Brien says, “In Sophia House I’m concerned with how symbols function in the mind and emotions. For example, the damaged symbol of male and female, father and mother. Part of the plot puts flesh on the concept of the power of ‘language’, and the language of symbols is absolutely central to how we perceive and integrate truth and love. If we lose symbolism, we lose our way of knowing things. If we destroy symbols, we destroy concepts. If we corrupt symbols, concepts are corrupted, and then we lose the ability to understand things as they are, rendering us vulnerable to deformation of our perceptions and our actions.”
Sophia House has already received rave reviews. Jewish convert and author Rhonda Chervin calls it “his masterpiece.” Another convert from Judaism, author Marty Barrack, praises O’Brien for “weaving a tapestry of Jewish and Christian themes that emerges as a poetic story of salvation.”
Now that the series is complete, what lies ahead for Michael O’Brien? “I’m back to being a n’er-do-well painter again, and loving it immensely,” he jokes. Fans of his novels needn’t fear, though; O’Brien recently finished the edits on the manuscript of a forthcoming novel, which he describes as “an action-adventure with philosophical-spiritual subtexts”, his first stand-alone work since the Children of the Last Days.
