A few years back, my friend Mike McMullen and I were
driving to Oklahoma for a seriously incorrect weekend of eating, drinking, and
shooting, when Mike posed a question. He asked if I had time to take a look at
a novel he was working on.
An
engineer by profession and an outdoorsman by inclination, Mike did not strike
me as a would-be novelist.
“What’s
it about?” I asked. “We’ve got another hour so. We can just talk it through.”
“Well,”
said Mike shyly, “it’s about this concealed-carry expert. One night he’s out
walking his dog, and he runs into a . . . uh . . . uh . . . he runs into a . .
. Martian.”
“A
Martian!” I laughed. “Stop right there. Don’t send me your book. In fact, don’t
tell me another word. Start the novel over.”
“What
should my guy run into then?” Mike asked defensively.
“How about a Muslim terrorist,” I
suggested. And so was born The Hunt,
a political thriller from Permuted Press available December 10 wherever you buy
books. Or, for a collector’s item signed by both Mike and me, check out
TheHuntBook.com.
What prompted me to embark on a novel
was the research I had recently been doing on the increasing failure of young
males in academic settings. I cite Kansas as an example here only because the
Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) does a good job of testing its
students and making test results available.
Last year, in the best performing
public high school in Kansas, 45 percent of the school’s tenth graders
tested not proficient in the English Language Arts. In the
worst performing school, an incredible 97 percent of the tenth graders tested
not proficient. In the average suburban high school, inevitably considered
“excellent” by town boosters, 60 to 80 percent of the students failed to reach
the low bar of proficiency in language arts.
The KSDE does not break the scores out
by gender, but if it did, the boys would be the ones pulling the numbers down.
They pull the language numbers down wherever tested.
High school failures lead to underperformance
in college. In 2018, for instance, females earned nearly 59 percent of all the
academic degrees awarded in the United States. The Department of Education
expects the trend to continue. By 2027 women are projected earn 151 college
degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men.
One major reason for male failure is the
effete dreck boys are assigned to read in schools. A recommended high school
reading list from the library in Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent
Washington suburb, speaks to the problem everywhere. Some samples:
In Will Grayson, Will Grayson,
two teens with the same name, one gay and one straight, accidentally meet.
Hilarity ensues.
In The Wee Free Men. A
young witch meets up with six-inch-high blue men and the Queen of
Fairyland. The author, a self-described British “humanist,” is an
associate of the “National Secular Society,” an organization “explicitly
created for those who reject the supernatural.”
Struts & Frets is the first book by Jon
Skovron. His second book, Misfit, is described by Kirkus as
“a diabolically delightful paranormal about a teen girl discovering her inner
strength and power — and her potential for darkness.”
Nine of the twelve books on the Montgomery
County list were written by women. Eight of them have female protagonists. None
of the three books written by male authors offers boys anything like guidance
on how to become men, and all three serve up something to offend any kid who takes
his faith seriously. It is no wonder that girls today are an incredible ten
times more likely to read a book on their own than boys.
It doesn’t have to
be like this. When I enrolled in high school, I was assigned a reading list for
the summer before class began. I still remember many of the books I was
assigned— Call of the Wild, Annapurna, Kon-Tiki, Red Badge of Courage,
Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, Huckleberry Finn.
Not only did the
books hold our attention, but they also instructed us boys in the virtues
needed to become men. We saw examples of courage, of resourcefulness, of
perseverance, of teamwork. True, I had the advantage of attending an all-boys
high school, but even in co-ed schools there is no good reason to shield boys
from reading books they might actually profit from reading.
One
reason I rejected the man vs. Martian scenario is because kids today are
saturated with fantasy scenarios. Another, of course, was the financial
underperformance of Cowboys vs. Aliens, a movie whose very title
condemned it to failure.
Good
male fiction hinges on plausibility. For that reason I recruited Mike into the
writing project. I may be an Eagle Scout, but Mike goes elk hunting in
Colorado, where the novel is set. To work, male fiction has to be technically perfect. An
author cannot Google his way to credibility.
Mike
also has two sons, now both U.S. Marines. In the Hunt, we
tell the story of a recently widowed father, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan,
who takes his adolescent sons on an elk hunt only to discover they are the ones
being hunted. The hunters are not Martians. They are Muslim terrorists in
league with Mexican drug cartels. Political correctness, of the sort in which
movies now abound, subverts real story telling.
We submitted the
book for early review to people who knew their way around the wilderness. Said
one retired U.S. Army colonel, “The Hunt is an all-to-plausible action-packed
story of perseverance, fatherhood, duty, self-sacrifice and redemption.
Real-life application of military skills learned the hard way. Mike and Jack
have winner of a tale that keeps the pages turnin’!”
Virtue does not
come naturally. It is learned. And a novel can still be a good place to learn
it.