When I first glanced at the title Zombie Church by my man Tyler, I immediately recalled the part of Resident Evil 4 where all the monk zombies come out of the abbey grumbling in Latin, chasing you around the graveyard. Or was it priest zombies running out of a cathedral? In any case, the imagery sustains the title and meta-metaphor for his book:

Zombies.

Church.

Yeah, that ain’t right.

Most of you know my deal with Christians – or anyone for that matter – riding the coattails of fads. People use fads to make money rather than masterpieces, so I groaned “not another zombie… whatever” louder than many of you groan “not another vampire… whatever.” However, I know Tyler, know his fascination with all things geekdom (including zombies). Tyler erected a giant retractable screen in his dorm room back in college and mounted a projector over the door. If you set out to watch a cheezy or action-packed or larger-than-life movie, you used Tyler’s room.

More importantly, I happened on the environment he and many of his friends ministered in over the last several years. If anyone has holed up in a little building on some side street, using it as a base from which to pull hit-and-runs with the antidote, it’s Tyler. Eugene Peterson talks about pastors like Tyler in Under the Unpredictable Plant. Tyler stays. He refuses to leave unless, at the last-minute, it might kill his family. Then he’ll move camp. But only then.

To say mixed emotions hit me going into this read feels like the following understatement: I get along okay with books, but only if they visit on Christmas and Easter. Tyler’s my friend, but he’s also a writer. Tyler’s a pastor, but he also went with the zombie thing. Tyler’s a nerd (which covers for the zombie thing), but he also likes cheese a little more than I do (uncovering the zombie thing). This all collided inside me, but I gave him my word to be honest. As a writer who hears encouragement from some of his peers, “Yeah, I liked it!” followed up by a dozen rejection letters and then the dreaded renege from his peers, “Actually, dude, it sucked,” I sympathize with the need for honesty. Here goes:

Zombie Church brings a timely and accessible concept to a larger audience than religious people. Basically, Tyler labels the American church as undead in the 28 Days Later sense. They need an antidote. They claim to have new life, but trudge around undead. Friedrich Nietzche’s said in The Antichrist, “I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.” Tyler tempers what could turn into a rant on hypocrisy through several stories from his pastoral experience, some of them fairly shocking. One pastor called a woman a whore for what she wore into a worship center. I think that jerk was thinking of the other “or” word: poor. Each of these stories slowly builds his case—we live in a post-apocalyptic world, like it or not.

Eventually, I relinquished my zombie-fad criticism. Tyler references older movies like 28 Days Later, Days of the Dead, The Signal, I Am Legend and Dawn of the Dead. Any time he bolsters his filmography with a film directed before the economic crash, he wins over a little more support from me. He even dares to utilize crappy zombie movies like the zombie western Undead Alive.

What bothered me about this book cannot fall on Tyler. As I said elsewhere, passive prose constitutes the biggest problem in “Christian” books. Christian presses or Evangelical spin-offs of the Big Six often publish sentence after sentence of road blocks, forcing us to stumble over be-verbs and haves and have nots and need toos. It gets old. Excuse me, it got old after four years of bible college. Granted, I ran across classics while there, but rarely did “Christian” literature rise to the quality I search for when I read. I turned classicist fast—at least those books stood the test of time for their poignancy and distilled power. I also read a lot of Harry Potter, Americana poetry, Chesterton and Lewis.

But I give Tyler a hall pass for his be-verbs and haves and have nots and need toos.

Here’s why: most people never see their book in a bookstore until they turn thirty. Oh they could self-publish, sure. Tyler didn’t. Granted, no publishing house plucked his query letter out of the slush pile, but that matters little in his case. This guy fought for it. He submitted his book to one of those manuscript submission sites that promises to publish your book if people vote you to the top. Who does that? He might blush when he reads this, but that community voted him up place-by-place, higher and higher until he won.

And then the company published his book.

The cheerleader in me chloroformed the literary critic for this one. Yes, the book has it weaknesses. Yes, it’s technically “Christian lit.” Don’t care. Pride gushes out of me for Tyler. He charged this task head-on and put a book in the stores that he wanted to write. And he did it at twenty-fiveish. Keep an eye out for him in fifteen years. You might hear his name again in the circles that write these kinds of books, as long as he keeps writing what he wants, writing the book that scares him most.

This book would be perfect for:

• young or frustrated pastors
• anyone the church has wounded or burned out
• zombie-holics
• start-up religious writers who need encouragement: yes, you can get published if you grind it out
• people who try to follow Jesus and like fantasy or sci-fi
• religious people contended with business as usual

These people should probably pass:

• lit snobs
• heavy heavy fiction readers who hate nonfiction
• anyone reading closer to the Gladwell end of the nonfiction spectrum than the Maxwell end
• people focused on academic reading lists for advanced degrees

Beyond all that, I think you should support Tyler for publishing long before thirty. Bravo, brother.