Are Dan Brown's 'Wonderfully Thrilling' Novels ... Ghostwritten?
by Randall Carter Gray
As we await Dan Brown’s next guaranteed to be best-selling novel (nearly two years late), which this time will do a number on the Hebrew portion of our Bibles, we predict, we’ve been wondering what the holdup is with Not The Solomon Key, a working title which reportedly has been dropped. It could actually be coming up with a title for Brown’s fifth book, which will deal with the wholesomely kooky hi-jinks associated with Freemasonry.
Or, perhaps Lucifer, that stickler, just won’t let go of those galley proofs.
If a title is the problem, we have a couple of suggestions. How about: “Where In The World Is John?” or “The Disciple Whom Jesus Forgot” or “The Ghostwritten Code” or “Lady Sheba’s Lover” or “The Ethiopian Messiah That Never Was” or “My Goat-Footed Gal” or “Men In Aprons” or “Is That An Obelisk, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?”
None of those? Well, some of those are rather esoterically vague. We will come back to them and tell you how we came up with them, later on in the series Christian Heroes and Villains if you care to read about it. How about “Will The Real John And Mary Please Stand Up” or “Look Out! That Floating Hand With No Arm Has A Knife … Code” or “Passover At High Noon”?
You like “The Ghostwritten Code”? We do, too. Everybody uses ghostwriters. As for us, we use the Holy Spirit.
Also while we’re waiting for what could be called “Is Nothing Sacred, Part Deux,” which we believe like the first four of Brown’s books may also be gang ghostwritten, we’d thought we’d kick around the nature of secrets and clubs which kids who are up to no good will often form. Remember those?
When you were a little kid, did you ever have a circumstance in which you found yourself being told by someone older and “wiser”: “Hey, you want to be in our club? But if you join, you can’t tell anybody what we’re doing … or you get beat up”? Or a situation where someone, someone older, past the age of discretion, meaning 14 or 15, wanted to pull down your pants … and did, and then said after it was all over, with fear on his or her face said, “You can’t tell anyone, okay? It’ll just be our little secret.”
Things that seem pleasurable followed by those words … are paradoxical … and disorienting. They twist you. Make you feel guilty without really knowing why … or without trying to know why. This is the silent trauma that children experience when an adult figure, or perceived adult, sexually violates a child … which often resulting in mental illness due to unprocessed shame and guilt. Things that are bad for you usually lead to someone having to keep a secret. We know this having majored in psychology and having had a lifelong interest in human evil … and what it is.
Secrets are kept secrets for a reason. Because letting the cat out of the bag undoes the scheme that the big schemer behind the whole thing has cooked up. Secret clubs and groups, which by their very nature have contempt for other average folks, outsiders, are nefarious by nature, not to be trusted, suspicious. Weird.
It would take a lot to get me to put on an apron and say a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and do all these secret handshakes and rituals. I wouldn’t do it. I’d look at someone and laugh and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Whaddya think I am, some kind of fruitcake?”
Also, while we’ve been waiting, we’ve been wondering how many people does it take to write and write fairly readably well … outright blood-curdling blasphemy?
How many heretics does it take to screw in a best-selling novel?
And who funds blockbuster films … that bash the Redeemer of mankind, unless they don’t think he is … and don’t, not because they have a death wish, but because they think they have a really, really good reason not to, some alternative information, some secret inside knowledge, which these secretive wizened people claim to have, which allows them to sleep at night? Suckers.
The truth trumps that nonsense all day long … and dishonest people obviously don’t know that, so they keep signing up and joining, even if they say, “If you tell anybody, we’ll have to beat you up.”
Having said all of those things … we believe Dan Brown has had and still has ghost writers … of a supernatural nature. A whole upper room full of them. Ha ha ha ha ha. In fact, he might not be writing a single word of what is being put out under his name. Just a hunch. But we think we have some reasons to be suspicious. Ghosts can slip in and out and make edits when you’re not looking with great stealth and skill. Ask John Mark.
Consider the following quotes by the golden boy of fiction at the moment — and maybe from here on — which appear on his website and which ran in a self-promoting flyer in an April 2003 edition of Bookpage, with softball questions (Words in parentheses are mine):
“My interest in secret societies is the product of many experiences, some I can discuss, others I cannot. (Oooo.) Certainly my research of organizations like NSA, the Vatican, NRO, and Opus Dei continues to fuel my intrigue. (Why? Been there, done that.) At a more fundamental level, though, my interest sparks from growing up in New England, surrounded by the clandestine clubs of Ivy League universities (Of course it does, dahling), the Masonic lodges of our Founding Fathers, and the hidden hallways of early government power. (Oooo.) New England has a long tradition of elite private clubs (That would explain the leather patches on the elbows of his sports jackets. Sorry), fraternities, and secrecy. On that theme, the next Robert Langdon novel is set deep within the oldest fraternity in history … the enigmatic brotherhood of the Masons.”
Maybe we’re being to hard on the former actor. We actually think Dan Brown is being taken advantage of. Elitists don’t have to be on their toes always, which explains the presidency. And so they can afford to be less discerning. They are easy prey for elitist spooks, who lure you into their private clubs … pull down your pants or suck the blood out of you. Consider these quoted remarks from the same article, generated presumably as an ad by Doubleday:
“I first learned of Da Vinci’s (that would be … Leonardo’s, Dan. Otherwise what you’re calling him is “Of Vinci,” instead of by his name) affiliation with the Priory of Sion when I was studying art history at the University of Seville” (There is no proof Leonardo was affiliated with any such organization), Brown says in a telephone interview from his home in New Hampshire. “One day, the professor showed us a slide of ‘The Last Supper’ and began to outline all the strange anomalies in the painting (Keen! What a great reason for a hatchet job on Jesus, except it was been repainted, as we will suggest and adequately defend, we think, in part two, or will it be three? Anyway …). My awareness of Opus Dei came through an entirely different route and much later in my life. After studying the Vatican to write Angels & Demons, I became interested in the secrecy of the Vatican and some of the unseen hierarchy. Through that, I also became interested in Opus Dei and met some of the people in it.” (Did you? Good, Dan, that’s the way research works.) “One of the aspects that I try very hard to incorporate in my books is that of learning” (Hmm. You mean, teaching?), he says. “When you finish the book — like it or not — you’ve learned a ton. (A ton? You mean like a totally humongous amount, Dan?) We should lighten up. Dan has been made too much of a victim as it is.“I had to do an enormous amount of research [for this book]. My wife is an art historian and a Da Vinci fanatic (Wow! … why?). So I had a leg up on a lot of this, but it involved numerous trips to Europe, study at the Louvre, some in-depth study about the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and about the art of Da Vinci” (You mean, Leonardo … again).
“For some reason, I was a good math student” (Intelligence?), Brown says, explaining his involvement with codes and symbols. “And language came easily. Cryptology and symbology are really fusions of math and language. My father is a well-known mathematician. I grew up around codes and ciphers. In The Da Vinci Code, there’s a flashback where Sophie recalls her grandfather creating this treasure hunt through the house for a birthday present. That’s what my father did for us. …
“I am fascinated with the gray area between right and wrong and good and evil. Every novel I’ve written so far has explored that gray area.” He reveals that his next novel will deal with “the oldest and largest secret society on earth” and with “the secret history of our nation’s capital.” (Hasn’t National Treasure been done? “Let’s do it again, the boss says to”). Evil is bad, um-kay.
Brown concedes that turning Christianity’s most fiercely held beliefs into fictional fodder may spark some controversy. But he says it’s a risk worth taking (He says he’s a Christian, which we become not to take risks, I think). “I worked very, very hard to make the book fair to all parties (You lying twit). Yes,it’s explosive. I think there will be people for whom this book will be — well, ‘offensive,’ may be too strong a
word. But it will probably raise some eyebrows.”
Christian heretics, people who claim to be Christians, but who are opposed to Christianity and Jesus, are liars, in our view, and have a tendency to make up spiritual things pertaining to Jesus. I don’t think it’s because they’re retards, either (not entirely), but because they have these secrets … and they think they’re right in what they know about Jesus. They know things, or they think they do, which we don’t, and they don’t want us to know. (Like Rome thinks it killed the right sacrificial lamb.)
Why? Why would anyone be so bold if the enemies of God, who are crafty but themselves deceived, aren’t behind such a scheme? All of this garbage smacks of a movement, an organized campaign, as evidenced by heresies of the past, some of which just rolled on like waves, perpetuated by weirdoes, like the bogus Prester John sagas, spread out from the 11th century to the 17th.
The people who tell the initiates these secrets must have said, “Okay, now don’t tell anybody. The only way that anyone gets told any of this stuff, is if they join the club, too,” which usually involves inappropriate behavior; it must, why hide it, otherwise? Once you’re in and way in, they tell you in so many words … “If you tell anyone, we’ll have to kill you.” How good is such knowledge, if it is held back from other people who might be helped by it? How good is it and how good is the organization that would kill you … if you spoke about it? Not too damn good, in my book.
Also, it has been suspiciously disingenuous of the church in Rome to have cried crocodile tears, very apparently, in its reaction to The Da Vinci Code, when the truth, very apparently, it seems to me, is that Brown’s book only supplements the heresy of which the church of Rome is itself guilty and has been for years.
I’ve always had a problem with the religious institution which killed Jesus wanting to be in charge of the church of Jesus … and doing such a dreadfully awful job — cases in point being the inquisitions, et al., looking away while priests are diddling boys, corruption, secrecy, and the whole grandeur thing, when Jesus was a Jew, poor as a church mouse, with no place to lay his head, who taught humility and forgiveness and austere living.
Could you get the message of Jesus anymore wrong than they have?
What do you want to bet that this followup book to The Da Vinci Code, which was supposed to be out in 2006 and then 2007, is going through revisions by a committee? When a writer is done … he let’s a book go, because he can’t write it any better. He doesn’t string it out, go past deadline, because he doesn’t want to. You want to be done with a writing project, to write that last sentence. The end. There are groups of people, no doubt very large groups, who have a vested anti-Jesus objective in this property. If you don’t think so, you aren’t paying attention. Or you don’t have angels hovering over you shoulders.
Dan Brown isn’t skillful enough, is he, to have written so elaborately the things he claims to have written. And he has moved in some creepy, evil circles in New England … and creepy, evil people can’t think, obviously … not well enough to save themselves, for starters. But again, we’ve never met Dan. He may be just a big ol’ victim.
It takes a lot of dumb Gnostics to screw in a light bulb. They have to know the light … be the light …
I’ll bet you that Brown’s next novel is a disguised promotion for more of the stuff that he himself has grown up with, Freemasonry being one, his affections for which … are secret, to him and the club of ghostwriters to which we believe he belongs.
To those behind the scenes, who plotted not only the book, but all of this going way, way back … you are so going to … nah. Why ruin the surprise?
Janet Devlin
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