by Anna Vander Wall
What do Bible stories and fairy tales have in common? Symbolic thinker Jonathan Pageau talks about Bible stories as condensed patterns of reality—bare-bones vignettes that represent the truth of God’s cosmos.
In the same way, Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin talks about fairy tales as “essential reality.” Ilyin uses the term “fairy tale” not in the common parlance of something “made up for children,” but instead of something so essentially true that it is easy for children to apprehend. He says that “fairy tales are not fabrications or tall tales, but poetic illumination, essential reality, even the beginning of all philosophy. Fairy tales don’t become obsolete if we lose the wisdom to live by [them]. No, it is we who have perverted our emotional and spiritual culture. And we will dissipate and die off if we lose our access to these tales” (from Nicholas Kotar’s translation of Ilyin’s lecture on “The Spiritual Meaning of Stories”).
What Jonathan Pageau says of Biblical stories and what Ivan Ilyin says of fairy tales might just as well have been told about Jean Hoefling’s newest book, Stones of Fire. Both Bible stories and fairy tales are essential reality waiting to be enfleshed, and that is precisely what Jean Hoefling does in Stones of Fire. Her book draws on the Old Testament tale of Enoch, building out the bare bones of reality with the muscle of deeply developed characters, the sinew of their complex relationships, and the smooth flesh of honey-tongued prose. Hoefling breathes life into the old tales many of us learned by rote in the forgotten corners of childhood that are still with us, waiting to be awakened.
Indeed, Stones of Fire begins with the childhood magic of “Jack the Giant Slayer” combined with the heart-pounding heroism of Beowulf facing Grendel. It’s a rollicking good time. But books written by Jean Hoefling don’t linger long in adolescence. They don’t leave you unchanged. And Stones of Fire is no exception. In it, we follow Enoch, a man “marked by God.” The man whom God marks cannot walk away unscathed.
Enoch, a Sethite elder, lusts for the blood of the Nephilim, giants who are the unholy offspring of human women and demonic powers. Together with his lifelong love, Eeda, he hunts and slays the Nephilim to protect his people. *
One day, Enoch ventures forth without Eeda to slay a giant. To his astonishment, he sees the giant holding a slab of brilliant color and hears the voice of God saying, “I give you the sky, son of Jared… for I have chosen you.” In this moment, Enoch’s life is transformed. Instead of slaying the giant, he steals the slab and narrowly escapes the giant’s murderous wrath with the help of a shining one, who appears when Enoch prays in desperation, though he has never before been pious in anything more than form and duty.
From this moment on, the brazen and prideful Enoch is humbled and comes to rely on God, who takes him into Kairos time. He becomes a man wooed by heaven from earthly concerns, returning at times to prophesy to his people, but taken often from them and the wife he loves. Eeda, meanwhile, grows jealous of God for stealing her husband. The novel explores the aching tension between divine love and earth-bound desire, between God’s inexorable beauty and man’s finite conception of happiness.
We see how every transformation that ensues—over time and through suffering—is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov or Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Through the character arcs of Enoch, Eeda, and other members of their tribe, the reader witnesses the whole scope of human life over time. We see how every change, every loss, and every love transforms the characters in ways that are both surprising and fitting.
Accompanying this journey of transformation is the true hallmark of a Hoefling book —the quality that sets her stories apart from any other title you’re likely to pluck off the shelf: earthiness. In our age of screen-mediated reality, Hoefling gets at something older, something deeper, something purely magical: an unmediated experience of creation, not as we moderns like to think of it (tamed, idyllic, friendly even), but as it is: wild, uncivilized, and gritty.
I cannot conclude this review without a note on Hoefling’s prose. It is like honey on the tongue, sweet as Psalms. A dream presses against the heart “like sap to the fingers, unctuous with meaning,” and the sea is the “blue-green world beneath the surface where sunlight dances in tendrils and the colors of the coral are more numerous than in a dream.” Perhaps more impressive still, the cadence of the language is unbreakably consistent with what we might expect from an Old Testament biblical narrative—a voice that is approachable yet also a voice from a time gone by.
Jean Hoefling is a genie with words, and the drama is engrossing. But the best compliment I can give this book is that it left me wanting to be holy. Through Enoch and Eeda’s transformations, the reader is also transformed. Writers often wonder how to portray goodness without it becoming boring. In the epilogue, Hoefling offers a vision of holiness that is wild, dangerous, and utterly captivating. I read the last word and wanted to be a saint. I closed the book and opened the door of my heart to Anointed One’s persistent, gentle knock.
* For those less familiar, the Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish text expanding on the cryptic Genesis account of the “sons of God” and their giant offspring, the Nephilim.
Anna Vander Wall is an iconographer, poet, and writer of dark academia whose books hint at the secret mysticism of places, relationships, and embodied beliefs. Her readers connect with her quirky iceberg characters while experiencing the inherent transcendence of creation through sacred objects, palpable settings, and the cycle of tragedy and rebirth. By day, Anna is a director at the St. Basil Writers’ Workshop, and by night, she enjoys ballroom dancing, chatting with friends around the fire, experimenting with new baked goods, and walking with her Goldendoodle, Goldberry, while observing the small changes in the trees and sky in her neighborhood. You can find her on Substack at https://annavanderwall.substack.com/ and online at https://vanderwallstudios.com/.