By: Phillip Mink
Author Phillip Mink believes the current political environment is so toxic it may be beyond repair. In his view, it may also be dangerous. His novel, The Heathen Paradise, imagines what will happen if the hard Left and hard Right merge into one party, with plans to dominate every conceivable aspect of society. They will destroy anyone who gets in the way.
The idea for this book has been gestating for decades. Mink grew up in a small Mississippi town during the reign of Jim Crow segregation, and all institutions – churches and schools included – were segregated by race. “I couldn’t grasp,” Mink said, “how a society that claimed to follow the New Testament’s vision of compassion could create such a cruel system.”
Jim Crow was worse than cruel. When Mink was 10, the Freedom Summer project was attempting to register Black voters throughout the South. Half an hour from Mink’s hometown, the Ku Klux Klan executed three young men working for the program and buried them in an earthen dam. The State of Mississippi wouldn’t charge killers for murdering a Black man and two Jews, so only the FBI’s intervention gave the victims’ families some small sense of justice.
Years later, Mink took a creative writing course in college, and it brought these events to the surface. He began creating stories set in the fictitious town of Rose, Mississippi. Eventually, he started working on a novel, The Devil, which dealt with human nature’s dark, brutal side. He completed the novel while in law school, and his plans for a legal career were put on hold when the University of Virginia offered him a Henry Hoyns Fellowship in Creative Writing. He worked for several years under the tutelage of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Peter Taylor before moving to Washington, DC, to practice law.
During this time, Mink began reading political thrillers such as The Manchurian Candidate, a genre that fits perfectly with his interest in belief systems’ influence on society. “I came to realize,” he said, that “true believers are society’s most dangerous problem because they will commit unimaginably heinous acts to impose their beliefs on others.” During the Civil Rights era, the entire nation saw firsthand how skin color created a vicious belief system, and any vile act was “acceptable so long as it furthered the believers’ goal of racial segregation.”
Mink saw a similar pattern in college. As a civil libertarian who opposed repressive governments of any kind, he assumed his liberal professors would agree. But he realized they would not give up their Marxist fantasies even in the face of clear evidence of mass murder. For instance, in the 1960s, Mao Zedong imposed the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and “millions died while he pursued his ideological dream.” Nevertheless, Mink’s professors admired Mao for creating a Leninist society. And despite the horrors of the Gulag, his professors hoped against all evidence that the Soviet Union would produce the “nirvana predicted by Marx.”
These two terrifying belief systems – Jim Crow and Leninism – morphed into an idea that became The Heathen Paradise. When Mink started working on the manuscript several years ago, the U.S. political system was functional. But things began to splinter with the 2016 election, and soon Neo-Nazis and white supremacists were parading their beliefs publicly. In fact, Mink said, “I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the Unite the Right rally, a celebration of racism and antisemitism, and it made me realize that the Klan mentality is still alive and well, and so was Nazism.” These events confirmed his concerns about true believers, and he sees that same pattern in the recent explosion of antisemitism.
The main antagonist in The Heathen Paradise, Phelix Blackstock, is consumed with white supremacy and Leninism, and he is planning to install a puppet president so he can slaughter the heathens who dare to question his beliefs. As the plan unfolds, only one person can stop Phelix – Clyde Savage, the half-Choctaw Indian sheriff in Rose, Mississippi, Phelix’s hometown. While pursuing Wallace Slade, a savage, racist thug, Clyde stumbles into the outer fringes of Phelix’s plot. The evidence leads him to conclude Slade is working for Phelix on some kind of devastating plan.
Caroline McCool, a medical doctor, is the only person who will help Clyde in this dangerous pursuit because she is as committed to justice as he is. The two were lovers in the past, and now, as hatred cascades through the nation, they become lovers again as they try to stop Phelix before they both die. In the end, Clyde races through the great Tecumseh County Forest to stop a catastrophe that will end the American experiment.
According to Mink, The Heathen Paradise is a “warning about the nation’s descent into ever-more-vicious politics. I hope we can change before it is too late, and I hope my book can help with that.”
Published By: Aize Perez
