Book: The Vault Between Spaces

The Vault Between Spaces, by Chawna Schroeder

I read this book some time ago, and did so again for this review, kinda hoping my earlier negative opinion may have been wrong and unfair. It wasn’t.

Cringe 

It’s there, though for most of the book it’s not bad. Some characters speak in a stilted manner, and the big final fight is little more than a series of deus ex machinas, where the “good guys” find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbers but then start singing, which causes the bad guys to act like they’re in pain, and that ends up turning the tide of the various skirmishes. But the book’s big problem isn’t cringe, but something else, something that comes closer to openly insulting the reader.

Characters

One of the author’s strengths is in making characters. For much of the story, Gareth could have been one of my favorite male characters in the Christian books I’ve read. Oriel starts off as annoyingly perfect, apparently able to do whatever she wants no matter what anyone else does to stop her, but that changes. 

I’ll give the author credit for a good amount of creativity in world-creating and world-building. Finally, it’s no small thing that a Christian book should be fairly unapologetically Christian instead of trying to sneak in Christian ideas on the sly.

The Unexplaineds

The story does have one big annoyance, outside of the scene I mentioned at the first: it doesn’t explain some very important things.

One example of this is Wallace.

Wallace’s name appears one time, and Gareth talks about him one time, yet what happened with him is very important.

The shutters closing off Gareth’s soul crumbled, revealing dark pools of unbridled pain. “I wanted to believe them. That I would never leave. That I belonged here.”

Lightning flashed within Jaki’s eyes. “You believed Creator had dismissed you just as Sarish had.” 

“Because I cannot regret what I did. How, yes, but not what.” He dragged a hand across the rough post of the gate. “Every time it ends the same. Wallace had found the gateway. He was on his way to tell Levioth.” Gareth’s fingers dug into the post. “I tried to talk him out of it. Did you know that? But he just laughed. Mocked you . . . the Ishir . . . Creator.” 

“And you killed in the rage of man rather than in the righteousness of Creator.” 

“I was supposed to be the Prince of Guardians. I knew better—and didn’t care.” Gareth stared at HopeWell. “I deserve this.” His voice broke.

The Vault Between Spaces (p. 115)

When the story begins, Gareth is in a prison camp, and has been there a long time, maybe even a couple of decades. He’s there because he killed someone, apparently this Wallace.

Who was Wallace? We get hints, but nothing more. He may have been a guardian, since Gareth says that he himself was suppose to be The Prince of Guardians, but even that’s unclear. He may have been a traitor, someone who was good but then went over to the bad side.

What happened between Gareth and Wallace? We don’t know, except that Gareth ends up killing Wallace. Did they fight? Why did Gareth have to go to such extremes to keep Wallace from telling Levioth about this gateway?

This is one of the matters that I would have liked to know more about, and that I think would have made the overall story better.

And there are other, similar unexplained things. What happened between Gareth and Juliet before he went to prison, when they were close, even engaged to be married to each other? What did Juliet’s father do to her, and why does that make her hate Witless? How did Witless, or Iris as she is later called, even come to be in the first place, with the implication that she was is some kind of half-breed between human and Ishir, a race of powerful spiritual beings? What is a Jewel, and how does a person become one, especially since Iris seems to have been born one?

These are important questions, as they would help explain certain character’s reasons for their actions. We readers need more than just hints, we need answers.

The scene

But even with those problems, I’d probably still have thought this was a good story, but there is one scene that ruins the whole thing.

It happens in chapter 28, about 80% into the story. Oriel has returned to the Vault, trying to save Gareth’s life, and has apparently failed to do so (don’t worry, he has strong plot armor). Levioth shows up in the vault. Oriel and Levioth talk, and Levioth demands something from Oriel, the key to the Bottomless Regions.

Understand, at this point, Levioth cannot get this key by herself. In this vault, she has no power to get what she wants. She can’t threaten Oriel or anyone else in order to force Oriel to give this thing to her. She doesn’t even try to play on Oriel’s grief over Gareth’s dying to try to twist her thinking and con Oriel into giving her this key she needs to unleash hell of earth.

Levioth is stuck. If Oriel simply refuses, Levioth is defeated.

Oriel gives this key to Levioth.

This is stupid on at least two levels.

First, the last 20% of the book is Oriel, the still alive Gareth, and their companions and allies now running around trying to prevent Levioth and her allies from using the very thing Oriel gave her in the vault. The whole big final battle is them trying to prevent this great catastrophe. It’s little more than all of them trying to undo what Oriel did in this one scene.

None of it needed to happen.

Oriel’s actions make no sense. She knew what would happen if she gave this key to Levioth, and she was not in any way forced to give her that key; yet, she does it, anyway.

But that’s not the worst part, because…

Second, God was happy with Oriel that she gave Levioth the key.

“Oriel.” He (Gareth) waited for her to lift her eyes to him before continuing. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Creator is pleased.” 

“Pleased? But—” 

“You passed His test. You relinquished power, obeying rather than controlling.” His mouth twitched, trying to hide a grin. “In fact, He’s gloating right now over His victory through you.”

The Vault Between Spaces (pp. 205-206)

And later…

Gareth opened his mouth to respond, but Oriel glided forward and spoke before he could. “I am responsible, Sarish. I gave her the key.” A thread of smoke coiled through her flames. 

“Gave? With the blood moon less than two days away?” An electrical charge snapped and crackled around Sarish. 

Gareth stepped in front of Oriel. “As the Key of Everything and Protector of the Vault, Oriel understands perhaps even better than you, Sarish, the potential repercussions of her actions—actions, I might add, Creator approved.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, his last words for her benefit as much as for Sarish’s.

The Vault Between Spaces (p. 218)

Where to even begin?

Oriel is some kind overseer and protector of this vault, so she also protects the contents of this vault. That is her responsibility, her duty.

And God is somehow pleased that she did not do her job, that she did not do her duty? That she chose not only to not do her duty, but to hand over these keys to someone who is clearly going to use them to do something evil?

It is one thing to say something like Joseph said to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Genesis 50:20. The Bible has many accounts of God bring good from evil acts, perhaps none more powerful than the death of Christ, an example of human injustice and cruelty that God made into the sacrifice for our sins

But it is something else to say that God approves and even brags about those evil acts. Could you image God bragging about Judas and how he betrayed Jesus? God boasting about David’s infidelity with another man’s wife, then having her husband killed? God being pleased as punch when Aaron built the golden calf and told Israel to worship this false god?

What Oriel did was wrong. She was suppose to protect this vault and what was in it. She failed in her duties. To not only have her fail, but to then say that God is pleased that she failed, is insulting, perhaps even bordering on blasphemy.

And please don’t try to excuse it because it’s a story, a work of fiction. Yes, it is a story, it is fiction, but it’s also giving us messages, it’s telling us things. And one thing this story is saying is that God does not expect his rules to be obeyed, and is even pleased with the people who don’t obey his rules or do what he tells them to do.

That’s a messed-up message.

Ponderings

Creativity can be good: This stories creative is one of its strong points.

Characters are still important: There are stories that can be good based on a premise and what happens in the story, where the characters themselves don’t necessarily need to be eye-catching. One example I can think of is The Call of Cthulhu, where the characters aren’t over well-developed, but they don’t need to be the focal point as the mystery of all this strange stuff happening is the focus of the story.

Still, most often characters are one of the big draws in our stories. We want to see characters grow and change, even if it is change for the worse.

Motivations: One of the biggest things to consider is why characters do what they do. If a character comes to a fork in the road, we need to have some kind of reason why they went left instead of right, and we usually need a better reason than “Something deep inside of him told him he should go left”. That’s one of this story’s big failings, because motivations are not always clear.

God as a character: I admit, I struggle with having God as a character in a story, or even how to portray responses to prayer in stories.

One problem can be that God can become a deus ex machina, where a character gets out of all his troubles because God does something to get him out of them. That’s what happens in this story, especially the final fight.

Prayer may seem to be an out, as a character can just ask God to do something and that means he can do it, but even that doesn’t really work. Do any of us really get prayers answered the way we want them to? Sometimes, maybe, but I’d guess it rarely happens that way. God is not some kind of vending machine, where we insert prayer-coins and can expect to get the expected candy bar of an answer.

This kind of thing needs to be done with greater care than I’ve seen it done in many stories.

Conclusion

It’s a shame that one scene could ruin an otherwise good story, but it’s a shame that’s on the author and publisher of this story. They should have done better.