Novelist Melanie Wells Discusses Evil vs. Truth

Written by Paula Parker

First Dylan Foster — a psychology professor and therapist — meets that ghastly pale man at the faculty picnic. Then her mother's engagement ring turns up — the same ring that was buried with her mother two years before. While she is still dealing with these eerie events, she is accused of impropriety with a former patient. After that, things really get weird.

When the Day of Evil Comes is the first novel by Dallas-based writer — and therapist — Melanie Wells. It is a chilling story, blessedly short enough to be read over a weekend  because you're not going to want to put it down until you've finished it.

When the Day of Evil Comes

Interestingly, Melanie did not go to Southern Methodist University to become a writer or therapist; she went to college on a music scholarship. However, she credits this training with being integral to therapy and writing.

"People ask me how I went from being a musician to being a therapist to writing books; but they are actually all the same thing to me.

"My parents were musicians. I was trained as a musician. I grew up knowing how to listen and observe. When you are studying music, you learn how to listen for structure and theme and storyline and resolution — not just of the chord, but also of the theme, the melody, and eventually the piece itself. You learn to listen to the different voices of the instruments, and to develop things over time.

"This is the same set of skills I use in the therapy room — multiple points of view, multiple-partiality — listening for a theme over time, and trying to wrap it up at the end of a session, without writing it all down as you are going. You need to have a visual picture of the structure in your head.

"These are the same set of skills that I use in writing a story. When I'm writing the words — even the paragraph length — it's really important to me, because it is rhythmic, just like the rhythms that I grew up listening to and learning how to play. My training as a musician and as a therapist formed my writing in a way that I can't even disentangle.

"Good writing is writing that you don't notice. A friend of mine was playing principal flute in a difficult orchestral concert. About halfway through the concert, I realized I had forgotten to listen to the flute part, and that's how I knew she was doing a great job. She blended in and her part was almost invisible."

"I think about that a lot when I am writing, for the writing to not be what people notice. The writing should feel like it's inside the reader's head. When they are reading, it should become a part of the way they are thinking about things."

Melanie explains that part of her purpose in writing this book is to alert people to the fact that spiritual warfare is real, and not just for Christians only. "It's like Hurricane Katrina … anytime there is an absence of distress in your life, you become complacent and assume that is the way things are going to be. Then something happens and that rips away the façade; I think we're at risk for this [as] Americans, because our lives are pretty comfortable. New Orleans became like a third world country overnight and suddenly all those people are realizing that there is a lot more going on in the universe that they are normally insulated from.

"I think that is true spiritually too, and as a therapist, it is important for me to expose, not so much the world of demons and angels, but the battle for our hearts and minds. What I deal with most of the time in the therapy room, when I'm working with an individual or a family, is the on-going battle to point people toward the truth."

There are some pretty sinister events that take place in the world of Melanie's book, and she admits that while some of the things were made up, some came from other people's lives, and some happened in her own life.

In one scene, Dylan has an eerie encounter with flies in her home. "That happened to me," Melanie explains. "It was so bizarre; and it happened at a time in my life when I was going through a lot of disastrous things and there were a lot of spiritual … clouds … on the horizon.

"So, I wrote that scene, and about six months later, a friend of mine read it. He told me that he had chills reading that scene because the same thing had happened to him. And I get emails about this scene all the time."

People ask Melanie, "Why Dylan?" She did not appear as someone who would be considered a threat to the forces of Darkness, yet she was attacked.

"Everyone is a threat," Melanie says, "if they are committed to truth. When people ask me, 'Why Dylan?' my answer is, 'Why not Dylan?' Why does God choose us for anything? It's not because we're qualified or because we have something special going on. He's the one that’s qualified; He qualifies us by choosing us.

"I am passionate about the civilian nature of Christian life — I like Dylan because she is so thoroughly imperfect. She's not a cheesy 'I get it all right and I'm going to wrap things up in a satisfying way by the end of the book,' because that is not how it is in life. You're just trying to getting through it the best that you can and that's who Dylan is; she is sort of an equal opportunity heroine."

Melanie states that she didn't want to put Dylan in physical peril as much as she wanted it to be a battle between truth and evil.

Mike and Paula Parker cover entertainment for LifeWay.com from their home in Middle Tennessee. Visit them online at www.wordcrafts.net.