Dr. Bruce Hennigan is a medical doctor who lives and works in Shreveport, Louisiana–and he writes books about demons. (He also took a trip to New Zealand and visited the Hobbit village from the Lord of the Rings movies, for which I’m jealous, but let’s stay on the first subject.) Bruce is four books into a thirteen-part paranormal suspense series that started with The Thirteenth Demon: Altar of the Spiritual Eye, and has worked down to the Tenth Demon: Children of the Bloodstone. He had self-published the first two books on his own before receiving a publishing contract from Strang Communications, the company that publishes Charisma magazine for the charismatic niche of the Christian market. In 2011, when The Thirteeth Demon was rereleased, Strang had launched a publishing imprint called Realms that targeted the science fiction/fantasy/horror segment of the Christian market. Unfortunately (as a friend who used to work for Strang told me), Strang lost faith in the Realms idea before it ever had the chance to get on its feet. Now Realms is back safely in the bonnets-and-buggies segment of the Christian bookstore market, but Bruce is still churning out his novels.
I first met Bruce Hennigan sometime in the early nineties at a Christian writer’s retreat at Tall Timbers camp outside Alexandria, Louisiana. It wasn’t a huge event in terms of attendance, but they had good presenters. One of them, Robert Don Hughes, had published some fantasy novels for the secular market with Del Rey. One of Bob’s novels, The Prophet of Lamath, had a two-headed dragon named Vicia-Heinox. (One head was Vicia, and the other was Heinox.) I had entered The Sign of the Sword into the novel-writing division. It won first place, but there probably wasn’t a huge pool of entrants. I remember Bruce telling us stories about his experiences as a medical doctor. I don’t remember now if they were his entries, or if he just told them to us. One of them, about a young mental patient, sounded like a scene from one of his demon novels. The other story he told us was about a night he worked in a charity ward. Patients included a suicidal child molester from one of the area prisons, a man with a huge tumor, and a vagrant who looked like Santa Claus who was on life support. Bruce’s stories and the way he told them left an impression on me.
Fiction publishing in general is a strange and mercurial animal, and Christian fiction publishing is even more unpredictable because a subject that is taboo one year might be the focus of a bestselling book the next. Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, a novel in which angels and demons fought battles beyond the reach of human perception, was a huge hit in the late 1980s, but Christian bookstores aren’t selling many angel and demon books these days. The closest fairly recent comparison to This Present Darkness I can think of is the I, Frankenstein movie which came out in 2014 and starred Aaron Eckhart. It featured battles between angelic gargoyles and scaly demons, and that was a secular film. I wish Bruce the best in rekindling that Christian sub-segment of the horror genre–or that horror sub-genre of the Christian fantasy genre. Author C.S. Lewis believed there were both healthy and unhealthy kinds of interest in the demonic, and I know Bruce’s goal is to support the healthy kind. (Besides, werewolves are just cool, and he has them in The 12th Demon: Mark of the Wolf Dragon.) These are the second, third, and fourth books in Bruce’s Jonathan Steel series with links to Amazon if you want to explore further.
As a medical professional, Bruce helps people deal with demons of a less dramatic but no less dangerous sort. A few years back, he and pastor Mark Sutton teamed up to write about depression. I’m going to include that link here too, for readers who are facing that particular demon. Writers like Bruce and me are often plagued with bouts of melancholy. Most of the time they’re mild, but they can turn serious, and sometimes medical as well as spiritual guidance is needed. One problem Christians face in some church communities is that people judge depression to be a sign of spiritual weakness, making people reluctant to seek help, and Bruce and Mark address that concern.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Bruce writes next. I’m also curious about what he’s doing with William Shatner on his Facebook page. And Dr. Who. There has to be a story there.