The Story Behind Whisper of the Seventh Thunder
by the author, Larry Brooks
People ask me all the time where I get my ideas. I have two answers. One is for writers, and I usually give it at my writing workshops in context to seizing a teachable moment.
The other is less precise, and much longer.
Story ideas come from somewhere we cannot completely understand. Some intersection of our interests, our fears, our desires, our questions and – this is the mysterious part – something outside of ourselves. Perhaps a calling, maybe a warning, but always a gentle push toward something we might not consider on our own, or even fully understand.
Whisper was like that for me.
Sometimes we pass this off as growth. In the case of Whisper, I’m convinced it was something more.
The core idea of this book came to me in 1978, in the middle of the night. I bolted upright with the clarity of it, then quickly went back to sleep peacefully.
The story emerged nearly 30 years later in the form of a novel, and the space between those two milestones continues to confound and intrigue me.
I actually didn’t write my original idea, and for a couple of reasons.
The first was that I felt the idea was beyond me at the time. That I wasn’t ready for it.
I’d written a bunch of stuff that was, quite deservedly, unpublished, and knew that to tackle a story on this scale required more skill than I possessed, or perhaps that I would ever possess. Also, given the scope, I felt I needed to have already established some equity in the market as a writer, and while that didn’t quite happen to my satisfaction, about 25 years later I knew that after publishing four fairly successful novels it was now or never.
The other reason was that the original idea scared the hell out of me.
I was in my mid-20s at the time, and like many young adults I was exploring my own religious sensibilities and options. I’d been brought up in a church-going home by a well-meaning alcoholic mother and an equally-well meaning Iowa farm boy with a temper and social issues, which created a confusing landscape of spiritual mentoring and modeling.
I was pretty much on my own to figure out who I was and what I believed in that regard. My sister was much better at it – she’s the finest Christian I know – but I continue to struggle with it to this day.
Even though I wasn’t much of a Bible reader, the Book of Revelation fascinated me from the beginning. More accurately, it frightened me, and more than a little.
If you don’t have any beliefs about God or the Bible, then Revelation is a distant or perhaps non-existent book of prophecy that reads like a fairy tale and has been inspiration for more than a few killer movies.
But if you do believe in the veracity of the Bible, this is like your parents telling you that the airplane is going to crash with you in it – this conversation is happening while you’re in the air, by the way – and if you have faith God will save you from the burning wreckage.
The analogies and images from Revelations are not far removed from that metaphoric scenario.
At about the time the initial story came to me – I’m sure this is not a coincidence – I discovered the writings of Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth), who had written several bestsellers that sought to explore and present the prophecies of the Book of Revelation in context to modern times. Lindsey went so far as to interpret the cryptic descriptions related by the author (St. John – though which St. John remains in dispute – who received these revelations from a visiting angel while confined to a cave on the Island of Patmos off the coast of Ephesus, near what we called Turkey today).
Lindsey gave the visceral meat of 20th century visualization to images that, he claimed, John had no meaningful reference for, therefore no other way to describe them than the cryptic, fantastic, ancient verbiage we read today. What John saw as massive flying locust with stingers of death in their tails could be, according to Lindsey, military helicopters spitting lead from a rapid-fire machine gun. Certain kings and prophets and emissaries of Satan were assigned roles in today’s global political landscape, including our own Presidents, and the whole thing suddenly seemed very real, and very terrifying.
In the midst of being enthralled and terrified and challenged by all of this, an idea came to me in the form of a question: what if I novelized the book of Revelation? What if I did in fiction what Lindsey did in a non-fiction way and assigned present-day interpretation to John’s apocalyptic visions as described in Revelations, and then weaved a credible story around them, complete with political and social relevance?
The idea gripped me like a religious epiphany. And so I began to study Revelations, as well as other books on the subject.
My mother and sister thought I had found the Lord, but actually I was trying to research a potential bestseller.
And that’s when I got really scared.
In my study of Revelation I came across two verses of Scripture that would change everything, and would be the basis for a hesitance to the write this story that would last nearly 30 years.
I knew I needed a hook, a McGuffin around which to wrap this story. In searching Revelations for such an idea, those two verses rose up and slapped me into a confused stupor that would became the journey of the writing of this story, both from a literary and personal perspective.
The McGuffin, the hook I had been looking for, was the possible interpretation of Revelations Chapter 10, verse 4, in the midst of a description of what John saw as visions foretold by the voice of what he described as seven thunders. He had already seen and written about visions from seven trumpets and seven bowls, and the seven thunders were the apocalyptic conclusion:
And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I
heard a voice from heaven say, “Seal up what the seven thunders
have said and do not write it down.”
The significance of that stopped me in my tracks for many years.
What could possibly be the rationale behind this Biblical instruction?
The possibilities consumed me, literary and otherwise. I concluded that since Revelations was, in fact, a description of the end of times, that it was the prophesized Armageddon itself, it could be nothing other than the key to knowing when it would happen.
Revelation 10:4 was an apocalyptic timetable. The gateway to eternity.
Or so I chose to believe.
Why else would it be forbidden to commit to print? For us to know and understand? The actual events themselves had been described in detail, albeit from John’s two millennia-old, very human social perspective. John wasn’t told the meaning of anything he saw, he simply wrote down what he saw in these visions, describing it in his own words.
The answer held incredible dramatic potential.
I should state here that my intention and interest was always from a literary experience, rather than a spiritual one. While respectful of the latter, even hopeful for it, it was never my purpose to preach or to evangelize, simply to write a fascinating story that capture the heart and soul of a reader to the same degree the entire landscape of Revelations had captured mine.
I was, and am, the last person who should be writing a book about religion, the Bible or anything close to sheparding folks toward the light. Whisper of the Seventh Thunder is a secular thriller, not a religious book, in the same way that The DaVinci Code is not remotely a “Christian novel.” Nothing wrong with those, it’s just the wrong place in the bookstore to file Whisper.
Given that context, about which I was clear even back then, I began to dig deeper. I started concocting political scenarios on a global scale that would fit with what John had written, and might, in fact, be harbingers of a coming apocalyptic confrontation should things get out of hand.
And in that process I stumbled upon the real deal-changer.
It was another passage from Revelation, this one from the final page of the entire Bible, Chapter 22, verses 18 and 19:
I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book:
If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues
described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this
book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree
of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.
In other words, I’m goin’ straight to hell if I mess with this stuff.
Consider this for a moment. If you don’t believe any of it, then big deal, you keep writing. But I did
believe, and I still do. I was entering dangerous waters, and I would quickly be in over my head.
I then asked myself the question that would trigger the book as I would end up writing it. The one that is published today.
What would happen to me if I actually did write the book as I had planned?
If I tried to faithfully depict the end times according to John’s vision, setting those events in present day?
It was then that a terrifying thought hit me: what if I got it right? What if, in my creative imagination of how the world might descend to an apocalyptic point, I actually – and coincidentally – hit upon the very thing that John was instructed not to write down?
I’d be guessing of course, taking literary liberty… or would I?
I can’t describe the shiver that went up my spine at the moment that specific thought entered my head. It happened thirty years ago, and I remember it like it was this morning.
In fact, a similar chill did hit me this morning when I realized what I’ve done in Whisper of the Seventh Thunder. Not by intention, but by invention in the name of literary license.
But I digress… back to about 1982 now.
I got scared. Scared enough to abandon the idea of “novelizing” the Book of Revelation. Maybe not such a good financial or career move, given that 13 years later two guys named Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins would do precisely that by launching a series of novels called The Left Behind Series, each of which was a runaway New York Times bestseller that in total sold in the neighborhood of 80 million copies.
Guess they weren’t as scared as I was.
It’s interesting to note that LeHaye was an established religious writer and preacher – one wonders if that licenses one to defy the admonitions of scripture – while Jenkins was the hired-gun writer.
Be that as it may, there I was back in the early 80s all conflicted with how to handle this idea.
In quest of help I consulted experts from three realms.
First, I talked to people I knew about the story idea at its most basic level, including the scripture that terrified me and the inherent potential risks. Opinions were polarized from two camps: fervent believers and more casual folks who weren’t sure. The former warned me off my original story, and the latter just shrugged and wanted to quickly change the subject.
I then talked to a couple of ministers, and in direct contradiction (and to their horror), a psychic. Interestingly, they all told me the same thing.
I was warned that dark forces might take an interest in this project. And by dark forces they weren’t referring to greedy publishing types in New York with connections to powerful Sicilian families. No, they feared that elements of a dark spiritual nature might try to intervene, to actually trick me into defying the word of God and write the book as I’d originally envisioned it. Why? Because dark forces would like nothing more than to defy God’s word, or even to upset the apocalyptic timetable.
I remember thinking at the time that this decision point – whether to blindly submit to faith, or follow one’s very human heart in pursuit of earthly success – was the state of the human condition for everyone, even those who aren’t writing a book about it. We are tempted daily, and we decide based on the culmination of many factors, including the strength of our faith.
It was the minister who said this: “You may hear a knocking on a door that you shouldn’t answer. I would proceed with great caution if I were you.”
If I was scarred before, I was utterly, completely terrified now.
I swore off the notion of writing this book and tried to get on with my life. Which in my writing manifested as the beginning of an interest in screenwriting and the development of a bunch of scripts that would, in a roundabout way, bring me to where I am today with this project.
Over the next few years I never completely lost interest in the topic, primarily because of my fascination with Revelation 10:4. I’d never heard it discussed before – though again I must remind the reader that I wasn’t an overly active or even religious person, nor did I ever attend any Bible study in which such a discussion might have gone down.
I can’t say for sure, as I can with the original idea, when the actual premise for what is today Whisper of the Seventh Thunder struck me. But I can say with absolute certainly that it was an evolution of my experience with the original idea, as fueled by the emotion and fear that ended up being attached to it.
That level of terror was too good to waste. There are tens of millions of people who do believe, or want to believe, and an even larger number of people who at least know people who believe.
The concept of the book today.
This is simply stated. Instead of novelizing the Book of Revelation, I wrote a novel about a writer who novelizes the Book of Revelation. A writer who does what I was too afraid – or perhaps respectful of my core beliefs – to do.
Gabriel Stone had always wanted to write about the Book of Revelation in the form of a novel. Life and a successful marriage got in the way, with his very religious wife urging him strongly to not write the book, that it would open the wrong doors and perhaps defy the very word of God himself.
And then she dies. Suddenly, mysteriously, and coincidentally with a phone message he finds after learning of her death, telling him she’d changed her mind about his book and encouraging him to go for it.
Stone soon finds himself the pawn, even the centerpiece, in a battle for the survival and explosive success of his book, which does, in fact, specific precisely what John in the visions of the Seven Thunders, including the final one that he was instructed to never write down.
Gabriel Stone did write it down. And if some people have their way, millions will read it. Meanwhile there are others who get wind of the project and will stop at nothing to block its path to publication, including the complete disappearance of the author and his manuscript.
The fuse has been lit. Gabriel Stone had unwittingly struck the match. And now, it would be up to him to decide the outcome, which just might be the fate of the entire world as we know it.
The scales of his decision would be balanced by very human decisions based on ambition, materialism, fame and even greed, as opposed to the blind faith that Stone had struggled with his entire life.
That is the foundational premise of Whisper of the Seventh Thunder.
You don’t have to believe in either God or the Bible to understand and hopefully be gripped by the story in this novel. You only have to believe that there are some people who will do anything in the name of what they believe – one only has to look as far as the 9-11 tragedy to see that this is valid and current – including taking very human steps to help fulfill the prophecies that reside at the core of their belief system.
It is when those belief systems collide that we must resort to our faith to survive.
Whisper of the Seventh Thunder isn’t so much an apocalyptic thriller as it is a political thriller about the last days leading up to what some might believe to be the ignition of an apocalyptic fuse… all of it with sub-text that some might construe as coming from somewhere other than, and higher than us, as well.
As for me, the writing of this book has solidified my faith through the exploration of it. The road remains long, but as my sister recently told me, don’t sweat the details; just let God be God.
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