Walking in the Reign

Here's an interesting detail from An Evil Guest: at one point in the story we encounter a hymn. The protagonist, Cassie Casey, has been talking with an older woman named Margaret who is her new assistant. As I recall, (I don't have the book in front of me so my recollection might be a little off) Margaret has been trying to convince a doubtful Cassie that she (Cassie) can sing as well as act. Cassie either tries to deflect this by asking Margaret to sing, or says she doesn't know any songs off by heart. In any case, Margaret sings a song, entitled "Walking In the Reign," which she knows from church. As is true of many people, that's the main place where she regularly sings, and those are the songs she knows best. The lyrics, to me, made it sound like a fairly recent hymn, something written in the last twenty years or so. Since An Evil Guest is set some time in the future, this would have been a song Margaret had been singing since she was a young woman, one she knew well.*

On reading this I speculated that this might be a song which Wolfe heard and enjoyed at his own church. Well, it turns out that's true, but not quite the whole story. He actually attends church with the songwriter ("hymnist?" "hymnodist?" "hymnographer?"), a man named Rory Cooney. Wolfe had asked for permission to use the lyrics, but still managed to slyly surprise Cooney with his own song at a bookstore reading. The startled-but-delighted hymnodisgrapholomogist, err, songwriter, blogs about the story here.

(via Hoof & Hide)

*Wolfe has included interesting details about people's memories of church before. I recall a story in which a character remembers his father taking him to church, and muses that it had been only as an adult that he had figured out that this was not some timeless thing, but a new or renewed interest on his father's part, stimulated by the 1960s/70s post-Vatican II folk-music-in-church/charismatic/Jesus People movement.