Guest Review: The Gospel According to Lost by Chris Seay

About the book:

An epic journey into the deepest mysteries of faith.

Lost is NOT just a television show. It has become larger than that—a massive story filled with mystery that has garnered over twenty million participants. Some might call them viewers, but one does not just watch Lost, one participates in it. It demands that you dialogue with the story, seeking theories and comparing yourself to characters. Lost breaks all the formulas for television, and in doing so has drawn together millions of people on a shared journey that explores life, faith, history, science, philosophy, hope, and the basic questions of what it means to be human. It is the seemingly infinite ideas, philosophies, and biblical metaphors that make this story so engaging.

Chris Seay's fascinating book explores each of these elements in a spinning analysis of faith and metaphor that will attract a multitude of readers who desire to go even deeper into the journey.

Guest review from my hubby: (Hubby doesn't often review books for me, but I love getting to feature him on my blog. *grin*)

I was recently given a copy of Chris Seay’s “The Gospel According to Lost” to review. I had never read or even heard of Chris Seay, but I was willing to give a fellow Christian Lostie a chance to see what he had to say. I wasn’t expecting any spoilers for the show, but was interested in what Seay had to say about Lost and Christianity. Unfortunately, everything that Seay said was nothing new. It was almost like some college papers I’ve read in the past where students try to make a short topic appear to be deep and insightful.

Seay’s writing style was very clumsy. He tries to joke around on one page, and then tries to sound very deep and insightful on the next. In my opinion, he failed at both. There were several things that were disturbing, the first one being that for a book that is supposed to contain the Gospel, Seay felt it was ok to curse. The curse words weren’t used very much at all, but just the inclusion of them really made me think that Seay is just about sounding hip and not concerned at all about the true presentation of the Gospel.

Another disturbing part of the book is even though the book is called “The Gospel According to Lost,” the true Gospel is hardly mentioned. Part of the Gospel is mentioned, but it’s almost like Seay remembered “Oh yeah, I’ve got the Gospel in the title of my book. I’d better include it.” Instead, his book almost seemed like his own personal contest to see how many thinkers or philosophers he could quote in one book, such as Hemmingway, Oscar Wilde, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The last part of the book that disturbed me was the author himself. He is very arrogant in some parts. In the chapter that is devoted to Kate, he asks “So how could educated people fixate on such a character?” I’m not sure if he’s saying only uneducated people should be attracted to Kate or if educated people that are attracted to Kate should be ashamed. As a Lost fan, Seay even gets parts of the show wrong. Again, in the Kate chapter, he says that “Locke, Ben, Hurly, and even young Walt are all praying that Kate will play Eve to their Adam.”

Seay arranges the book (very clumsily by the way) by devoting a chapter to certain key characters from the show. Each chapter briefly described that character’s story, life challenges, and then tried to connect them to the Bible. Any insight that Seay offered about the characters was obvious to anyone that watches the show. Each chapter stood alone with no overall theme and felt repetitive. All of Seay’s chapters were stretched and felt like he was struggling to make some kind of length requirement.

I found Seay as a poor writer trying desperately to be a cool, young fountain of knowledge. However, after reading through several pages, Seay fell flat in my eyes. I honestly did not learn anything from him, but was more frustrated by the way he presented is ideas, which were more or less just recaps of Lost with a few quotations from great thinkers and a light sprinkling of the Bible. I can’t honestly recommend this book to anyone. I feel that Lost has some great Bibical imagery and doesn’t need any assistance form Chris Seay.

1 Star

**Book was provided free for review through the Thomas Nelson Book Blogger Program.