One of the most striking moments in my recent conversation with Candace Lynn Talmadge did not begin with politics, institutions, or even fantasy.
It began with the body.
At one point in our exchange, I offered a familiar metaphor: the body as a garment worn by the soul. Candace Lynn resisted that framing. Not because she denied the reality of the soul, but because she believed the metaphor was too thin. The body, she said, is not merely a disposable covering. It is an anchor.
That word stayed with me.
An anchor does not define the whole self, but it roots the self in a particular reality. It gives form, location, consequence. It binds freedom to place. In the interview, I found myself thinking about a Mexican Sunflower my wife had planted in a small pot. It had grown tall, unexpectedly tall, and wide - and was blocking our access to the back yard. So I moved it, without realizing I was tearing its roots, which had gone down into the earth beneath it. What looked portable had already become planted. When those roots were torn, the plant wilted almost immediately.
That image now feels like more than a gardening anecdote. It feels like a diagnosis of modern life.
We live in a time that prizes abstraction and scale. We debate systems, nations, ideologies, markets, and technologies. We speak in terms of platforms and structures. But Candace Lynn’s language points in another direction first: toward the anchored self, the embodied soul, the inner life from which all outer life radiates. If the roots are damaged, the visible organism begins to fail. If the soul is ruled by fear, denial, and self-judgment, those distortions do not remain private for long. They externalize. They institutionalize. They become social reality.
That is one of the deepest insights beneath Candace Lynn’s Stone Slayer series, and it is why this is not merely an author interview, nor merely a discussion of fantasy. It is an inquiry into how civilizations break down—and how healing begins.
The outer conflict mirrors the inner one
Candace Lynn put it plainly in our conversation: the cycles we see in communities, nations, and the world reflect what is happening within individual souls.
That is a serious claim. It is also an unfashionable one.
We are accustomed to explanations that move in only one direction. We are told that politics shapes consciousness, that institutions shape behavior, that economics shapes belief. There is truth in all of that. But Candace Lynn reverses the lens without denying any of it. She asks us to consider that collective life is not only structural. It is also spiritual and emotional. Public disorder does not emerge from nowhere. It gathers force through accumulated fear, alienation, falsehood, and unresolved injury.
In Stone Slayer, the demon is not just an antagonist placed into a fantasy world to move the plot along. It represents something more unsettling: the way unhealed wounds scale upward into domination, corruption, and destruction. The external battle and the internal battle are not separate stories. They are the same story seen from two vantage points.
That idea resonates well beyond fiction. In recent years, researchers across disciplines have documented the civic effects of inner and relational fragmentation. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has described loneliness and isolation as a public health crisis with far-reaching consequences for trust, belonging, and social cohesion.[1] In a different register, psychologist Dan McAdams’ work on narrative identity has shown how the stories people construct about themselves help shape how they live, act, and endure.[2]
Candace Lynn’s argument is not reducible to either public health or psychology. Her framework is more openly spiritual than that. But the overlap matters. We are, in fact, story-bearing creatures. And our private fractures do not stay private.
The stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live
One of the most compelling threads in my discussion with Candace Lynn was her language about vows, denials, and self-judgments.
She described these not as passing thoughts, but as deep internal conclusions—often old, often hidden, often formed in fear. “The feelings,” she said, “are little stories that we tell ourselves.” Those stories can harden into inner laws. I can never stand on my own. I can never trust my heart. Love is not real. The conscious mind may outgrow those statements, but the deeper self may still be living inside them.
That idea helps explain why people so often recreate the very patterns they say they want to escape. It also helps explain why societies do the same.
A culture shaped by unexamined fear will normalize control. A people formed by humiliation will be tempted by cruelty. An institution ruled by denial will eventually require falsehood to survive. Before systems become oppressive, they are usually justified by stories. Before stories become public, they are usually rehearsed within persons.
This is one reason exile is such an important theme in Candace Lynn’s work. Exile is not only geographic. It is spiritual and psychological. A person can be exiled from a homeland, from a community, from a family, or from their own worth. And once that fracture enters the inner life, it can become a lens through which everything else is interpreted.
Candace Lynn’s heroine Helen, and the generations that follow her, do not simply confront danger “out there.” They confront the vulnerability created by self-limitation within. Their struggle is not only to defeat evil but to stop cooperating with it at the point where self-hatred, fear, and false belief make them susceptible to it.
This is what makes Candace Lynn’s fiction morally interesting. Her characters are not fighting cardboard villains in a morally weightless universe. They are trying to become whole enough to act truthfully.
Evil wants control; love requires responsibility
Another phrase from the interview deserves to travel well beyond it: responsibility means responding to your ability.
That is one of the clearest definitions I have heard in a long time.
Candace Lynn uses it to mark the difference between domination and stewardship. Evil, in her telling, wants control. It wants possession, coercion, totality. Love does not operate that way. Love acts, but it does not usurp reality. It does not pretend to omnipotence. It responds faithfully within the scope of what is actually possible.
That distinction matters because wounded people often swing between two distortions. They either deny responsibility entirely, or they assume responsibility for everything. Both are forms of disorder. Both can arise from fear. And both can render a person ineffective.
In the interview, Candace Lynn shared a simple real-world example: witnessing a car accident and doing what was within reach—offering shelter and care to the children until help arrived. Not saving the world. Not controlling the whole outcome. Responding to the ability that was there.
That is a needed ethic for a time of overload and spectacle.
Our public life trains us toward performative omniscience. We are invited to have a total opinion, total outrage, total allegiance, total blame. But the human person is finite. Moral seriousness does not require pretending otherwise. In fact, one could argue that many of our collective pathologies are worsened by people who confuse visibility with responsibility and control with care.
Candace Lynn’s contrast between the demon’s domination and her heroines’ struggle toward right use of power is therefore more than fantasy architecture. It is a moral anthropology. It asks what kind of power heals, what kind corrodes, and whether a person can be trusted with influence if they have not reckoned with the wounds that shape their use of it.
Why fantasy can tell the truth more directly than realism
There are truths that direct prose can state, but not fully carry.
That is where fantasy matters.
Candace Lynn Talmadge is writing high fantasy, yes. There are demons, political struggles, reincarnated souls, contested powers, and a world shaped by ancestry and conflict. But to call Stone Slayer escapist would be to miss the point. The genre is doing something realism often cannot do cleanly: it renders spiritual, emotional, and civilizational realities visible by giving them form.
Exile becomes a bloodline and a political condition. Inner division becomes outer warfare. Control becomes a demon. Healing becomes a struggle not only of ideas but of energy, courage, and soul.
Fantasy, at its best, tells the truth sideways so that we can finally bear to look at it straight.
That is especially important in a time when direct speech is often flattened into slogan and counter-slogan. Symbolic narrative can recover depth. It can hold contradiction. It can portray generations, consequences, wounds, and hope without reducing any of them to propaganda.
Candace Lynn’s Stone Slayer series is working in that register. It is spiritually charged, politically alert, emotionally serious, and unafraid of darkness. But it is not darkness for darkness’s sake. Beneath the struggle is a stubborn insistence that healing is possible, that self-judgment need not have the last word, and that even long-carried wounds can be named, faced, and released.
A final word—and a recommendation
What stayed with me most after this conversation was not simply Candace Lynn’s cosmology, though it is distinctive. It was the moral architecture beneath it.
The body is an anchor.
The inner life is not sealed off from the world.
The stories we tell ourselves become social consequences.
Control deforms.
Responsibility clarifies.
Healing within and justice without belong to one another.
That is a serious set of claims. It is also, I think, a timely one.
If you want fantasy that wrestles honestly with exile, mixed identity, institutional corruption, generational struggle, spiritual warfare, and the difficult work of becoming capable of love, Candace Lynn Talmage’s Stone Slayer series deserves your attention. It is not fantasy as retreat. It is fantasy as revelation.
And in an age of shallow explanations, that may be one of the most necessary things a story can offer.
Candace Lynn’s books are available through major online booksellers, and you can learn more at Candacelynntalmadge.com.
References
[1] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
[2] Dan P. McAdams, “The Psychological Self as Actor, Agent, and Author,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (2013): 272–295, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612464657
Sneak Peek
Next on Created in the Image of God, the conversation turns from fantasy, healing, and spiritual warfare toward two other frontiers where inner life and outer reality meet.
On Sunday, September 20 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Christopher Benek—pastor, author, and thought leader on artificial intelligence and faith—about how emerging technology is reshaping human life, and the spiritual and ethical questions Christians should be asking in response. From digital culture to human flourishing, it promises to be a timely conversation about what it means to remain deeply human in a rapidly changing technological age.
Then on Tuesday, September 22 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Kutter Callaway—theologian, author, and cultural critic—to explore the relationship between theology and contemporary culture, and the ways film, television, and technology shape how we understand ourselves and our faith. If story is one of the great vehicles for truth, this will be a rich discussion about the spiritual questions hidden in the media world around us.
In the meantime, if you have not yet explored Candace Lynn Talmadge’s Stone Slayer series, I encourage you to do so. It is serious, searching fantasy—less an escape from reality than a symbolic return to its deepest conflicts.
