The Story Behind The Story of the Marsh Boy

Why write The Story of the Marsh Boy?

We’ve made it to the conclusion of The Story of the Marsh Boy.

For those who hung around with me until the end, thank you!

If you’re just joining the newsletter, this is an uncommon type of post as I’ll be explaining some of the behind the scenes of the serial story I that wrapped up in the last issue. You can tap here to read it.

I did get the request to delve into the inspirations and influences that shaped the story, so this post is pulling the curtain back for you.

As I wrote Fightin’ Poseidon, the message I was working towards was getting lost in abstractions. What it means to ‘fight Poseidon’ in the day to day was my way of phrasing how to fight the giants in your life. Even still, it didn’t hit home the way I wanted it to.

Andrew Peterson, who is a singer/songwriter turned author, said, “If you want someone to know the truth, tell them the truth. If you want someone to love the truth, tell them a story.” And so, I dropped Jeremiah and Cole Marsh into a meat grinder to tell their story.

Additionally, I have been pursuing writing for a few years. I first heard about freelance writing back in 2018. In 2020 during the height of madness, I took novelist Ted Dekker’s now-shut-down writing course, The Creative Way, on writing transformational fiction. I followed that up with N.D. Wilson’s School of Fantastical Wordcraft. Several ideas rattled around and had inconsistent starts. Then I got on X (then Twitter), followed a bunch of writing accounts, created a page with BeeHiiv to have an arena for consistency, was inspired by Kristen McTiernan to write serial fiction, and put my hand to the plow. That’s how I landed on writing The Story of the Marsh Boy. But what fueled the content of the story itself?

What Influenced and Shaped The Story?

***Caution: Spoilers Ahead***

If you haven’t read The Story of the Marsh Boy yet, tap here to go to the chapter list and read it for yourself before I spoil some of the surprises.

Ok, ready?

Chapter 1: Grades Aren’t Everything, directly came out of conversations I was having with my son. I was one of those annoying students who didn’t have to study hard to make A’s, and I wanted to encourage my son that it was good to struggle because in the end that’s much more valuable than the A. You learn more. You become more. That’s where The Story of the Marsh Boy started. At first, I was just going to make it a one-off fictional application of that less.

Then I had the idea to add in the loss of Lily, Jeremiah’s wife and Cole’s mother. A mother plays such a huge role in a family, and she’s not a lesser contributor. I’m fact, she plays such an impactful role, I wanted to explore what it would look like for Jeremiah and Cole to continue on in spite of losing her. Jeremiah wanted things in his way and he had heard old stories about healing properties of Tannigath, which is why he took his sick wife out there to begin with. In hindsight, this is an element I should have developed more.

About this time I had been listening to BibleProject’s podcast series on the Chaos Dragon. Before Cole’s bully classmate and neighbor went full dragon, I started working that out in what would become the most popular post I’ve written, Don’t Let Your Young Man Become an Un-Man. The Un-Man is a direct lift from the second book in C.S. Lewis’ Ransom trilogy, Perelandra. Echoes of the Un-Man emerge again chapter 19: Emerald, Amethyst, and Stars Collide when the Tannites soullessly repeat, “Marsh. Marsh. Marsh.” in the same way the Un-Man in Perelandra repeats, “Ransom. Ransom. Ransom.”

David became a special kind of dragon. Yes, this was influenced by the Chaos Dragon series, but I overlapped that with one of my favorite short horror stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H.P. Lovecraft. If you’ve never listened to it, do yourself a favor and click that link, put on some headphones, dim the lights, and get swept up in my favorite Lovecraft story. It is a real treat.

The family name Marsh is taken right out of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. One of the story’s characters, Obed Marsh, plays a central role in the odd happenings in this queer Massachusetts coastal town of Innsmouth. Silas Marsh is one of the playable characters in Arkham Horror: The Card Game from The Innsmouth Conspiracy expansion. Tannigath, the rock where most of the story takes place, is the Marsh boy’s version of Devil Reef, where the horrific monsters worshipped in the moonlight. Except instead of running from the monsters, I took the Marsh family into the heart of them.

The name Tannigath is an amalgam of two words: tannin, which I learned in the Chaos Dragon series was a Hebrew word for serpent, and Gath, which was the ancient Canaanite city of origin for the famous giant, Goliath. In Gath, one of their deities was Dagon, which was also another much shorter story by H.P. Lovecraft. I knew early on that I wanted to tie these stories together.

The Tannites, named after tannin just like the rock, essentially became the monsters of Innsmouth but instead of merely physical, I took them in a preternatural direction. The entire story was on the knife edge of a physical and spiritual realm. It happens at the place where the two cross over. Though I didn’t take this as inspiration, we listened to the Haunted Cosmos episode Who Are the Fair Folk? on a family trip, and literally the Tannites are Lovecraftian eldritch fairies / fae. A repeated event in the story is shimmering lights. The purple light signified passing through one realm to another, as we saw with the nexus and time lapse between the land and the rock, and shimmering green lights which represented characters interacting with the spiritual realm and it having an effect on the physical realm. What happens in the heart plays out in the world. We see this in the singing of the songs as well as the ghostly appearances and interactions with Lily and Old Zeke. In Apkallu’s throne room, we see crimson and purple lights mimicking the emerald rainbows in God’s throneroom in Revelation 4.

Once the Tannites captured everyone and brought them into the lairs beneath Tannigath, the story took on a heavily religious shift. Love and worship and motivations took on even more of a central role. I’ve been a fan of Dr. Michael Heiser’s work for a few years since I read The Unseen Realm. If you’ve never read Heiser, The Unseen Realm is the place to start. In fact, BibleProject’s video series on Spiritual Beings can provide an even shorter intro. This is where I first heard of Heiser’s work as he was a contributor to the research on the Divine Counsel episodes. The follow up book to The Unseen Realm is called Reversing Hermon: Enoch, The Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ. Some of that book was a stretch in my opinion, but its scholarly work on the apkallu and the Watchers became embodied as the proper name of the true villain of The Story of the Marsh Boy. The temple of Erets is after the Hebrew word with means Earth. Honestly, I don’t remember if I learned this from Bible Project or Heiser.

Some of the more bizarre chapters were Old Zeke’s preternatural mind trips, chapter 10: The Unseen Realms of Glory and Shadow and chapter 17: The Terror of Old Ghosts and Unrest. Old Zeke is a man who was dragoned himself but for reasons that can only be boiled down to the sheer grace of God, found repentance while he was still a Tannite and shed his old skin to become a man again. Even as a man, he was shaken by the trauma of the change, though he did learn to sing the song that allowed him to travel between time and space and realms. This is the same thing Lily tapped into as she began appearing on land to Jeremiah, though she was not physically transported as Zeke was. The few mentions of singing the song of the stones were direct influences of the power of songs on the heart as explored in The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. If you haven’t read it, much better than The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but also much longer. Peterson stands on the great shoulders of Lewis and Tolkien with his story.

Apkallu has affects men and women differently. For men, he tempts them to their deepest desires and once they give in enough, they turn similar to the way naughty boys turned into donkeys on Pleasure Island in Pinnochio. The Tannites would seek men to turn them into Tannites. Women, on the other hand, were turned into wives. What I initially had planned for a raise story took an even darker turn when Lily’s heart was darkened with the temptation that she couldn’t better than Jeremiah by loving a god, Apkallu. This shift came after listening to Tilly Dillehay on The Will Spencer Podcast talk about her book My Dear Hemlock and some of the specific temptations of women. So I thought, “Let’s see where this will take Lily.” Oh boy.

I honestly didn’t know how dark the story was going to turn when I made that pivot in Lily’s motivations. She had become a dragon that was even more destructive than Jeremiah the one eventually succumbed to. It was here where The Story of the Marsh Boy literally took on flesh as a spiritual warfare story. Every character began to get bombarded with lies.

Maybe it was too much, but the brides of Apkallu, specifically Heather, physically and sensually tempted Cole. Not with any explicit sexuality, but with far more subtle temptations of promise and senses and feminine wiles instead of the obvious danger signs of butts and breasts.

The brides of Apkallu, to be honest, needed much more development, too. In the end, they were merely fodder for Apkallu’s vanity and pride, to be used as he wipes his mouth and says he’s done nothing wrong.

As the story came to its close, I took inspiration from another BibleProject podcast series on The Mountain. Everything with Apkallu and Erets is inverted, similar to the Upside-Down in Stranger Things, but it’s embodied more in words and motivations and lies instead of the physical place. In the penultimate chapter, Apkallu is revealed in his monologue as Dagon, the deity of the Canaanites, who has been sentenced to the gloomy dungeon below the waves (2 Peter 2). In Erets, the spiritual “mountaintop experience” is inverted and takes place below the mountain.

None of the characters in The Story are outwardly religious, with the exception of Apkallu. Even as Jeddy recalled This Little Light of Mine, it was only surface and superficial. However, even the truth contained in that refrain was enough to latch onto Cole. With the imperfect lessons his father taught him, and the sheer grace of God that also rescued Old Zeke, Cole was able to resist the song. Then Erets explodes in purple lightning.

The messenger, literally an angel, splits the Tannigath down the center and exposes Erets to the open air. He’s destroying the dungeon. He then explains how even the fresh air they’re breathing is a gift. It all originates from God, even our ability to resist and reconcile and forgive and love again. Splitting the rock, as well as Apkallu’s violent splitting of his brides, alluded to the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 15. With a promise, comes splitting. “May this be done to me if I do not keep my part of the promise.”

And those are many of the elements that went into The Story of the Marsh Boy.

Lessons Learned and What Comes Next

Was it perfect? No, but first steps never are. It was important to me to actually work on a project and finish it, to take more action than to just talk about it. This story was a stepping stone to what comes next.

The Story of the Marsh Boy got progressively darker as the family went deeper into Apkallu’s gloomy dungeon temple of Erets. The downward spiral each character slid into wasn’t a trip I wanted to take again. Maybe it’s just my nature amplified by a career as an automotive mechanic, but I’ve been a fault finder for a long time. It’s too easy to look for what’s going wrong.

I need to look to the light. As they sang deep beneath the rock, This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. In the name of honesty, yes, I could admit the gloom and battle against it.

This is where Fightin’ Poseidon is taking a shift. When I started, the focus was on fathers and sons. While The Story of the Marsh Boy had its fair share of it, I’ve been going through personal experiences of spiritual warfare myself.

Yes we pray for one another, but are we really aware of the entities and powers at play here? In our lives and the world at large? It’s scary to think about dark forces we can’t control.

We’ve lost a supernatural worldview.

With that, we’ve lost sight that there are more than material factors at play in our lives.

Spiritual warfare isn’t a comfortable topic. I can’t write on it exclusively with a track record of wins. Anyone close to me can tell you how I’ve fallen. They’ve seen it. It’s easy to insulate from sharing my losses in a newsletter or on X or Instagram where I typically post. However, I have been in the battle.

Before things really started ramping up for me last fall, I had the idea of a starting a small group study on spiritual warfare. As soon as I talked to one of my elders about it, the warfare and conflict intensified. Whether or not that happens in person, you dear reader can benefit from it. Think of Fightin’ Poseidon as a small group in your inbox.

That’s the value I’m going to be bringing to you in the days ahead. I’ll be with you in the murky waters of spiritual warfare. We’ll still be Fightin’ Poseidon, but we’ll be exploring tactics of the enemy and shining light into dark places.

I hope you’ll join me and ask others to join the crew, too.

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the tearing down of strongholds, as we tear down speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is fulfilled.” ‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭10‬:‭3‬-‭6‬ ‭LSB‬‬

Stay anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons