Why I Wrote Guardians of the Canon
By Susan Pavan, M.A.Journ.
It started with a king, not a fantasy series.
The king was David, and this is the story every child should hear first. A boy who was small, overlooked, and, to many, had no business standing where he did, but who held a belief in God that no one else in the room seemed to share.
If you don't know the story, it runs like this. Three thousand years ago, two armies faced each other across a valley. One side had a champion, a giant in iron armor, who came out every morning for forty days to demand a man to fight him, and nobody went. A boy arrived with bread for his brothers, heard the giant, and asked why nobody had answered. He was the youngest of eight, a shepherd, and the only weapon he had ever mastered was a sling. He went out with five stones from a brook, and he said out loud, in front of both armies, whose battle it was. He became king of Israel. Almost everything in that inheritance runs down from him.
There is a moment in the book where Jerome, the father of the family at the center of it, says what that means:
“And from that appointment, from the house David will build, will come the King Jonathan has not yet been told about. The one the Enemy cannot defeat.”
Christ is born of the house of David, a thousand years later, in the same small town. That is why this is not one battlefield story with a good moral attached. It is the beginning of a line.
Before I let myself reimagine any of it, I went back to the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible. I wanted David in front of children the way he must once have stood in front of the people who first told his story, not softened and not explained away.
The world the book is set in
Guardians of the Canon takes place in a gray future the book calls the Servile State, where the great King has been classified and filed away like a rumor, and where a family's memory of a freer world is corrected the way paperwork is corrected.
One small scene early on tells you everything about that world. A child at a dinner table remembers the story of a river her grandfather once swam. Her parents correct her gently. She must have dreamed it, because no such river appears on any approved map. She looks from face to face, searching for one flicker of memory looking back at her.
Above ground, one family complies. Jerome wears the gray State work suit with the red insignia at his collar. Eleanor wears her hair in the single regulation plait. Below ground, behind a furnace marked DANGER, HIGH PRESSURE, AUTHORIZED ENGINEERS ONLY, four underground levels of oak and iron shelving hold Bibles, histories, maps, chronicles, and the lives of saints and kings.
Peter's great-great-grandfather carried many of those books down there before the Consolidation made memory a crime. The family record is broken in places, a ledger with half its pages blackened, initials where names should be. The duty survived what the documents could not.
Jerome has told his children one thing about the Library. The Library is safe. Believe that. Guard it anyway.
What actually happens
Peter is sixteen, the eldest of six. When the book on the family's reading table opens, they do not read David's story from a safe distance. They are put inside it, in the Valley of Elah, three thousand years back, watching a scribe try to write the true account down while something works to blot the words out as they appear.
They are not there to fight the giant. David does that, and the book is clear that nobody stands in his place.
They are there to make sure the record of it survives.
That is the test I wanted to hand them. Not to become heroes in David's story, but to prove worthy of carrying it, and the whole inheritance behind it, to whoever comes next.
Why the Guardians are children
The book is not called King David's Story. It is called Guardians of the Canon, and the Guardians are children.
I believe children are the real guardians of story in this world. Adults hand a story over. A child decides whether to take it. That is the link in the chain where the whole thing either continues or quietly stops, and it is the only link an adult cannot control.
One of the characters says it better than I can. In the letter that opens the book, an old king tells the reader directly:
“A Guardian is not the hero of someone else's story. I want you to hear that clearly, because I got it wrong myself for a long time. A Guardian is the hero of the story that keeps every other story alive. Do not let anyone tell you that is the smaller part.”
David was that link once. A shepherd nobody expected anything from carried the story of his people forward into everything that followed.
What the enemy actually wants
I want to be precise about the threat in this series, because it is not the giant.
The Enemy in these pages hunts the people who wrote the story down and kept it. His command never changes, and it is a single word. FORGET. Forget who you are. Forget what was given to you and by whose hand.
His method is not violence. It is editing.
There is a moment in the valley where two Philistine scouts watch David walk out and assess him coolly. One says he has seen shepherds drop a wolf at sixty paces with a sling, and notes that the giant's helmet does not close fully at the face, that below the cheekbone there is a gap, that the boy knows his geometry.
Lilly, watching from the ridge, understands what has just been done. “They reduced it to tactics.”
Jerome explains it:
“David declared it himself, in front of both armies: I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts. That is not a battle cry. It is a declaration of whose battle this is. Remove it, and you have a clever boy with a well-aimed stone and a gap in a helmet.”
That is how a story is taken from a child. Not burned. Explained. Reduced to a mechanism, admired for its cleverness, and emptied of the only part that made it worth telling.
Why imagination is the mechanism, not the decoration
So imagination is not ornament in this series. It is the working part.
Picture David on the hillside. No armor that fits him. A sling he has used on lions and bears in a field with nobody watching. In the Douay-Rheims he tells the giant:
“Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, which thou hast defied.”
A child who can imagine their way into that moment has already begun carrying the story forward.
The part that surprised me most is what came before the valley. David tells the king he has killed both a lion and a bear, and he says it plainly, the way a man reports something that happened and is now past. In the book, Peter works out what that means:
“The lion and the bear had no witnesses. They happened in the field, with no army watching, no king's approval, no announcement. David went out after the lion because the lamb needed to be returned to the flock. That was the whole reason. No glory. No audience. No reward except the lamb returned safe.”
The formation happened in the obscure work. That is worth a child knowing before anything else in the book.
What the Canon is
I use the word Canon throughout, so it is worth saying plainly what I mean.
The Western Canon is the accumulated body of books, texts, and ideas that shaped Western civilization. Scripture at its center, and around it the work that generations built up: the ancient historians and the saints, the medieval theologians, the classic literature most of us still recognize by name. It is not a single book. It is the whole inheritance, the long conversation running from David's Psalms to the stories we are still telling children now.
When the Guardians protect the Canon, they are protecting the right of the next generation to actually receive it, rather than have it edited out from under them.
The old king in the opening letter puts the stakes better than my explanation does:
“What was taken can be taken back. The Canon, this hidden treasure of stories, is not a ruin for you to walk through and mourn. It is a city under occupation, and any city under occupation can be freed.”
Why now
This is the part I would rather not have to write.
The West no longer recognizes its own childhood. The old stories were not banned. They were simply not handed down, and a consumer version of history moved into the empty room. A generation is growing up able to name every character in a franchise, so it was only natural to restore the original meaning.
That is not a story being destroyed; it is a story going unclaimed, which is quieter and works faster.
So the argument of this book is that the claiming has to be done by the person it belongs to. As Jerome tells his children on the night the book is opened:
“Stories survive because people guard them. Not because they are written down. Written things can be burned. They survive because someone decides the story is worth more than his own safety.”
What I hope a reader takes from it
I did not write this so that children would finish it wanting to be Guardians. I wrote it because every child already is one, and because the deciding is already theirs whether anyone tells them or not.
I wanted them to walk through it once through their imagination, on the page, with David and with Peter's family beside them, before they are asked to carry a story of their own.
The old king ends his letter by handing the reader the book the way a sword was once handed to him:
“Hold it the same way: like the stone is still in the sling, like the outcome has not been decided yet, because for you, it has not.”
That is the story that started with a shepherd boy and the Douay-Rheims Bible on my desk. I hope it finds a place on your shelf, and in your child's imagination.
Guardians of the Canon: David the Giant Slayer, Vol. 1, by Susan Pavan, M.A.Journ., is published by Trumpet Publishing House. Peter is sixteen; the series is written for readers of about eleven and up, and reads aloud well below that. View the hardcover edition.
Scripture quotations are from the Douay-Rheims translation.