The Shack tells the story of a man whose young daughter is murdered and who, four years later, receives a note, apparently from God, inviting him back to the shack where his daughter’s blood had been discovered. He encounters God in the form of a larger-than-life Afro-Caribbean woman.Mackenzie (Mack) Allen Philip’s, an ordinary American, though one with a painful past of his own, decides one weekend to take his kids on a camping trip in the mountains of Oregon. Nothing unusual – just a fun filled weekend of campfires, hiking, canoeing and enjoying the great outdoors. Until tragedy strikes in the most unexpected way. Mack’s two older kids are out canoeing when they lose control and the canoe flips over.
The reader naturally expects that one or both of them drowns, but Mack succeeds in saving them. Yet while his attention is focused on saving them, a serial killer abducts his younger daughter Missy. As the search progresses, the dress she had been wearing is found torn and bloodied in a Shack, high up in the mountains, implying that she has been murdered.
The shack is a metaphor for “the house inside a human being”, he said, “the place of a soul that gets damaged and twisted by what happens to you”. It is the inner dark place in which people store their hurt, their lies, their addictions and their secrets from the outside world.
William P Young’s The Shack has become a publishing phenomenon in America, and the book is now into its 14th print-run.