Asylum for Nightface

In his children’s book Asylum for Nightface (1996), Bruce Brooks uses lengthy passages unbroken by dialogue to explore questions of faith, good, and evil in this story of a young man forced into a bizarre spiritual quandary by his parents.

Fourteen-year-old Zimmerman lives with his wealthy parents. Zimmerman has recently found faith in God, which he feels very deeply, though his individual sense of spirituality doesn’t conform precisely to any specific established religion. His parents have no spiritual beliefs, and Zimmerman practices his faith in the kitchen of their large house because it is the most private room in the house. His parents never cook and only use plates and utensils they can throw away so they also never have to do dishes.

He has a picture in which God resembles an Arab, knowing that this puzzles his friends Janey and Mary, conventional Christians who expect God to look like a white man. These differences contribute to Zimmerman’s feelings of isolation and angst, as he realizes acutely how different he is from almost everyone, including his friends and his parents.



Finding him somewhat unsettling and strange, Zimmerman’s parents don’t know how to connect with him. While his parents smoke pot, Zimmerman takes his spiritual awakening very seriously. His parents occasionally take an interest in his faith, asking challenging questions or making offers to tempt him into betraying his ideals, apparently out of curiosity to see if he’ll give in. His parents clearly don’t understand why Zimmerman doesn’t enjoy himself like a normal teenager.

Zimmerman’s literary hero is the author Drake Jones, who wrote stories about superheroes that include holograms. Jones was a child prodigy; Zimmerman believes that, in a sense, Jesus was also a child prodigy. When he was younger, Zimmerman showed the books to his father, who is a printer. His father printed trading cards based on Jones’s characters. These cards became extremely popular and valuable as collectible items when Jones vanished, mysteriously disappearing. One card, in particular, the one depicting the character Nightface, has become quite rare and valuable. Zimmerman identifies with the portrait of Nightface on the card, where the character is depicted balanced on a rock, observing the world. The back of the card reads, “Nightface seeks asylum in the highest of places.” Zimmerman, seeing himself as an observer and outsider as well, sees parallels between the lives of Jesus, Drake Jones, and himself.

While his parents are away on vacation, Zimmerman has a conversation with his friend Marcos, who makes his living as a drug dealer. They discuss the episode in the bible where Jesus casts out the moneylenders from the temple. His parents return with a new spiritual faith; while on vacation, they met Luke Mark John who preaches The Faith of Faiths. Zimmerman’s parents have converted to the Faith of Faiths. They have given up alcohol and other vices, and Zimmerman finds that they have begun worshiping in the kitchen as well.



Zimmerman’s parents have a new attitude towards him and his faith; they now regard him as a saint of some sort, a special representative of God. The entire cult of The Faith of Faiths, in fact, regards Zimmerman as their patron saint, which freaks Zimmerman out. He then discovers that Luke Mark John wishes to promote this image of Zimmerman as a saint in order to attract younger people to the cult.

Seeing that this new religion is obviously fake, Zimmerman cannot understand why his non-spiritual parents have bizarrely embraced it. Luke Mark John, who refers to himself as Pastor John, encourages the cult members to view him as a living avatar of Jesus, which Zimmerman finds disturbing. Finding the cult ridiculous and not wanting to be responsible for bringing others into it, Zimmerman rejects the role of  “living saint” that Luke Mark John and his parents want to thrust upon him. He sees himself as a real-life Nightface; instead of a face that expands to become the night sky, he is expanding to become the life force of the cult members.

Desperate to derail Luke Mark John’s plan and to be free of the Faith of Faiths, Zimmerman decides he must tarnish his saint-like image by doing something bad, something very much like what his parents once encouraged him to do in order to be a “normal” teenager. He decides to steal the very valuable Nightface trading card, thinking this will result in him being sent to jail, exploding the fiction of his sainthood for once and for all. He steals the card, and the story ends on an ambiguous note, not revealing the fates of everyone involved.