THIN NOT IN? Wilton Barnhardt’s new religion-inspired...

THIN NOT IN? Wilton Barnhardt’s new religion-inspired adventure novel “Gospel” is an epic-sized 800 pages (E1). But having grown up reading “big old 19th-Century books,” the Laguna Beach author doesn’t feel his book is too long. “Compared to a late Dickens or Henry James, I feel like the reader gets off easy,” says Barnhardt. . . . He chides authors of “these thin little trendy novels; I can’t understand how people write as little as they do and get published.”