I told him I’m intrigued by the petroglyph on the cover, which makes the design is similar to the cover of Patricia Karamesines’ The Pictograph Murders. They’re both mysteries of sorts, so I’ll be interested to compare approaches. I should have more after the event, and maybe some pictures.

Rings of the Tree tells the story of Diana Applesong, a Victorian woman who has experienced tragedy after tragedy in her life. So eventually, after dealing with so much grief, she cloisters herself and her servants into her mansion, essentially cutting herself off from the world. However, a group of explorers stumble upon her secretive existence and set off a chain of events that places her face to face with that which she is most afraid of… love.

“She has experienced a lot of loss and pain in her past,” said Jaclyn Hales who is playing the lead role of Diana Applesong, “Her default reaction is living like a porcelain doll. Everything is beautiful and protected on the outside, but inside she’s nothing… she’s numb. She has nothing left to give… or so she thinks.” Hales is recently making headway in her career with starring roles in films like the upcoming Unicorn City, but she took a break from her film pursuits in LA to work on this show, for which she has expressed a lot of fondness and excitement. “As far as everyone here in the Utah audience, it’s going to be innovative,” said Hales, “It’s super creative and will keep the audiences’ attention and awe factor at a high the whole time.”

Rings of the Tree is not a new story to Utah audiences. It was originally produced at Utah Valley University to very positive audience and critical reaction, and Stewart’s screenplay version of the story won first place in last year’s LDS Film Festival’s Screenplay Competition (which screenplay Imminent Catharsis Media has optioned and plans on making a feature film, once funding is in place). This production of the play, however, is very different than the one that premiered at UVU. Zion Theatre Company and Imminent Catharsis Media are taking a multimedia approach with the show, meaning that in staging it they are also incorporating film and other mediums. The production has required several film shoots, the composition of original music, the use of projection, digital devices and theatre magic.

“This version of the script is much closer to the screenplay than the original stage play,” said playwright Stewart, a Utah native who is currently getting his MFA is Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. “There is a lot more emphasis on the visual element, the spectacle, the magic. In the past, I’ve focused on language. This time around, although that beautiful language is still a vital component, yet I tried to make room for spectacle… for visions.”

Utah film actor, Danor Gerald, is taking one of the starring roles in the multimedia production, but is also one of the show’s producers. Along with the production’s director Jyllian Petrie, they are creating the show’s film elements and creative multimedia effects. “Rings of the Tree pushes the creative boundaries of theatre, and narrative cinema.  Zion Theatre Company and Imminent Catharsis Arts & Media are working together to develop this groundbreaking work of art,” said Gerald, “After doing so many movies in Utah, this project excites me as an actor, and as a producer because it brings me back to my roots in classical live theatre.  That’s my first love, plus I get to integrate my new zeal for digital cinema and web-based media to tell this story.”

As indicated, there is a digital, intermedia element to the show which will surprise audiences. “We’ve all been warned at the movies or theatre to turn off our mobile phones and silence our devices,” said Gerald, “But in this show we expect and encourage the audience to bring your web-enabled tablets and smartphones.  Bring your headphones, and a splitter for your date.  You will want to take the chances we give to you to use them… We aren’t using these as gimmicks.  We are making creative technical choices to deliver each part of the story in the most valuable and enjoyable way.”

Director Petrie has both been invigorated and challenged by the production. “It’s been an eye opening experience. I’ve worked for years in theatre and years in film, but I’ve never had to do both at the same time. It’s been very difficult, but very rewarding, but we’re doing the impossible—we’ve basically filmed a movie and rehearsed a play in a matter of weeks! But I’m very excited, because when it all comes together, it’s going to be mind blowing.”

The Off Broadway Theater is located at 272 South Main Street, Salt Lake City. The Grove Theater is located at 20 South Main Street, Pleasant Grove. All performances of the show will be at 7pm. Tickets are $12 for adults and $10 for students/seniors. Tickets for the Salt Lake performances can be purchased at http://theobt.org/ or by calling (801) 355-4628. Tickets for the Pleasant Grove performances can be purchased at www.ziontheatrecompany.com .

Let me start by admitting that I pretty much hated this book. Let’s just get it out there so we won’t have to keep talking about it. I hated the flat characters, the adrenaline-pimping pacing, the absurd science, the conspiracy theories within conspiracy theories, the Illuminati/Cobra badguys, the kitchen-sink idea inclusiveness, the audience pandering, the prestidigitational narrative breaks, the wowza-zowza phrasing —

I could go on.

Anyway. In addition to the usual suspects (Thomas Jefferson, painters, corrupt military, secret societies, ancient families, villains with broken bodies as well as souls), this book also features Mormons.

I came across the book in question, The Devil Colony (2011) by James Rollins (part of his bestselling Sigma Force series), via recommendation from a friend. It’s actually the second Sigma Force novel he’s recommended to me. I never got around to reading the first, but this one he really sold me:

It blends Native American lore, history from the founding fathers (focus on Thomas Jefferson), and Mormonism in a thrilling international adventure. What’s really interesting is the author isn’t LDS, and it’s cool to see how he spins it in.

I immediately put the book on hold and waited my turn. When it came, I started at the beginning and read the Acknowledgments, Notes from the Historical Record, and Notes from the Scientific Record. After reading those, I had to put the book down for a few hours before I could bear to pick it up again. The Acknowledgments were basically a list of informed people whose suggestions he intends to ignore. The Notes from the Historical Record lists some facts, with holes ( to be filled later with “facts”). And Notes from the Scientific Record reminded me of my nanowizard friend Tom Lowery’s disgust with Michael Crichton’s Prey.

At this point, even without beginning the actual novel, I was predisposed to hate it. Instead of engaging me with characters or situations, he was saying Shocking Things About the Real World! with the promise of fictional resolutions. This is not the sort of gimmick I appreciate.

Now, I should pull back and admit that, since these books are bestsellers, and because they were recommended to me by one of the best friends I’ve ever had*, that many people less snobby than me must really like them. And I admit that if this collection of ideas had been better written, I might have liked them too. However, I did not. And thus I won’t be worrying much about spoiler alerts or anything else from here on out. Consider yourself warned.

* (The funny thing is that it might be his fault I didn’t like The Devil Colony. Back in high school, I was gaga over The Millennium File by Glenn L. Anderson, a book that shares many surface traits with The Devil Colony: cutting-edge science rendered wrongly, Mormons, mastodons, the Lost Tribes of Israel, painfully obvious plot. My friend pointed out all the books faults and I felt suitably ashamed. And now here we are, fifteen years later. And I think his beloved book is stupid. . . . Suddenly I wonder if I’m hating it out of some weird need for revenge. . . .)

Here’s the background you need in order to understand this novel’s use of Mormon elements:

• The U.S. government has a group of super secret scientist spy scholars called SIGMA FORCE!
• An ancient group of families called the Guild — “the secret within all secret societies” (445) — bent on world domination (or something) makes life hard for our heroes.
• Even Thomas Jefferson had to deal with those Guild people.

That should cover it.

The book begins with a couple teenagers in Utah who discover a cave filled with gold plates. And an ancient nanotechnology that has the potential to destroy the world. Unless first destroyed by volcanoes. You know. Normal Utah stuff.

But gold plates! Sounds interesting! (Though any Mormon tempted to believe in Rollins’s descriptions of American history and nanotech will be given pause by the fact that the Golden Plates these gold plates were inspired by were translated by a gent named John Smith.)

Not that I think a silly thriller like this requires an army of fact-checkers, but after a million discussions over The Da Vinci Code, I’m a little leery about being known through a popular throwaway novel. Because let’s face it — Mormons are awesome material for conspiracy-theory thrillers. Don’t you think? Mysterious history! Missing artifacts! Colorful characters! Secret/sacred spaces! Things impossible to prove wrong! Things possible to prove wrong that are really juicy anyway! The only miracle is that books like this don’t become bestsellers every year.

With all my negativity, I suppose you’re expecting me to now come down on Rollins for his terrible depictions of Mormons.

Wrong!

Actually, I thought, given the standard set by his takes on everything else, he did an excellent job.

First, Mormons aren’t just shadowy figures in the background. One of the main characters (this volume only) is a Mormon. A Mormon and a Shoshone. And he’s one of the better developed characters (which, granted, isn’t saying much), and probably the most inherently interesting. Besides being a dem Marmin and a dem Injin, he’s a historian, naturalist, old fellow, has a dog, chews cigars (a leftover habit from his wild days), a respected if controversial figure in the Native American community, and pretty nimble, all things considered. Hank Kanosh, of course, is who first recognizes that Indian mummies with red and blond hair buried with gold plates might find some explanation in Mormon lore. And when their writing is a sort of protoHebraic? Well.

Naturally, Sigma Force’s resident Indian finds the idea of his people being Israelites unlikely and Hank agrees, suggesting ways to reconcile the story to the science that we’ve all heard and pondered ourselves (198-199). The most compelling evidence arrives when our heroes and villains, forced to work together in a race against time!, come to Yellowstone and discover a gold copy of Solomon’s Temple in a cave. (It may not surprise you to hear that Rollins wrote one of the novelizations for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)

Sadly, the ancient nanoweaponry yet again destroys all the mummies and the temple and the scores of gold plates and everything else. Save one plate.

And then, in the most delightfully Mormon passage in the book, Hank takes that plate to the Salt Lake temple, having fasted and prayed, where he is admitted to “the threshold of this temple’s Kodesh Hakodashim, the Holy of the Holies’ chamber at the heart of the Mormon temple” (468). Frankly, without reading the rest of the book, this scene might not pay off as well, but I have to say that I thought it was pretty terrific. Best two pages in the book. Most interesting, most daring, most surprising. In part, probably, because it is so understated. And in part because Rollins could enjoy the mystery for mystery’s sake, as the Mormons ain’t coming back in the next book.

In the end, although I’m not convinced Rollins is a very careful researcher and although I find his writing nearly unreadable (believe me — I’ve listed not a hundredth part of this book’s sins), I still want to give him props.

The Devil Colony accomplishes the following:

• Engages with Mormon story in a new and compelling way.
• Does so in a way that is integral to the plot.
• Does it seriously, without being dismissive or mocking.
• Provides a Mormon hero.
• One that doesn’t look or sound like Mitt Romney!
• Does all this before a national audience.
• And does it in a way that people — lots of people — really like.

So although I basically hated this book and could never in good conscious recommend it to you, pretty cool, right?

Title: Mr. Monster
Author: Dan Wells
Publisher: Tor
Genre: YA suspense/horror
Year Published: 2010
Number of Pages: 287
Binding: Trade Paperback (also available in hardback and as an ebook)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2790-1
Price: $11.99

Title: I Don’t Want to Kill You
Author: Dan Wells
Publisher: Tor
Genre: YA suspense/horror
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 320
Binding: Trade Paperback (also available in hardback and as an ebook)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2844-1
Price: $11.99

Reviewed by Jonathan Langford.

Includes spoilers for Book 3 in a very general sense, but no specifics.

John Wayne Cleaver, the main character of I Am Not a Serial Killer, is kind of a weird kid. 15 years old. Helps out in his family mortuary. Obsessed with serial killers.

And then a real-life serial killer comes to his small town. Only it turns out to be a demon. And it becomes Cleaver’s job to kill it. And then the same thing happens again (Mr. Monster). And again (I Don’t Want to Kill You, released just last month).

It sounds like a clever premise for an ongoing series, one that combines a half-cockeyed look at teen life with a ration of suspense, violence, and gruesomeness. And that’s the way it starts out. But it’s also a lot more, as I Don’t Want to Kill You brilliantly (and I don’t use that word lightly) demonstrates. All credit due to the genre of teen horror, but this series transcends the genre. Really. I say this as someone who doesn’t usually like horror as a genre, because I find real life terrifying enough, so take my comment as you will…

*****

Perhaps the best part of the books is Cleaver himself, a sympathetic teenage boy whom it’s surprisingly easy to like. In a lot of ways, he’s a fairly normal teenager: socially awkward, more than a bit geeky when it comes to his areas of interest (serial killers), at least a touch neurotic, beset by bullies in school, attracted to girls and unsure how to deal with that, saddled with a dysfunctional family past and a mother who loves him but whose attempts to help often drive him up the wall. To a great degree, what he wants are normal things, and what he wants to be is a normal person.

Alas, the latter seems unlikely to be achieved. I’m no psychologist, but I have to say that Cleaver’s recitation of symptoms displayed by serial killers and how well he matches them is all too convincing. Normal boys who are attracted to a pretty girl don’t automatically start thinking, with loving possessiveness, about unspecified acts of torture. Cleaver’s behavior is genuinely over the top, though much of it represents potential that hasn’t yet been acted on, as in the following quote from Mr. Monster:

Brooke Watson was the most beautiful girl in school, and she was my age, and she lived two houses down from me, and I could pick out her scent in a massive crowd. She had long blond hair, and braces, and a smile so bright it made me wonder why other girls bothered smiling at all. I knew her class schedule, her birthday, her Gmail password, and her social security number — none of which I had any business knowing. (p. 25)

But the critical defining element of Cleaver’s character isn’t his sociopathic personality type (diagnosed as antisocial personality disorder by the counselor in his first book, a sympathetic figure who, alas, doesn’t survive to book two), but rather his strong desire not to be a serial killer and the vast self-discipline he applies to that effort. Cleaver is both a strong and a moral character — all the more so since for him, acting morally is so clearly an act of will, as opposed to natural inclination.

Wells does a good job at depicting teenage dialect, as in the second book when Cleaver’s  best friend takes to starting every conversation with the words “Shut up,” for no terribly clear reason except that he’s a teenage boy. The fact that Cleaver himself doesn’t sound much like a typical teenager is part of Wells’s characterization of him as both brighter and less socially clued in than other kids his age. It also is part of what makes him appealing as a character. Cleaver is in some ways not that far removed from the tradition of bright adolescent misfits so well exemplified by Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin. The atypical teenager, despised for his differences but with hidden worth and a secret power to save others, is a powerful trope and one I daresay is particularly likely to resonate with adolescents and adults who read for pleasure. Not to mention that a full book, let alone a series, that presented teenagers acting entirely like regular teenagers would get tedious pretty quickly, and not just I suspect for adult readers.

Having said that, and acknowledging that most teenage boys really aren’t budding sociopaths, I have to add that this is a series that says a lot about what it feels like to be a teenage boy, especially the second and third book. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. John Wayne Cleaver is memorable, and he’s real, and he’s someone I wouldn’t mind getting to know and spend time with, though I have to admit I’d be a little nervous if he were dating my daughter.

The stories are helped along by frequent touches of humor, many of them arising out of the juxtaposition between the normal realities of teenage life and Cleaver’s specific challenges. Here’s an example of a paragraph (from early in the second book) which I as a reader can’t stop snickering over, though it may be that you have to have spent some time with Cleaver as a character before it will seem funny. Cleaver has just baked a cake for Mother’s Day, and they’re waiting for his sister to show up:

The cake was already done and cooling on the counter, so I was browsing through the paper. I noted with pleasure that Karla Soder had been admitted to the hospital for extended care; she was one of the oldest people in Clayton, and I’d been waiting for her to die for a while now. We hadn’t embalmed anybody in more than a month. (p. 47)

To some degree, this is funny because we’ve been pulled into Cleaver’s world, where a death means more business and a chance for Cleaver to satisfy his desire to cut up bodies in a harmless and even socially acceptable way. Unlike many stories that feature violence as a dominant theme, however, Wells’s books don’t invite us to put our conscience on hold for a while and just accept the blood and gore. Even when Cleaver is forced to kill — because how else are you going to deal with a demon who’s killing people to perpetuate its own existence? — we’re all too aware of the cost.

Which brings me to the supernatural element, which at first seems like an almost unnecessary gesture toward the current market reality that books about teenagers fighting demons seem to do better than books where the teenage protagonists face more mundane opponents. But there’s more to it than that. Many years ago, J. R. R. Tolkien, writing about the supernatural monsters in Beowulf, declared: “It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it . . . put the monsters in the centre, gave them Victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.” Cleaver isn’t a doomed northern hero. But there are elements of his situation that work better, both thematically and from a plot perspective, with demons who must be fought if innocents are to survive, who cannot be countered by regular law enforcement.

Some might argue that this makes things too easy by giving Cleaver a clear moral justification for his actions. But that’s not the point. This isn’t a story about some Hamlet who must decide whether or not violent action is justified. Rather, it’s the story of a warrior like David who must somehow learn how to fight without staining his soul with the blood he’s spilled. Or something like that. A moody teenage David, who has to worry about whether he’s becoming a psychopath. (And wouldn’t that make an interesting historical novel? Or maybe not.)

*****

On reading I Am Not a Serial Killer (and knowing there were two more to come), I worried whether the basic idea was going to get stale. Let’s face it: part of the attractiveness of the first book is its novelty. This is a premise which mostly hasn’t been done before (although some reviewers have compared the book to the TV series Dexter, which I have never watched). More of the same could get old very fast.

For me that doesn’t happen, not because Wells comes up with clever new twists and variations (though there are some of those) but primarily because of the changes in Cleaver — and because of the successively broader lenses each story occupies. The first book is largely private, focusing on what happens when the imaginings of Cleaver’s inner life start to confront him outside the confines of his own mind. The second book shows us where Cleaver comes from, his family and his intense desire to protect and strike back against those who threaten what is precious to him. The third book shows him coming to understand what love and sacrifice for others really mean, ultimately at a great cost.

It’s a devastating progression. Wells has said in no uncertain terms that this is the last in the series, and I for one am glad, because I honestly don’t know where he could go from here that wouldn’t diminish the story he’s told so far. The first book is clever and fun; the second well-written and thought-provoking; the third . . . astonishing, and sad, and deeply moving. Well worth it, in my view — undoubtedly the best of the three — but also undoubtedly the hardest to read. You’ve got to be willing to face some really tough stuff to get through this book.

*****

John Wayne Cleaver isn’t Mormon. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing. Not only does it avoid possible stupidities from publishers about Wells limiting his audience, it also avoids the need to spend a lot of time and space on Mormon beliefs about the supernatural, which would I suspect have been boring to most non-Mormon readers (and many Mormons as well) and probably couldn’t have been handled to anyone’s satisfaction. Put another way: the book is chock-full of issues and plot twists and life realities as it is. Working Mormon issues into top of that would have been like adding chocolate syrup and butterscotch sauce on top of a piece of baklava. It would be overkill, if you’ll pardon the expression.

A critical question that the books persistently raise is whether Cleaver’s small acts of propitiation toward his own inner demon — his research on serial killers, helping out in the family mortuary, minor acts of controlled arson in an abandoned warehouse — represent necessary compromises or a fascinated dalliance with evil that makes it all the more likely that he’ll eventually be sucked in fully. His white-knuckled adherence to rules that are intended to keep him away from the more dangerous behaviors typical of serial killers — for example, complimenting someone when he desires to strike out violently against them — seems ultimately doomed to failure. Certainly the circumstances that keep forcing him into violent confrontations with demons do nothing for his self-control.

Part of the problem is that some of his rules seem like such disastrously bad ones. Don’t look at a pretty girl more than three times in the day, even if she comes up to you and starts talking? That’s a strategy that seems doomed to make Cleaver’s social isolation even worse. At the same time, we as readers understand why he does it. And even though his specific issues aren’t ours, the whole thing reminds us of the hell that is adolescence, when self-control often seems like an elusive holy grail and half or more of the time what you do seems to wind up accomplishing the opposite of what you had hoped, for reasons that don’t even make sense.

Below is a brief selection that I think captures Wells’s skills in depicting Cleaver’s character and the knife edge he walks. It’s the night after Mother’s Day, and Cleaver has decided he has to go out and burn something in order to relieve stress following a disastrous family dinner.

The fire was calling to me.

The warehouse reflect bright gray moonlight from its cinder block walls, shining dully in the clearing. I was grinning now. This was the time when the lines inside me blured, and Mr. Monster became simply John Cleaver: not a killer but a boy; not a monster but a human being. Fire was my great catharsis, but this prelude moment was my purest freedom — the one brief respite when I didn’t have to worry about what Mr. Monster wanted to do, because he and I wanted the same thing. Once I’d made my decision to light a fire, I wasn’t at war with myself anymore; I was just me, and everything made sense. (Mr. Monster, p. 61)

What Wells gives us, here and elsewhere in the books, is an unflinching look into the darkness that threatens all of us. Cleaver fights the good fight, but in the end we sense that he doesn’t really have it in him to escape his own nature. Not, at least, without help from others — help that for most of the books, no one seems capable of giving him.

For much of the books, Cleaver is sympathetic enough that we don’t take his dilemma with full seriousness. That’s our mistake as readers. Wells doesn’t make the same mistake, which I suppose is why the series has to end, instead of just continuing on indefinitely. Ultimately, Cleaver is redeemed, or at least we sense that he can be, and in a way that doesn’t feel forced or allegorical because it makes sense in terms of characters we have come to know and believe in.

So should you read these books? Yes, if you can stand to do so. If you can put up with a little teen humor, embarrassment, and gruesomeness, with an undertone of genuine feeling leading up to some real emotional gut punches in the final book — then yes, it’s well worth the ride. And if you care about Mormon literature and want to know what an LDS writer can do with Mormon themes in a series without a single LDS character, then you should probably read these books too. Taken together, they are, quite honestly, some of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

For this review, I’m going to break it in to four parts: the set up; what works; what doesn’t work; and the novel as Mormon literature. Each of those is going to be written from a slightly different point of view as I negotiate between my identities as a fan of genre fiction but with a bias towards genre work that has strong literary elements (the good ones — not the precious/precocious literary stuff); a writer and editor of fiction; a cheerleader for Mormon fiction; and a Mormon literary critic.

The Premise and Setting

Adopted by hippie parents, Autumn Rain lives in Portland, where she runs her late father’s antiques shop. She has also recently been reunited with her twin sister (also adopted — and apparently the main character in a previous Nunes novel) and has a crush on Jake, the tall dreadlocked African American dude who she sold her father’s herbal remedies store to. Autumn also has discovered (post the trauma of her father’s death in a bridge collapse) that she has a paranormal power: she receives impressions and memories from physical objects (assuming that they have been imbued with strong emotions [love, anger, terror, etc.]). She used these powers to solve a previous case, and the word gets out so one day a community college instructor turned private investigator named Ethan McConnell shows up with a pair of worried parents. It turns out that their daughter has semi-recently joined a commune that may or may not be a dangerous cult — the same commune that Ethan’s sister had joined almost a year previously. Autumn gets sucked in to the investigation, eventually going undercover with Jake and with Ethan’s help.

What Works

The setting: Portland and Oregon is the perfect place for a hippie chick with paranormal powers, and Nunes weaves in some good details and locations.

The powers: there’s always room to be a little tighter as well as push the limits more (especially towards the end of the novel), but on the whole, the type of power and how it works and especially the situations where it is useful or not — and the effects it’s use can have on Autumn — is very well done. Very much in the magic-with-rules-that’s-use-can-be-both-negative-and-positive vein that Orson Scott Card has preached and Brandon Sanderson has perfected.

The sisters: Autumn and her sister Tawnia (who is pregnant) are vibrant, interesting characters. When they are on screen, especially together, the novel really sparkles.

The plot twists: there are several. None of them are earth-shattering, but they work, and they are genuine twists that don’t come across as cheap or out-of-nowhere.

What Doesn’t Work

The overwriting: Nunes spells so much out, repeating information that we already guessed or knew or expressing feelings and thoughts that are already clear from what has been said or gestured. It really threw me out of the narrative; it’s quite grating. But nothing a good editor could have fixed. And it isn’t as bad in the latter part of the book.

The action scenes: Now some of these actually work quite well and Nunes is to be credited for not making anyone who gets involved in a fight or a piece of action superhuman. People get hurt. People do the wrong thing and although they show pluck and endurance and push beyond their comfort zones, they don’t show skills that are way beyond. But at times the blocking seems a off and at the end there’s too much going here and there. Tighten this up (and deal with the overwriting) and you have a much stronger novel. And to be fair, the blocking is much crisper than in many novels, where things tend to go hazy in the fight/action scenes.

The love triangle: It’s hard for me to judge this because I am so not the target audience here, but both Jake and Keefe needed added dimensions here. In fact, the two male leads are the weakest part of the story in terms of characterization. Jake, especially, needs to be more awesome. And the heat could have been turned up a bit. And Autumn is just a little too coy and conflicted.

Imprints as Mormon literature

Here at AMV, we follow the Association for Mormon Letters definition that anything by, for or about Mormons counts as Mormon literature. Imprints falls into that peculiar category of novels that don’t feature Mormonism but are written mainly for a Mormon audience e.g. “clean fiction.” Yes, it’s published by Shadow Mountain, which is ostensibly Deseret Book’s national market-oriented imprint, and it’s conceivable that the title will find non-LDS readers, but unlike Shadow Mountain’s YA/children’s fantasy series, this really seems to be for the female LDS audience. So any discussion of it in relation to Mormon literature is likely to turn to what is gained vs. what is lost in creating the clean, non-Mormon-themed-but-for-an-LDS-audience novel. And so I do have the same complaint with it that I did with Lemon Tart (although I think Lemon Tart is the better crafted novel): “…it sometimes creates reading moments where the fact that it’s a non-LDS-themed-book-written-by-an-active-LDS becomes a little too present.”

On the other hand, I was going to ding Nunes for something because (and this is perhaps a tiny spoiler) any novel featuring Portland and hippies and communes is going to have account for a particular herb, and it looked like it was never going to come up — but in the end it did. And it’s true that by making Autumn a hippie, natural foods chick you can avoid the major Word of Wisdom issues. But at the same time, I don’t see why, if you’re going to include, for example, violence (both real and emotional) in the work at a certain level of graphic-ness, you can’t, say, the moderate consumption of alcohol. Or the use of black or green tea. Although I have to admit that I didn’t mind the lack of swearing. And Nunes did push things a little further than one might expect (but still very, very PG), for example, see her open letter on the AML blog (where I claim in the comments that obsessing over the clean thing isn’t the best idea, but I’m a mercurial personality and what may sound good in the abstract doesn’t hold when it comes to actual reading experience — although I have to say that Imprints provided much less “oh, come on” moments than I would have expected c.f. the herb mentioned above).

Of course (and this again is reflecting my own bias), how cool would it be if Autumn was a hippie LDS chick? Pretty cool, I think. And then trying to situate her powers could be an interesting added dimension (A gift of the Spirit?). And then make Jake a non-Mormon and you have the recipe for some more tense romantic tension between the two.

I do think, though, that this is a work worth exploring if you have an interest in LDS genre literature. It embodies much of the tensions and issues in the genre and shows the improvement there has been in the field while highlighting the work that still needs to be done.

For another perspective, read the Mormon Times review. See also the AML Review.

Lemon Tart is a Miss Marple-style mystery (what the marketing copy calls a “cozie”) — that is, it feature an older woman who gets drawn in to a murder case (here, it’s the murder of a neighbor) and uses her pluck, life experience, natural curiosity, and local connections to help solve the case. What I liked about the novel is that it succeeds as a cozie, but that it also brings some character and plot elements in that have a real impact on the protagonist Sadie Hoffmiller. The emotional, physical and family/community/romantic repercussions from not just the murder, but also solving the murder are not glossed over at all. There’s just enough grit to it to make it work for a reader like me. And, in particular, the climactic sequences are fairly thrilling. The danger is real.

I do find it somewhat amusing, though, that Sadie is not-LDS, but lives LDS values. Not that there are Christian women of faith that don’t fit the profile. And certainly I understand that having a non-LDS heroine allows Kilpack to write certain settings and details and storylines that it would be much harder to deal with a Mormon context. It’s just that it sometimes creates reading moments where the fact that it’s a non-LDS-themed-book-written-by-an-active-LDS becomes a little too present.

On the whole, though, it’s the most entertaining and best crafted of the non-David-Farland, non-indie-press (Gravity vs. the Girl, No Going Back), non-national publisher speculative fiction (except it’s much better than Wings) Whitney Awards finalists. It’s also the first time I’ve been almost convinced by the mantra that LDS genre authors are catching up with their national counterparts.

But Jer3miah is ambitious and willing to dive into delivering a television-like drama (albeit with very short episodes) over the Internet. I’m not aware of any other Mormon work delivered this way, which makes me wonder if it is possible that Jer3miah could open up a new type of distribution for Mormon film, though how a producer would make any money from this distribution remains to be seen.

The series tells the story of Jeremiah Whitley, a BYU freshman whose parents travel from Seneca Falls, New York to visit him for his birthday and give him a video camera as a present. But when the family travels to Manti for a family reunion things start to get strange. Jeremiah is susceptible to “promptings” and a series of events lead him to both heartache and joy and to mystery and fear. All is not what it seems, and Jeremiah must puzzle out exactly what it all means. Jeremiah also must figure his way out of a few moral dilemmas along the way.

Overall, the plot moves along fairly well, without confusing the viewer or revealing the mystery at all. While the acting was reasonable, I’d have to call it flat–the ideas get across, but without much emotion. You may also struggle with the sound levels (which came out too low on my machine) and with getting the video delivery to work (I used the vimeo system on the Book of Jer3miah website and had to puzzle through two episodes where the video stuck on a frame while the audio continued. The episodes are also available on youtube, but there seemed to be at least a week’s delay there).

But despite all these problems, I have to admit I’m hooked a little. I’m looking forward to today’s episode, but, realistically, I don’t think the mystery will be solved, or most of the questions answered. I fully expect a cliff-hanger.

—————————–

I should note that Jer3miah is not without controversy. A post on the blog ‘Twas Brillig drew more than 40 comments, mainly discussing the portrayal of the sacred (even though there isn’t much portrayal of the sacred — apparently some object to Jeremiah’s “promptings”) and the idea that Mormon stories should be told at all.

But, there were a few thoughts in the comments that struck me: the idea that there is a bias in Utah county against telling Mormon stories, the idea that discomfort can or is used to determine when a work is “appropriate,” and the question of when something is “just entertainment” or whether anything can really be “just entertainment.”

And, why is there so little of the largest genre in the LDS market?

If you haven’t guessed, the largest genre is Mystery/Detective fiction, which, according to R. R. Bowker’s PubTrack service, accounted for 34% of all fiction books sold in 2008. But in the LDS market, only a handful of titles are mysteries.

For what its worth, sales of fiction in the U.S. broke down as follows:

• Mystery/Detective Fiction – 34%
• Romance – 24%
• Science Fiction – 9%
• Espionage/Thriller – 9%
• General (i.e., no particular genre) – 7%
• Other genres – 17%

Of course, comparable numbers are not available for LDS market titles, but it doesn’t take much effort to look at the titles available and see that not many titles are being produced in most of these genres. It sometimes feels like LDS fiction is composed entirely of Romance novels with a few westerns thrown in.

This is particularly surprising when we consider the LDS authors who write in other genres. Orson Scott Card is clearly a first rate author of science fiction, and is one who has let his LDS beliefs infuse his work, yet his science fiction isn’t found in LDS bookstores for the most part. Anne Perry is a hugely popular writer of mysteries, although her mysteries don’t involve LDS characters and situations. There are also other LDS authors who have been successful in these genres.

So clearly LDS Church members write in these popular genres, and it would stretch the imagineation to suggest that these genres aren’t also popular among LDS Church members. Why don’t LDS stores carry works written for LDS Church members in these genres? Why aren’t works for LDS Church members being published in these genres?

It sure seems like the purchasers of mysteries are attractive as buyers. Bowker’s data shows that on average they are wealthier than those who purchase Romances. They are also slightly older, and less likely to be women.

I suspect that a part of the answer is that some Church members can’t square these genres with the gospel, and complain when writers try to write LDS versions of such works. Probably the most public example of how this difficulty worked out was the controversy surrounding Richard Dutcher’s film Brigham City. While certainly not a particularly violent film, given what we regularly see coming from Hollywood, it was criticized for its violence, as well as for its portrayal of evil. How, complained some viewers, could this be an LDS film with such portrayals?

I suppose Mysteries are, if nothing else, about the problem of evil. The hero discovers an evil, searches for its source, confronts that source, and resolves the conflict, generally in favor of good. Along the way, the hero often is confronted by additional evil and temptation, and he may succumbs to some of it.

For some, I guess this might be incompatible with what Church members should be reading. Can you write a book in which the hero “wallows” in evil and have the book end up “uplifting?’ My own answer is, yes, you can. But I understand that not everyone will agree.

Even if I’m wrong, there are a lot of LDS Church members who are reading mysteries and “wallowing” in evil as a result. Wouldn’t it be better if they were “wallowing” in LDS mysteries instead?

1.

A Study in Scarlet is the original Sherlock Holmes story. The first seven chapters and the last two are all Holmes and Watson. Brilliant and trenchant. Earnestly scientistic. Quaint and mannered. The five chapters sandwiched in the middle are a hackneyed, recklessly-slanderous anti-Mormon screed.

Mormons in A Study in Scarlet are rich, debased, blood-thirsty zombies. The accompanying illustration comes from an early edition. It depicts Brigham Young in the home of one John Ferrier. Our American Moses has just threatened Mr. Ferrier with murder-by-Danite if he doesn’t produce his spunky adopted daughter (ingredients: one part Little Orphan Annie; one part Annie Oakley) for immediate enslavement in an arranged polygamous marriage.

This quotation (forgive the length) is a dandy:

[Ferrier] had always determined, deep down in his resolute heart, that nothing would ever induce him to allow his daughter to wed a Mormon. Such a marriage he regarded as no marriage at all, but as a shame and a disgrace. Whatever he might think of the Mormon doctrines, upon that one point he was inflexible. He had to seal his mouth on the subject, however, for to express an unorthodox opinion was a dangerous matter in those days in the Land of the Saints.

Yes, a dangerous matter—so dangerous that even the most saintly dared only whisper their religious opinions with bated breath, lest something which fell from their lips might be misconstrued, and bring down a swift retribution upon them. The victims of persecution had now turned persecutors on their own account, and persecutors of the most terrible description. Not the Inquisition of Seville, nor the German Vehm-gericht, nor the Secret Societies of Italy, were ever able to put a more formidable machinery in motion than that which cast a cloud over the State of Utah.

Its invisibility, and the mystery which was attached to it, made this organization doubly terrible. It appeared to be omniscient and omnipotent, and yet was neither seen nor heard. The man who held out against the Church vanished away, and none knew whither he had gone or what had befallen him. His wife and his children awaited him at home, but no father ever returned to tell them how he had fared at the hands of his secret judges. A rash word or a hasty act was followed by annihilation, and yet none knew what the nature might be of this terrible power which was suspended over them. No wonder that men went about in fear and trembling, and that even in the heart of the wilderness they dared not whisper the doubts which oppressed them.

At first this vague and terrible power was exercised only upon the recalcitrants who, having embraced the Mormon faith, wished afterwards to pervert or to abandon it. Soon, however, it took a wider range. The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about — rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders — women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror. Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took substance and shape, and were corroborated and re-corroborated, until they resolved themselves into a definite name. To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one.

Fuller knowledge of the organization which produced such terrible results served to increase rather than to lessen the horror which it inspired in the minds of men. None knew who belonged to this ruthless society. The names of the participators in the deeds of blood and violence done under the name of religion were kept profoundly secret. The very friend to whom you communicated your misgivings as to the Prophet and his mission, might be one of those who would come forth at night with fire and sword to exact a terrible reparation. Hence every man feared his neighbour, and none spoke of the things which were nearest his heart.

I don’t mind getting stuck at the checkout stand long enough to read the headlines on the National Enquirer. Just don’t expect me to read the articles! That is how deep Doyle apparently went in researching his Mormons. It’s not just the big things (murder and such). He also bungles small details. One Mormon character proclaims to an outsider: “We are … the chosen of the Angel Moroni.” I can imagine an alternative universe in which this is an authentic Mormon expression. Yet A Study in Scarlet is set in our universe. Mormon characters also repeatedly refer to the “Holy Four.” What is the “Holy Four?” I have no idea, and neither did Doyle.

2.
How iconic is Sherlock Holmes? Insert an embarrassing superlative here. That’s all that was left after I deleted various breathless stabs at describing his icon status. Certainly Holmes belongs among a handful of archetypal characters that seem to exist outside of the stories in which they appear. Others might include: Ebenezer Scrooge, Captain Ahab, Hamlet, and Hannah Montana. Holmes got so big that Doyle came to resent his power to overshadow everything else he did. Eventually Doyle killed him off. Yet Holmes was too big to stay dead. Doyle resurrected him under the influence of protests, mountains of hate mail, earnest pleas from his own mother, and extremely lucrative enticements.

A Study in Scarlet gives us Holmes’ origins, and it is full of memorable bits. Consider, for example, Holmes and Watson on knowledge:

My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Notice the contrast in tone between the Holmes chapters (narrated by the terminally acute and adoring Watson) and the anti-Mormon chapters (voiced by a comically sanctimonious omniscient narrator).

3.
Doyle visited Utah in May 1923. He was even given access to the tabernacle where he addressed a packed house on the subject of spiritualism. Doyle was introduced by Levi Edgar Young, a descendant of Joseph Young (Brigham Young’s brother) and a member of the presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy. On the same trip, Doyle dined at the Alta Club with Young, John A Widtsoe, and other Utah highbrows. Doyle was apparently grateful for this warm reception, and he spoke kindly of Utah.

Still, when given a chance to specifically renounce his treatment of Mormons in A Study in Scarlet, Doyle responded: “all I said about the Danite Band and the murders is historical so I cannot withdraw that tho it is likely that in a work of fiction it is stated more luridly than in a work of history. It’s best to let the matter rest.”

Much later, in a 1991 meeting with Salt Lake City Holmes-fan Michael Homer, Doyle’s daughter Dame Jean Conan Doyle claimed that: “You know father would be the first to admit that his first Sherlock Holmes novel was full of errors about the Mormons” and that Doyle had “relied on anti-Mormon works by former Mormons because he believed these accounts to be factual.”

Check out this Salt Lake Tribune article for more on this episode.

I am inclined to forgive Doyle for the sake of his children, literary and biological. All of us should have at least one offspring who successfully rewrites us into better human beings. Doyle had two.

4.
Dashiel Hammett wrote the following about his own iconic detective Sam Spade in an introduction to The Maltese Falcon:

Spade … is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client.

Likewise, Raymond Chandler offered this faint praise: “Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” This criticism is more devastating than it seems. (But don’t pity Doyle or Holmes. They were hard on their precursors too. In the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet, Doyle has Holmes call Poe’s C. August Dupin “a very inferior fellow” and Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq “a miserable bungler.”)

Chandler got it right in his essay The Simple Art of Murder when he waxed rhapsodic about the possibilities of detective fiction. Chandler gives an account of what realism in detective fiction looks like:

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge. … It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in[.]

Then Chandler declares:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. … But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; … if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Holmes was far too wooden to realize Chandler’s redemptive vision. And Sam Spade was gritty but too heartless. Phillip Marlow has them both beat.

I remember thinking several years ago that Halloween seemed to be a missed opportunity when it came to Utah’s theater community.  The past few years, however, have seemed to alter that, as theater producers have been realizing how popular seasonal events like these can be. Not too many years ago the Hale Center Theater in Orem put on a superb production of Wait Until Dark. BYU recently finished up a production of the classic thriller Dial M For Murder (why they didn’t play it through Halloween is beyond me). Performances of plays as varied Blithe Spirit and Sweeney Todd and The Crucible have planned their productions around the haunting season this year. Utah Valley University seems to be making it a semi-regular tradition now, having not too many years ago put up my adaptation of Legends of Sleepy Hollow (to a completely sold out run… I’m telling you, Halloween sells) and now Nosferatu.

Speaking of Nosferatu (a segueway into the subject at hand!), this is one cool piece of theater! The brain child of UVU professor and much-in-demand-director Chris Clark, this dazzling piece of theater is living proof of the man’s genius and UVU’s status as a rising star in the local theater scene. And I’m not just saying that because I graduated from there. I was there for a time when UVU had a bit of a slump in the program. Yet as I progressed in the program, I saw the department build upon the work of its pioneering predecessors and make some powerful decisions under the leadership of department chair D. Terry Petrie and favorable faculty acquisitions such as Chris Clark. It’s a totally different beast than when I started at UVU. And now they are regularly putting on innovative and powerful pieces of theater such as Nosferatu.

Chris Clark, who in the past has been known for his Midas’s touch with Shakespeare, will have to be careful, lest being a craftsman of ghost stories and vampire lore becomes his new niche. I saw Chris’s love for Halloween first hand when he commissioned me to write Legends of Sleepy Hollow so that he could direct it. It’s a favorite holiday of his. He gets it. The mood, the lore, the ambience… it flows naturally from him. Which is of great benefit to Nosferatu. Adapted by Clark from the cult classic silent vampire film by F.W. Murnau (which borrowed very heavily from Braham Stoker’s Dracula), this isn’t your typical piece of theater. Clark has created a mixed media production, basically re-creating the film on stage. The show has a film crew shoot it as a silent film and project it in glorious black and white on a screen above the actors (complete with dialogue cards a certain amount of footage from the original movie). The only words one hears from the play are the cues voiced by the film crew, as they film the actors. The rest of the mood relies on well executed and well chosen music, as the real story is expressed through movement, the actors performing it as a silent film actor would have done it at the time the original film was made. And the cast does a superb job at this. It’s as if they’re channeling the old time actors, they do such an impressive job imitating the style. Mark Oram as Knock, Heather Murdock as Ellen and the wonderfully creepy Tom Fernlund as Count Orlock the vampire are the stand out performances amidst a very fine (and rather large) cast.

Proper recognition must be given to the technical achievement of this show. The make-up (especially the make-up! The demonic Count Orlock is some of the best theatrical make up I’ve seen!) by Mandy Lyons and her talented team, costuming by Anna Marie Johnson and lighting by Mike James were all wonders to behold! Not to mention the finely crafted film work by Joel Petrie (an especially effective moment was when Count Orlock disappears on the film at the end of the story, while we still see the actor on stage).

This show was bold, innovative and thought out of the box. Re-creating a good deal of self effacing humor along with the genuinely moody and dark ambience the original film created made a theatrical event I’m not likely to forget anytime soon.

The other powerful Halloween tale playing in the valley right now trades vampires for ghosts… or are they? Turn of the Screw, playing at the Covey Center for the Arts, is adapted from the classic novella by Henry James with skillful artistry by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher. Drawing as much from the literary criticism sorrounding the story as the actual story itself, the play poses a good many questions about what exists in our minds and what is indeed real and supernatural. It also has questions about affection and what happens when we are not given this vital and basic need. Psychological drama as much as ghost story, the classic tale follows a governess who is given charge of two children, but with the express orders that she is to never contact their guardian about them– even when, it turns out, they are in the most dire need. Soon figures from the children’s past appear to the governess as she tries to piece together why she can see these figures when no one else can (except for perhaps the children?).

As with Nosferatu, this play rises on the wings of its director. Kimberley Mellen is a revelation to me, for I had very little previous knowledge of her until now. The concepts and execution of this play in Mellen’s hands are nothing short of miraculous.

To understand the limitations set upon her (and then the amazing things she did with the space), one has to understand the Covey Center’s “little theater.” It’s not that much of a theater, it’s really just a big room painted black with risers and installed theatrical lights. And before those lights came in, I have seen productions in there where the stage manager would just turn on and off the lights for scene changes. Actors have to enter through the same doors the audience does, and often music or other performances can be heard from downstairs where the more “grand” theater exists. So, to say the least, it’s never been an ideal space. But Ms. Mellen does something splendid with the space, using it to her utmost advantage.

Instead of staging the play in its proper Victorian period, the director garbs her actors in simple black clothing and relies heavily upon masks for most of the characters except the governess. She creates a square out of shower curtains, which can be drawn back and forth throughout the play, and which have a whitish, transluecent quality to them. With the curtains off-setting them, the black, large brick walls behind the actors suddenly seem less like a room, and instead take a very disturbing, clinical quality to them. As if you have just found yourself in an asylum.

As the curtains are drawn back and forth, back and forth, back and forth with increasingly reckless abandon, where this governess exists and what she tells us becomes highly debatable and we do not know whether we are being “seduced” into her way of thinking, or whether what she is telling us is real.  A hand held, electric lantern is also used throughout the play, sometimes pointing at the audience (again, an uncomfortable glare), sometimes shadowing the actors in frightening ways, sometimes casting our focus (or distracting it) to and from where it needs to be. All of these elements combine to make a very visceral and highly dramatic theatrical experience. This revelation of Mellen’s talent, I hope, is only a preview of great things to come from her. She easily joins people like Chris Clark, David Morgan and Barta Heiner in my personal pantheon of favorite directors.

And, of course, half of the job of good directing is good casting. Here Ms. Mellen does not disappoint either. All of the roles are divided between two actors. Rachel Baird plays the lonely governess, while Benjamin King plays everyone else. Ms. Baird gives a startling beautiful, yet frightening, portrayal of this governess. Aching, lonely, vulnerable, yet with a repressed passion and strength, it’s one of the best performances I’ve seen all year. A perfect complement to Ms. Baird is her fellow actor Ben King, who is a force of nature in and of himself in this play. Taking on several very distinctly different roles (complimented by some very evocative masks), he is able to give us a very convincing portrayals ranging from a seductive employer, trapping the governess into a strange and often frightening occupation; to a vulnerable, yet slightly creepy young boy, quite the feat since King towers above the governess; to the housekeeper, which King does a surprisingly excellent job at, considering his manly height and physique. Between the two performers, the show was one of the best acted pieces of theater that I have seen for a very long time.

So between Nosferatu and Turn of the Screw, there is a chance for Utah Valley Residents to see truly compelling theater and get their Halloween tricks and treats at the same time. Corn mazes and haunted houses are all part of the fun of the season, but I hope that it becomes a tradition within the valley to see shows like this every All Hallow’s Eve.