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.

It is probably not surprising that so many of the nationally-published, succesful YA novels by Mormon authors are about agency — Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, Dan Wells’ I Am Not A Serial Killler, James Dashner’s The Maze Runner. Not only is it a key component of Mormon theology, but it’s also really what YA is all about. One comes of age when one can learn to (or be freed to or free oneself to) make choices (and accept the consequences). But as intensely as the three titles I mention deal with agency, none of them are about it thematically as much as Ally Condie’s Matched. From the title, which refers to the fact that reproductive unions in Condie’s dystopia are arranged/assigned, and the front cover (which features a young woman in a bubble); to the back cover, which includes blurbs with words like free will, choice, rebellion and controlled; to, well, all all those pages in between this is a book about agency.

Condie intensifies the issue of agency by doing what all dystopias do: create a claustrophic, circumscribed, controlled society. A key component to that is the restriction of approved materials for consumption by the populace — or in other words: correlation. I use that term, of course, in the LDS sense to mean a system of education via approved materials that are consistent across the organziation (or in this case — the Society).

As we discover on page 29:

The almost-snow reminds me of a line from a poem we studied this year in Language and Literacy: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It is one of my favorites of all the Hundred Poems, the ones our Society chose to keep, back when they decided our culture was too cluttered. They created commissions to choose the hundred best of everything: Hundred Songs, Hundred Paintings, Hundred Stories, Hundreds Poems. The rest were eliminated. Gone forever. For the best, the Society said, and everyone believed becuase it made sense. How can we appreciate anything fully when overhwelmed with too much?

Whatever you think about the characters and plot of the novel*, this bit of world-building is genius. Not oh-my-heck-I’ve-never-seen-this-before genius, but brilliant-execution-capturing-of-the-times genius. Condie bottles up all the hand-wringing over information overload, filters it through our (and by our I mean our society, but especially the culture created by Gen X) obsession with top 10 (or top 25 or top 100) lists and then labels it with the marks of correlation** that she has experienced as a post-Harold B. Lee Mormon.

And what’s fascinating about this to me and about my readerly reaction to the novel is not just that I find her transmutation of these elements of recent history captivating, but that these elements work both ways. Yes, this is a dystopia. But because of the way she combines the familiar elements, it’s hard to see the way society has configured itself in Matched as wholly bad — or rather, I can see the appeal. It would be nice, sometimes, if life could be correlated, and if there really was a list of the best of everything that actually was viable, that could actually lead to full appreciation (and, of course, here’s where lists and correlation always breaks down — because the determining the best as a discrete list is impossible, and it never can be the best for every single person and circumstance).  The cultural and educational aspects of the “Hundred” approved works are just the beginning of the dystopia in Matched — I haven’t even discussed the way social relationships, living spaces, work and physical health are regulated/shaped by the Society.

Of course, once you begin thinking about it in a very specific way — once you realize that the lists then lead to all other cultural products being destroyed — then the whole notion is completely horrifying. As it is meant to be. And, if one were a rather introspective reader, one would be tempted to then turn the dystopia, the Society back on to our own society and begin to wonder about both how we correlate and list as well as how we deal with the overload of information. I don’t know that Matched provides any amazing answers (although we really do need to see where it’s going with the rest of the novels), but in the way it dramatizes our messy, disjointed perhaps even schizophrenic relationship to cultural products totally works. And works in a way, that maybe, just maybe, is as effective as it is because Ally Condie is a Mormon. So at the risk of engaging in the sort of list-making the work itself decries, I nominate Matched for immediate inclusion in to the Mormon literature*** YA canon. And I look forward to far more sophisticated and in-depth literary criticism that treats the theme of agency in this and the other recent YA books by LDS authors.

*And my armchair reaction to Matched was that I enjoyed it quite a bit and that I’d take Ally Condie over Meyer and Dashner any day even if she doesn’t quite (yet) reach the heights of Wells or Hale.

**For our non-LDS readers. Correlation in a nutshell is the standardizing of materials to be used in teaching as well as the administration across all LDS congregations. It’s basically standardized curriculum and policies/procedures. Of course, most large organizations (and school districts) engage in the practice to some degree or another. But the LDS Church is, perhaps, particularly thorough and effective in its implementation of it.

***As you may know around here we use the Association for Mormon Letters definition of Mormon literature which is any narrative work that is by, for or about Mormons.

Matched

Dutton began with a 250,000 copy first printing and booksellers responded to the buzz around the novel. As a result the novel started at #2 on the ABA’s bestseller list (representing sales at independent bookstores). This morning it was ranked #223 on Amazon. The buzz has extended overseas, as foreign rights have been sold into 30 countries. Given that, it should come as no surprise that Disney has purchased an option for the film rights.

Sound familiar? The Wall Street Journal also noticed the parallel.

Unlike Meyer’s work, however, the subject matter of Matched boils down to a concept with philosophical heft, and one dear to Mormonism: freedom of choice. But it is also a dystopian novel, which, as far as I know, is unusual in Mormon literature (anyone know of other Mormon dystopian works? Is Meyer’s Twilight dystopian? Anything else?).

The novel, the first volume in a trilogy, is told from the perspective of a young girl nearing the age of marriage. She lives in a society in which nothing is left to chance–her food, work, and marriage are planned for her by “the Society,” the ruling religion in her world. Believing that the Society knows best, she accepts all this, until one day she is presented with evidence of the unthinkable: that the Society doesn’t know best.

I haven’t read Matched, but the descriptions have already enticed my 16-year-old daughter, so I’m sure it will be around the house within the next few weeks (who knows, the season of the year may have something to do with that). If nothing else these descriptions make me hopeful that this will be not only as popular as Meyer’s work, but have more substantial ideas to explore.

So I’ve posted different versions (with different titles) in the two places. The version at my blog focuses on the original question of whether No Going Back is a YA novel. The version here retains most of that content, but also considers some more general questions about the nature and status of YA novels, particularly in the Mormon universe.

Who’s the intended audience of No Going Back? In particular, does No Going Back fit the definition of a young adult (YA) novel? That’s proved to be a tricky question — one that raises, for me, broader questions related to the teen market in general, and in particular the market for teen Mormon fiction. And other fiction too, for that matter.

As best I can tell, “young adult” is a label used by publishers and librarians in trying to target books to an early-teen to mid-teen clientele (sometimes stretching down to preteens in practical application), whether by appealing to kids themselves or to the adults who buy, recommend, and/or assign books for them to read. There’s also a general perception (whether justified or not) that such books tend to be shorter, focused on teen protagonists dealing with teen issues, and often written in a simpler style, compared to novels labeled as adult fiction.

Chris Bigelow (my publisher) and I didn’t label No Going Back as a YA book, for reasons that made sense to us at the time. Evidence continues to accumulate, however, that many readers — including some who almost certainly know better than Chris and I — see it as a YA novel. For instance, there’s the review in the spring 2010 newsletter of the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Round Table, which evaluates No Going Back as an example of Mormon YA literature.

I’m happy, of course, with people buying and reading my book, whatever they choose to call it. Let’s pretend for a moment, though, that this question of definitions has some importance, and look at some arguments each way.

First, reasons why No Going Back is a YA novel:

• Most of the action centers on a teenage protagonist, his best friend, and their agemates at school and Church.
• The central story arc is about growing up.
• The central issue is how the teenage protagonist will deal with his increasing awareness of the conflict between his homosexual attractions and the religious beliefs he’s been raised with, together with a large side helping of questions about popularity and peer group loyalties — classic teen issues, just the sort of stuff you might have seen in those much-dreaded After School Specials of yesteryear.
• Much of the story is taken up with details of teenage life, from lunch-table conversation to video games.
• The style is relatively simple and straightforward, with a lot of space devoted to dialogue and internal monologue.

On the other hand:

• Not all of the characters are teenagers. One of the three characters who gets a lot of air space is an adult, the protagonist’s bishop and father of his best friend.
• There’s a major subplot (seen as irrelevant by some readers, but praised by others) about that adult character and his relationship with his wife, which has been strained by the demands of his calling as bishop.
• The book is grittier and more realistic in areas such as teenage language than titles that are sold as standard Mormon YA fiction.
• Although it reads quickly, the book is actually longer than typical size for a regular novel, let alone a YA novel, weighing in at about 110,000 words (standard adult novel size is considered 80,000-100,000).
• Perhaps most important, the book wasn’t written with a teenage audience in mind. So far, in fact, the only teenager I’m aware of who’s read it is my own daughter. (No, I didn’t twist her arm.) To be honest, I don’t think it’s a story that would interest many teenagers (unless they’re dealing with this issue personally) or that they would enjoy.

Readers so far have been divided in whether they think it’s suitable for a YA audience. A criticism some readers have made (both from a faithful LDS perspective and from a gay perspective, interestingly) is that the book could easily be depressing for teenage readers who are themselves same-sex attracted (SSA) and Mormon. Certainly it doesn’t spell out any easy answers for them. And the main character gets hit with a lot of hard things, partly as a result of choices he makes but largely as a result of things that are completely out of his control. When it comes down to it, I’m not sure I’d want a same-sex attracted teenage Mormon kid to read this book. (Though I think it might be good if his bishop had read it.)

Perhaps more to the point, as I indicated above, there’s little evidence so far that teen readers will want to read the book, or will like it if they do read it. This, however, raises a broader question to me: Who actually is buying YA novels? Who is reading them? Who is choosing who reads them?

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There’s a key definitional question that centers, I think, on differences between the Mormon YA market and the category of YA fiction in the larger non-Mormon world. Mormon YA titles are expected to be pretty much squeaky clean as regards language and what is considered inappropriate behavior, especially sexual behavior. You might have a (pretty daring) YA Mormon novel where a character or a character’s friend slips and falls morally, but all of the inappropriate behavior — and the feelings leading up to that behavior — would happen offstage. You could never (for example) allude to a straight teenage boy’s physical reaction to being next to a pretty girl — at least, that’s my perception — let alone a SSA teenage boy’s physical reaction to seeing a cute guy, as No Going Back does.

This is far from true as regards YA fiction nationally. In fact, YA fiction in general takes a certain pride in tackling the issues that are most relevant (if often embarrassing) for teenagers, like unwanted and socially distressing physical reactions. The very scenes in my book that would horrify buyers and editors of Mormon YA fiction actually increase its qualifications as YA fiction, judged by a national standard.

I think part of the reason for this — on top of a general prudishness in what’s usually referred to as the Mormon market — is that YA Mormon fiction, unlike YA fiction nationally, is a category that’s been created largely by publishers and booksellers, not librarians. Furthermore, it’s being sold largely to parents, grandparents, etc., not directly to teenagers themselves. The primary marketing niche for Mormon YA fiction, as I see it, is as an alternative to mainstream YA fiction, for those who are horrified by the very realism that mainstream YA fiction is so proud of. Marketing No Going Back as a YA novel in a Mormon market would have targeted it at precisely those buyers least likely to like it, while guaranteeing that it would have been overlooked by many who might have liked it but who know what the code of “Mormon YA fiction” generally means.

But then I have to wonder: Do teenagers really like all those issue-oriented YA books that are being sold and praised in the national market very much? Are they books that teenagers generally choose to read? Or do they read them because they’re assigned in classes and pushed on teenagers by librarians?

From my experience, when teenagers read at all by choice, they usually read genre fiction: science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, romances, or whatever their particular preferred flavor may be. (Adults aren’t much different in that respect.) I think there’s some evidence that teenagers tend to like books with teenage protagonists, dealing with themes related to growing up and coming of age. It seems to me, though, that they tend to like them in works such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game — a book with younger-than-teenage protagonists for most of the book, which resonates for many sf nerds with their experiences of unpopular brilliance, but not written, marketed, or (mostly) read as a YA novel, though it has many of the generic markers I mentioned above.

On the other hand, searching online, I found the following:

Orson Scott Card is the recipient of the 2008 Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring his outstanding lifetime contribution to writing for teens for his novels “Ender’s Game” and “Ender’s Shadow.” An accomplished storyteller, Card weaves the everyday experiences of adolescence into broader narratives, addressing universal questions about humanity and society. The award was announced January 14 at the 2008 Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) in Philadelphia.

So maybe Ender’s Game really is a YA novel, even if he and most of his readers don’t think it is. Kind of like No Going Back. Wait…

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Teenagers, I would argue, of all of us, very often most live in a fallen world beyond their ability to change. What good is done with stories featuring lives so unreal that their happy endings happen to people utterly different from those our teenagers know themselves to be? Of course, that’s assuming that teenagers do or will want to read such books at all, which as I’ve pointed out above is something I just don’t know. This, however, is an approach that conventional Mormon publishing absolutely cannot take, for market reasons.

I should acknowledge here that there are, by all accounts, some positive and fairly groundbreaking things that have happened in Mormon YA fiction. I’d be interested to know more about these, and to know if the experimentation that I heard about 5-10 years ago is still happening today. What drives Mormon YA fiction? What are its potentials and possibilities? Where is it headed? Clearly it’s not going to be the entering wedge for gritty realism within Mormon fiction, but are there other ways it might help push the boundaries? E.g., genre categories? I’m under the impression that a lot of the sf&f that’s coming from mainstream LDS publishers is YA fiction, though I’m not sure how much of it is distinctively LDS. Are there places Mormon YA fiction is leading (or has the potential to lead)? Inquiring minds want to know!

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There are, within the Mormon universe, a great many stories stories about growing up that are clearly intended for an adult audience. For a few examples off the top of my head, I need only think about The Tree House by Doug Thayer and On the Road to Heaven by Coke Newell. Not to mention The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall.

What marks these novels as non-YA is a combination of things, but style perhaps more than anything else. In some cases, such books are written from a clearly backward-looking stance: adolescence recollected from adulthood, as in the case of On the Road to Heaven. In other cases, the sheer sophistication of language and approach makes it clear that the expected reader isn’t teenagers. Doug Thayer does a particularly neat trick with this, writing with a highly literary style that nonetheless reflects the internal “voice” of the character, as in the following paragraph which starts The Tree House:

Harris walked out the back door and down through the dark garden past the antler pole, chicken cook, rabbit pens, and fruit trees. Lady, his dad’s big golden Lab, followed him. Harris looked up at the starry night. He walked down to the big, thick sycamore, which his dad said was at least seventy-five years old and one of the tallest trees in Provo. He climbed the rope ladder up to the tree house, climbed the trap door ladder, and crawled onto the low-pitched roof. He lay down on the old rug, his hands under his head, looking up into the sycamore just to watch the leaves move. He and Luke liked to do that.

The style is spare and lean. On a sentence-by-sentence level, there’s nothing you couldn’t expect teenage readers to process. At the same time, the prose is also dense, composed of short but thickly laid verbal brush strokes. It demands processing. Internal thoughts and feelings are reported simply but indirectly, creating a portrait of a young man that is at once intimate and somewhat distanced. It’s a very good, possibly great novel with an effective style, but not one (book or style) that I expect to attract young readers who would be looking to see their current selves in the adolescent protagonist.

I wonder whether it’s generally true — possibly even a requirement for such writing — that “adult” novels about a YA protagonist move so quickly to establish a literary distance of some kind between the protagonist and the expected age and sympathies of the readers? That would be an interesting question to look at more broadly. Examples, anyone?

Let’s take, by way of contrast, the first paragraph from Kristen Randle’s Slumming, a YA novel with a highly Mormon storyline, but from a national publisher:

There’s something about traveling to another country: you can never see your own home quite the same way again. I believe it was this experience that inspired by Great Philosophical Idea. Not that I am necessarily blaming the French. Or my mother.

The style is far more immediate than Thayer’s. Thayer’s first paragraph sketches a picture of a teenage boy; but Randle’s first paragraph is written in the voice of a teenager, and not just because it’s in first person, though I think that choice (highly typical of much YA fiction) is also not an accident.

And then just to round things out, let’s take the first paragraph of No Going Back. This, by the way, is a real-time experiment: I’ve written the foregoing without actually looking at my own first paragraph, and don’t have quite that good a memory for my own work. It will be interesting to see what comes out. Double-click the file… waiting… waiting…:

Paul had no intention of telling Chad that he was gay. Not anytime soon. Not ever, if he could get away with it. Eight years as Chad’s best friend told him Chad’s reaction wouldn’t be good. So why did he keep thinking about doing something he already knew was really, really stupid?

Even though this is in third person, it seems pretty evident to me that it’s a lot closer stylistically to Randle than to Thayer, particularly in the aspect of voice: you hear the adolescent character (at least, if I’ve done my job right). So maybe it’s understandable that readers are confused about whether or not this is supposed to be YA fiction.

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I can’t really be unhappy about the choices I made for No Going Back. I think it does what I wanted it to do, for a large part of my main intended audience: that is, believing adult Mormons with a tolerance for realism in their reading, without a particular investment in the issue of same-sex attraction but willing to consider how we as Church members can be more supportive in this area. I think, though, that for future ventures I shall try to be more cautious about the dividing line between YA and adult fiction, and work more clearly to stay on one side or the other — if only to keep from confusing the heck out of everyone. Then again…

Books I wish I owned:

Byuck by our very own Theric, er, I mean, Eric Jepson. This is the best link I could conjure up for this quirky never-published novel about the fight to stay single while attending BYU. So sad it never made it into print. Maybe if we’re all really nice Theric will serialize it on his blog!

No Going Backwards by Jonathon Langdon. Gay Mormon teen. Need more? Then check out the website.

Slumming by Kristen D. Randle (To read my interview with Randle click here.) What I loved about this book was how uncompromisingly Mormon it was and how uncompromisingly national market it was. Okay. It wasn’t exactly Gossip Girl, but the fact that the book works in both worlds made me so happy.

Breaking Rank by Kristen D. Randle. This one had closet Mormons but the teenage protagonist’s decision making process was so true to teenage Mormons. I loved it.

Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems I had no idea how awesome Mormon poetry was until I bought this. It was truly the best forty-six cents I ever spent!

The Year My Son and I Were Born: A Story of Down Syndrome, Motherhood, and Self-Discovery by Kathryn Lynard Soper. If you know a Mormon mommy who loves memoirs and haven’t bought this book yet for her, then now is the time. Seriously beautiful book.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams. I read this one for an ecobiography writing seminar and I was glad. TTW is a controversial and watershed figure not only in Mormon environmental writing but also in Mormon feminist writing and Mormonism as a culture and not just a religion. This book, part memoir and part ecology lesson, is a great place to start with her.

Long After Dark by Todd Robert Petersen. This book really pushed my litmus test, making me extremely uncomfortable in the process, but I felt like it was done artfully and purposefully and that made me glad. Read my interview with Todd Robert Petersen for more.

The Conversion of Jeff Williams by Douglas Thayer. This book about a California teen’s summer in the heartland of Mormonism is the novel that will shut the mouth of all the your Mormon fiction naysaying friends. Beautifully written, intensely thoughtful, this is one that demands repeat readings.

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George. For you readers who love teen fiction (it’s okay to admit it; I do too!) or just enjoy having a thought provoking book to read with your kids, this creative amalgam of Norse mythology and the Cupid/Psyche myth will delight. George is popular for her Dragon Slippers series and if you liked those you will LOVE this one.

The Candy Shop War by Brandon Mull. I love tween literature that encourages questioning and viewpoint broadening without being all Lord of the Flies or One Fat Summer about it. By creating an old lady of dubious motivations who makes candies that give kids super powers Mull does a great job of entertaining and pushing kids to think about consequences without preaching or settling for easy answers. I’m still waiting for a ten year old to read this book so I can chat with them about it. Really well done.

Books that were worth the inter-library loan:

Benediction: a Book of Stories by Neal Chandler. (Not everyone loves this book. A lot of people find it offensive. But I thought it was such a great parody of some of the wilder small town personalities I grew up with. Read my original post here.)

The Only Alien on the Planet by Kristen D. Randle. (Basically a novelization of the old “Cipher in the Snow” story. Interesting!)

Secrets by Blaine M. Yorgason (Quintessential Deseret Book “issue” novel. Tackles an important subject but tends to gloss over the difficulties.)

People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture by Terryl L. Givens (Probably the most important book for Mormon culture scholars and you should read it. But you might not tackle it more than once.)

A FUTURE FOR TOMORROW – Surviving Anorexia – My Spiritual Journey by Haley Hatch Freeman (Read my original review here. I also believe that this book should not be read without also reading Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine–just to give some context the psychotic break of it all.)

Books that are worth reading if someone hands it to you:

Circle Dance by Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Hold On, the Light Will Come: And Other Lessons My Songs Have Taught Me by Michael McLean

Abinadi by Heather B. Moore (For more of my thoughts on this book read here.)

River Secrets (The Books of Bayern)River Secrets (The Books of Bayern, #3) by Shannon Hale

Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA by Lance Allred (My original review.)

Austenland: A Novel by Shannon Hale

Dragon Flight (Dragon Adventures) by Jessica Day George

All this has got me wondering, what Mormon books did you read this year and what did you think? Any you enjoyed enough to shell out money for? I need recommendations for next year!

And yet, sometimes he just rubs my believing-Mormon-skin the wrong way with his cursory engagement with Mormonism, something that’s simply secondary to and arising from his academic interest in literature, faith, and culture. Since he’s a newcomer to the still-blossoming field of Mormon studies* and an outsider to the LDS faith, I can’t fault him for this engagement and for getting some things wrong every now and then. Heck, cultural Mormons are a peculiar lot with an equally peculiar history. Putting things together about the religion can be difficult even for those with a lifetime commitment to it.

But as I was catching up on some FHS Professor posts I’ve fallen behind on, I felt compelled to chime in this morning and to set the record straight, as it were (though I’m sure my straight is still fairly skewed), by referring the good doctor to Reading Until Dawn. Of course, this has something to do with the need for self-promotion. But, it also has something to do with my faith in the strength of Mormon literary scholarship, especially, in this case, Eric’s “Saturday’s Werewolf” (a revised version of which, by the way, will be published in a forthcoming issue of Sunstone [get your teaser here] along with a revised version of “Toward a Mormon Gothic“).

The setup: In his November 18 post in response to Stephenie Meyer’s answer to a fan’s question about the source for her imprinting werewolves (”Stephenie Meyer New Moon Q&A: Imprinting“), Granger suggests two sources beyond the one Meyer gives for this peculiar, primal relationship between imprinter and imprintee (read the post for her answer): (1) the institution of polygamy’s overabundance of man/child relationships and (2) the notion of premortal coupling. He ties Meyer to the first by suggesting that Twilight is a response to John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a book published, as Granger is quick to point out, “the month Mrs. Meyer had her [series-inspiring] dream and [... that] is filled to the brim with nightmare stories about polygamist crimes against young women as well as the nightmare of the Mountain Meadows massacre.” He continues—and this is what provoked my response: “Twilight is, I suggest, on several levels a Mormon woman’s response to Krakauer’s attack on her faith.”

Here’s what I said:

How so? Unless you’re privy to more information about Meyer than I am (i.e., that she’s read or is even aware of Krakauer’s narrative, something, in my mind, she’d have to do/be aware of in order to so specifically respond), this seems like something of a jump to me, like you’ve already formed an opinion on the issue and are stretching to find evidence (however thin) to support that opinion. Sure, Meyer is aware of Mormonism’s polygamist past and I’m sure she’s struggled with it in one way or another, though I don’t know how that struggle has influenced her personal understanding of the faith or, more apropos to this post, her work as a novelist.

But Eric Jepson (in the essay Sharon mentions in comment one) makes what to me is a more compelling connection between Meyer, Mormon doctrine, and Mormon (literary) history: imprinting as a manifestation of the premortal romance. This narrative trope is based in the LDS doctrine that we existed as spirits in the presence of God prior to mortal birth, an official teaching that gave rise to the folk doctrine of premortal coupling (i.e., that male and female spirits promised to find one another on Earth and to marry for eternity), which is conveyed in a sampling of non-official LDS narrative art. Jepson takes up two of these—Nephi Anderson’s 1898 novel Added Upon and Douglas Stewart’s 1973 musical Saturday’s Warrior (the latter is still a popular cultural reference in Mormon circles)—though I’m aware of at least two more: Susa Young Gate’s 1909 novel John Stevens’ Courtship (which was serialized before Anderson’s Added Upon was published; which may have been a source for his own, more expansive treatment of the premortal romance; and which was a response to the LDS Church’s [1890] manifesto putting an official end to polygamy) and Carol Lynn Pearson’s 1977 musical My Turn on Earth[, though this one is more simply about keeping premortal promises in general than it is about realizing a premortal romance].

This folk doctrine (which has been shot down by LDS Church leaders, most notably, as Jepson points out, by Spencer W. Kimball) seems a far more likely source for Meyer’s notion of imprinting than Krakauer’s discussion of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy. (And though they share common roots, Fundamentalist Mormon does not equal Latter-day Saint.)

I’m likely to come back to this idea of Twilight Studies meets Mormon Studies in the not-too-distant future with a post on my RMMLA experience (it’s been on the backburner for over a month) and a post in response to one of Granger’s recent interviews (on the backburner for a couple of months). But I felt this interaction was worth copying here, if only to show more of how non-Mormon critics are engaging the Mormonism of Twilight; to suggest, perhaps, ways Mormon scholars can (fruitfully?) respond by referring to our own literary and cultural history; and to solicit your feedback on any/all of the above.

———-

*I place him in this position (something he may not do himself) because he takes up issues of Mormonism as they relate to Twilight.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Convention at Snowbird, Utah (a rundown of my experience at the AML session will come in a later post that I’ve got halfway worked up; yes, I’ve been lazy—so sue me) and over the weekend I did some revising to incorporate some of the feedback I received and posted it on Reading Until Dawn. “Toward a Mormon Gothic: Stephenie Meyer’s Vampires and a Theology of the Uncanny” takes its place in the blossoming field of Twilight studies beside RUD’s inaugural essay, Theric Jepson’s “Saturday’s Werewolf: Vestiges of the Premortal Romance in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novels.” Link over and have a read. That’s what all the cool kids are doing (or so they tell me).

While you’re there, you might also notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to the site design (I’ve tweaked the header) and that I’ve updated the articles. The inconsistent layout was bugging me, so I took down the HTMLs until I can get them to look how I want them to look, reworked my document template slightly, and incorporated the new MLA citation standards into the notes. Hopefully this gives the collection a more consistent and professional feel.

Also: though I’ve published “Toward a Mormon Gothic” on RUD, I’m still open to feedback. So if, while you’re reading, you notice a typo or some such faux pas or notice that I’ve missed something you deem vitally important to the conversation, either email me or comment here. That or work up your own essay and submit it for publication. I promise I won’t complain.

A search of The Friend on LDS.org for “book reviews” shows that this feature began in May 2006 and that a Book Reviews column has been published in every November and May issue since then. Two prior results also appear — one in 1982 and one in 1985. [Of course, it may be that that search isn't turning up everything.]

Some of the titles reviewed in the May 2009 issue are: Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective, by Donald J. Sobol; Amelia Bedelia, by Peggy Parish; Small Pig, by Arnold Lobel; and Bertie Was a Watchdog, by Rick Walton (a bit of homerism, here, as Rick is LDS), illustrated by Arthur Robins.

None of those choices are particularly controversial or even new. Each column runs 2-4 recommendations in the categories of Picture Books, For children ages 5-9, For children ages 10-12, and Nonfiction.

What I find most interesting is that these choices come with a disclaimer:

These reviews do not constitute official Church endorsement of these books, but the books have been carefully reviewed to ensure that Church standards are observed. Please note: Occasionally, characters who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do not follow the Word of Wisdom. Selections where this occurs are marked with an asterisk (*).

That wording has been used since November 2007.  Prior to that the disclaimer had one line  that was worded differently:

Warning: Occasionally, characters who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will drink coffee or tea.

The use of the asterisk is not an occasional thing, either. You’ll see columns with 3-4 asterisked books.

I’m not interested in debating the merits of individual selections or the notion of using “Church standards” to select books (which should be fairly uncontroversial for this age range — and that may be part of why The Friend started doing it). Instead I want to point out two things:

1. How cool is it that the editors of The Friend are promoting reading and doing so with specific recommendations? (and specific titles is the best way to go).

2. How cool is it that the editors of The Friend are willing to include titles that have characters who may drink coffee or tea or maybe even smoke (pipe smoking does pop up in some older children’s books)?

The answer, of course, is: very cool.

Now, this is pretty safe, tame stuff we’re talking about here. And there’s still the issue of The Friend no longer publishing fiction. And it’s only twice a year. But an even “safer” approach would be to not do it at all.

Oh, and by the way. The work of Arnold Lobel is fantastic. Here are Amazon.com links to the The Frog and Toad Collection Box Set and Mouse Tales.

“Saturday’s Werewolf explores Twilight in terms of the supernatural literature of the Latter-day Saints, specifically as the series links to the premortal romance narrative mode, as exemplified in Nephi Anderson’s Added Upon (1898) and Douglas Stewart’s popular musical Saturday’s Warrior (1989).”

It’s an entertaining and insightful read that I’ve just posted at Reading Until Dawn (both PDF and HTML versions available there). Come take a look after you finish commenting on Laura’s Harvest post.

And don’t be scared: RUD’s lone (were)wolf doesn’t bite. But it just might inspire you to submit.

When I read Kristen D. Randle’s Slumming–which I found on the AMV Book Club list– I was completely surprised. The main characters were not vapid gossip girls looking to lose their virginity or angst ridden, beer drinking, wannabe boys (also looking to lose their virginity), like the characters in so many popular bestsellers aimed at young adults. No, these characters were different. They were Mormons.

Sam, Nikki, and Alicia are the only three Mormon kids in their school and it is that familial-type relationship that drives them to set up a great experiment for their senior year. A Mormon twist on the Pygmalion myth, the three teens decide to find someone who is “obviously untapped” and help them live up to their potential (was there ever a more Mormon phrase!). Nikki picks the biggest nerd in school. Alicia picks the bad boy who does drugs in the woods behind the bleachers during lunch. And Sam picks Tia, the eyebrow ring sporting, chip on her shoulder Goth girl. Throughout the book their ideals—which the three LDS kids can’t help but wear on their sleeves—are questioned and deconstructed as they discover that teenagers can be cruel but what hurts more is when trusted adults betray you. And that, sometimes, doing the right thing is painful and comes with untold costs, but it still feels good in the long run.

Kristen D. Randle is a fiery woman—a woman who doesn’t settle for compact answers and can’t help but complicate her own thought processes. Her passion shows in her writing and in her interview.

LC: Slumming is a very Mormon book–it has Mormon characters and it talks about Mormon theology–and it was published by a national publisher. That’s supposed to be impossible! How did you do it?

KDR: My editor at Harper, Rosemary Brosnan, is an incredible woman. We began working together when she was at a smaller company that was dissolved and she brought me along to Harper. When Rosemary was looking for a position – not hard for her, because her reputation in the business is glowing and offers came thick and fast – the choosing of a job WAS hard for her – because had two sons and her work schedule had to accommodate them.  Not the other way around.  She had to be home when they were home – period.  How many women in this competitive, shallow little world of ours would have that kind of depth of character, love and sense of duty and responsibility. This was a woman I could respect.

This is a long answer.  But I have to explain these things so that you will see that I did not, in fact, “do it.”  Rosemary did.  I had written the book, expecting to have to pull back all of the specific religious elements in it to almost nothing.  But when she, who is Jewish by lineage – but whose religious practice is personal and private, read this manuscript, she loved it.  She loved the fact that I was treating – almost examining –  a religious ethos in the story.  She said, “Nobody does this!”

We found out why.

The reviews of Slumming were very good, most of them.  Some of them glowing. Some saw the social aspects of having kids recognize and cross social lines as the heart of the book.  But some seemed to resent any mention of religion whatsoever and let a cynical tone carry that displeasure.  On top of that, the hard back YA market is mostly libraries.  And the National Library Association tends to the PC—which disallows serious mention of anything like a “predominant” religion.  My downfall, then, was not the LDS characters, but the “Christianity”  of the characters, which is deeply ironic.

You can write the word “God” as an explicative.  But you cannot put the word into the mouth of a character who uses it reverently and with meaning.  Not unless your story is ironic, hinging on the cruel inequality of religion and its rejections of certain behaviors, and thus proving your character to be a fool or a hypocrite, or something even worse.

Thus, even though Slumming sold far more hard back copies than my other books did—which were both award winning books; The Only Alien on the Planet went into seven printings in paperback—it languished and never made paperback.  Either that, or people just didn’t like it – but the sales numbers didn’t suggest that at all.

Pretty much the entire religious expression in the book was character development - a basic statement of where he was coming from, from a boy who was not perfect, who did not have a perfect life, but who cared deeply about doing the right thing.  And found out that, even in that effort, he was far more flawed than he’d ever dreamed.

Including “Mormon” characters?  It wasn’t really their LDS affiliation that the book was about.  It’s just, in writing what I know, I knew very well the oddly intimate relationships that can form in LDS wards – kids who end up feeling more like family in that consistent and germinal experience of participating in a ward long-term.  I wanted kids who were more than friends, who shared heart.  Thus, the church affiliation was really a plot element.  Obviously, those with no experience in this particular culture wouldn’t understand the power of that element, so I knew I was taking a chance.  But Rosemary recognized it right away.  So I became more confident about it as we went along.

Actually, I think that using the three voices to narrate was more controversial in many ways.

LC: Besides the LDS teenagers you knew, what was the inspiration for Slumming. Why did you write it?

KDR: Slumming was written differently than my other books.  It was a deliberately written book rather than a mystic download out of whatever place stories come from.  There are a lot of elements to its coming to pass.  One of the main things was reading a Louise Plummer novel–it was called Dance for Three, in which she used several voices to tell a story.  That simple unconventional convention allowed me the freedom to stage a story I had started fifty different ways only to leave after several paragraphs.  There had been no flow.  No real narrator.  No reason to tell the story.

But with three voices or two or four (and I had written in two before), suddenly the story could be told as it needed to be.  So there was a beginning.  Many things were happening in our lives during those days, and in our friends’ lives.  Some very distressing and strange.  And some of those things got woven into the story.  While I am not really much of a people person, and while I can only take so much of the happy fecklessness of kids (before I brain somebody), I care very much about what adults do to their children.  Adults, in our age of the world (as opposed to, say, the Greatest Generation – a generation of self sacrificing, shoulder-to-the-wheel people) are simply well furnished adolescents.  We don’t give up our angst as part of our matriculation from childhood.  It’s all about us – finding ourselves – defining ourselves through our stuff.

I was very involved with my kids’ schooling from the beginning.  And when high school rolled around, I knew their friends—knew and loved them and sometimes wanted to kick them in the pants.  Those years of experience with kids from other kinds of families (there are as many kinds as there are families), coupled with some very intense experiences with kids and their families when I was teaching in Salt Lake and Lehi showed me just how much damage idiot, selfish, self-enamored parents do to the children they have brought into the world.  Brought in and betrayed.  So that went into the story.

Living in Utah also crept in there. There is plenty of diversity here, and people run the same gamut that they run elsewhere.  It’s just, here – you somehow expect people to be preternaturally and consistently good, and since you know your neighbors, you also know they are flawed.  I think that I was writing about the person behind the “you” in that last sentence.  The one who somehow feels that, being who they are, they are in a position to make assumptions about the people around them.  Maybe that’s all of us.  So I wanted to explore good characters who do it, too—and who have defined the world so vividly in their own terms, they have little idea that there might be anything acceptable outside of those terms.

The book had the impact I’d hoped it would.  I saw it in the reviews and read it in the letters I was sent.  And that was a good feeling.

But primarily, I think, I wrote the book because I needed, for myself, to write a book.

LC: Why do you write for the YA market?

KDR: I think that writing to kids – that even teaching Sunday School to 13 year olds – is one of the most important things you can do.  Their brains are at an odd place – the brain is re-written back to front starting at age 11 and ending at around 24.  If you think you know something about life – about how to live it well, how to live it with meaning – this is the time to teach it.  This is the time you can get in on the wiring.  Adults have already made themselves, either into something significant, or into something – else – but kids?  They are waiting for the things that will help them sort out what is significant from what is glitz and not significant.  I tell other writers (arrogantly) that they better look at their lives and see if there’s anything in them that makes them worthy to write to children.  Because too many people use writing as a way of escaping the reality of the lives they have  - allowed to grow up around them.  That’s not a place from which to write to kids.  Kids don’t need to be enlightened and given direction by grown up adolescents.

LC: You are a woman of many interests. What are some of them and how do they interact with your creative process?

KDR: It’s funny that we speak in terms of “creative process.”  Is that not an oxymoron?

I’m interested in family.  And in the people I care about.  And in my animals – you’ll note that all of this amounts to: interested in creatures over which I have a some influence. I quilt.  I turn wood – really, really small pieces of wood. I love glass and so I dabble in stained glass and fused glass.  And I love beads (I would’ve sold Manhattan for beads, easy).  I guess what I really love are all those books with the shiny pictures you can spend big bucks on just to look at what other people have done with this kind of stuff.  I love making things.  I don’t love the process – I just love the idea of finishing. My house is full of tiny, amateurish little weird things. I’m also a genealogist—a primary source researcher.  Love the hunt.  Love the puzzle.   And I sing.  And I have five horses.

There is too much to do – there are too many wonderful, amazing skills and materials and projects to do in one lifetime.  There better be an eternity.  People who are bored are nuts.

How does all that interact with my CP?  I’ve learned this: when you put all the fabric of a certain color and texture group in one box, and all of another in another box, your brain has to come up with color concepts all out of its own little imagination, which is limited.  But if you take all the fabric and dump it on the floor, there will be combinations of things you NEVER would have thought of, lying right there on the carpet in front of you, free for the discovery. I recognize a shortfall of that kind of chaos with my circumscribed human world.  And yet, that world affords me endless concerns and joys and fuels my action full time.

An artist is like a big fat blender.  All the experiences of his life, all the news stories he’s heard, everything he knows about his friends, his world, his sex, his own particular brand of order – all of the museums he’s been to, and movies and books he’s partaken of – all experiences inside and outside go into his head and the blender goes on, and all that stuff gets shredded and sent racing around until everything falls out in new combinations.   The more you experience, the more elements you can combine.  The more you put your hand to, the more basic laws of physics you learn.  The more questions you ask, the more interesting your thinking—and your writing—becomes.

Check out Kristen D. Randle’s two other award winning books, too. The Only Alien on the Planet is like an in-depth, more hopeful version of the old LDS classic, “Cipher in the Snow.” Breaking Rank also has LDS characters, although only covertly. It’s a great book for examining the dynamics of the erotics of abstinence and how our good intentions can lead us to good and bad places at the same time. Definitely worth reading—especially if you have teenagers.