‘Tree House’ speaks softly to readers but carries a big stick

 

This review was originally published on March 27, 2009 in the Standard-Examiner newspaper. Due to a website update, it disappeared from the site. A search of Internet Archive failed to locate it. I am grateful to Christopher Bigelow, publisher of Zarahemla Books, providing a copy they had retained. Author Douglas Thayer died in 2017 at age 88.

Zarahemla Books’ latest offering in regional, LDS culture fiction, “The Tree House,” by Brigham Young University professor Douglas Thayer, maintains a soft grip on the reader which slowly tightens like a vice. Even when you think life is getting easier for the protagonist, Provo native Harris Thatcher, a sense of dread — just a few pages away — seems out there.

Thayer’s tale, which stretches from the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s, is told in gentle prose that almost seems to sleepwalk to the reader. Nevertheless, a lot of heavy, “big stick” stuff happens to Harris. His dad, who loved him but wasn’t a spiritual role model, dies. A few years later, Harris falls in love with a pretty classmate, Abby. Before “first love” can reach a gentle conclusion, Abby, who has frail health, dies.

Those two events are very important. Harris never seems to gain — real or unreal — a “testimony” of the Mormon faith. He’s a cultural member who does everything he’s supposed to but envies his best friend Luke, who has that type of sought-after “testimony.” There are very few pages where readers experience Luke in the first person. Perhaps that is intentional. Luke represents the outward spirituality that Harris never received from his father.

Abby’s death makes her a larger figure in Harris’ eyes than she would have likely been. She is the standard by which he compares women as he becomes an adult. 

Harris is what most of us would call a “good kid.” He loves his mom and brothers, goes to church, gets good grades and works hard at a local job, earning the respect of several role-model adults, LDS and non-LDS. His life is geared toward his mission. He’s called to serve in West Germany.

At this point, Thayer’s novel shifts a bit in tone. What was a memoir of growing up becomes on the surface a faith-promoting tale of a boy becoming a man. Harris is shocked by the devastation of postwar Germany but impressed by the faith of some members and the stoicism of a non-member couple who lost sons in the war. He adopts that stoicism to resist the temptation to slack off and becomes a model missionary, enduring much rejection to find a few converts. He witnesses a lot “spiritual experiences” while still acknowledging to himself that he lacks a testimony.

Harris returns from Germany and, almost immediately, reports to the Korean War. Luke also is drafted, although they will not be together. At this point, the reader will be in for a jolt. The novel shifts from Harris’ sometimes sad, quiet Mormon life to the horror of life on a ridge in Korea trying to survive while fighting off endless hordes of invading North Korean and Chinese soldiers. Harris’ stoicism makes him a good soldier and keeps him alive against tough odds.

But what he endures, including hand-to-hand murder and witnessing death daily, destroys his fragile testimony. No longer can he accept as truth just because it is told to him. Enduring war, and its emotional aftermath, has taken all the energy Harris can muster. He has none left for religion, which now seems unimportant against trying to survive. In a very emotional scene, Harris wonders why he deserved to live when so many others died. Among the dead is his best friend, Luke.

If I have a quibble with The Tree House, it is that Thayer continues to pile tragedy upon Harris even after the war. As Harris begins to rival Job in calamity, the novel threatens to veer into parody.

Nevertheless, The Tree House is a success. I remain impressed by the quiet, soothing style of prose Thayer uses which can still impact the reader. Even a jarring transition from the serenity of the West German mission to the slow-building terror of the Korean War is handled deftly by the author.

Although most of us don’t experience war or a 1940s European mission, if we’re honest with ourselves, we can feel empathy with Thayer’s Harris Thatcher, who oftentimes goes through the motions of what’s expected of him even though he can’t feel it inside.

-- Doug Gibson

LDS author Douglas Thayer's novel of teen’s fight to survive avalanche

The late Douglas Thayer, a BYU English professor who died in 2017 at 88, penned some pretty good books, including a memoir of his boyhood in Provo, “Hooligan,” and the novel, “The Treehouse,” a well-written but bleak-to-a-fault novel of a Mormon youth’s teen years, mission to Germany, a horrific stint in the Korean War, and his post-war life.

Thayer is a top-tier Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints novelist out there. His final novel, “Will Wonders Ever Cease: A Hopeful Novel for Mormon Mothers and Their Teenage Sons” (Zarahemla Books, 2014), is a good read that mixes an adventure with the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness thinking as he works to avoid peril and death.

The plot involves Kyle Hooper, 15-year-old Mormon boy in Colorado who takes off in a Suburban to go skiing without his parents’ permission. Almost abruptly, Kyle’s knocked unconscious and his vehicle carried away by a massive snow avalanche.

He comes to several hours later alive thanks to the strength of the Suburban, fortified years earlier by his late grandfather. Kyle is deeply buried in snow, but lucky enough to have landed close to a stream under the avalanche. That allows him to have oxygen. Without a cell phone — it’s smashed — but a car with battery power and some food and drink, he struggles through several days trying desperately to survive and dig himself out.

Kyle is a well-developed character of Thayer’s and the reader will enjoy following along with his ingenious and courageous efforts to save himself from what looks like a long, prolonged and certain death. Mixed in with the survival efforts in this slim novel are this typical but charismatic teen’s thoughts, which run the gamut from girls, church, testimony, his very religious mother, his remote father, his less religious but very talented grandfather, a brother, Trace, who died recently, family, his best friends, and musings about how friends and family are taking his ordeal.

In one emotional scene, Kyle turns on the Suburban’s radio and learns he’s been given up for dead, and retrieval efforts won’t resume until spring.

Within these thoughts, three characters are well-formed by Thayer, an author in his 80s. Kyle’s mother, Lucille, who is originally perceived as a Mormon scold but is revealed to be refreshingly progressive on issues such as homosexuality and premarital pregnancy, and possessed of a strong will, his Grandpa Hooper, whose legacy of common sense and handyman’s know-how is used to great advantage by Kyle, and his late brother, Trace, whose last months alive Kyle recalls as he endures his own struggle to survive.

About the only thing I don’t like about this novel is the bland title, which seems more suitable for self-help or inspirational genres. But it’s a good read, compelling and thought-provoking and readers — drawn into Kyle’s plight — won’t be able to put the book down in the final pages.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardNET in 2014.

‘Millstone City’ an example of the Mormon pulp fiction genre

 

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There’s been an emergence in what I call the Mormon pulp fiction genre. Far less refined than an Orson Scott Card novel, writers delve into thriller tales with Mormon plots or ideas. There's a short story anthology, “Monsters & Mormons” was published (read). Tales included missionaries fighting off flesh-seating zombies and another missionary being rescued in outer space by polygamous aliens. “Millstone City,” from Zarahemla, provides the Mormon pulp fiction novel.

 In a gang-infested lawless section of Brazil, breaking the rules leads Elder Zach Carson to witness a murder. Soon, he and his companion are on a race for their lives, trailed by psychopathic criminals. Two detectives, overwhelmed by a law enforcement system that is completely corrupt, try to help but are forced to flee for their own lives.

The term “pulp fiction” is not a criticism of the tale. Author S.P. Bailey has written an exciting, fast-paced, heavy-on-action story that takes constant twists and turns, with Carson and his companion, Elder Nordgren, racing from one threat only to encounter a more dangerous one in the next chapter. Here’s a plot: Elder Carson, pining for his girlfriend, Lilly, takes a late-night stroll (alone) to a local business in Olinda, Brazil, that offers long-distance phone service. That’s a big no-no in the mission field. While there, two men flit into the store and murder the employee. Elder Carson hiding, makes eye contact with one of the killers. His name is Heitor, one of their recent converts. Heitor stays silent and the now-traumatized Carson returns to his lodgings with Elder Nordgren.

That leads to a few days of fast-paced nightmares where Carson and Nordgren try desperately to get out of the remote Olinda and back to Recife, where they can seek refuge with either the mission home or the United States consul. They are at first stymied by Heitor, who threatens Carson and Nordgren and has them tailed by low-level gang members. However, things spiral out of control once the leaders of the gang, which deals with illegal organ transplants, decides to kill the elders.

There is a claustrophobic quality to the scenario author Bailey lays out. Carson and Nordgren can walk around Olinda, shop at stores, seek help from two detectives, Costa and Assis, who try to help them, visit Heitor’s family, who are unaware of his criminal deeds, call their mission president, who pleads with them to get out of there, visit a nosy “cougarish” neighbor, Luz, who later pays with her life for her interference. Despite their ubiquity, the elders literally seem like mice being pawed by cats in an alley with no escape hatch.

A good example of the prose is found in this scene, in a slum called Ilha do Bicho, the elders run for their lives from a local hoodlum ready to kill them:

“You’re dead, Mormons,” Mateus calls after us.

We turn a corner. Nordgren crashes into a rusty old stove. He knocks it down and tumbles over it. Hundreds of cockroaches and three flabby rats scatter. I’m running directly behind Nordgren; I trip over a rat and hit the dirt. It shrieks and sinks its teeth into my shoulder. I reach around and pull it off — it’s greasy and feverish — hot in my hand. I fling it away from me against a shack, pull myself up, and run after Nordgren.”

In that same scene, Bailey, in pulp fiction fashion, lends some gritty humor as the missionaries race through a shack right past two lovers. “We get a glimpse of middle-aged people copulating on the couch. They are big and sweaty and oblivious — they don’t notice the Americanos running wildly through their living room.”

Carson and Nordgren’s mortal peril, to many in the novel, is akin to bored wildlife watching a frantic lone human slowly sink into quicksand. The scene where corrupt federal law enforcement personnel contemptuously seize the missionaries from the two detectives trying to help them and throw them into a hellish, overcrowded roach- and rat-infested prison is chilling in its spareness and lack of emotion. The missionaries are taken to the gang leader, The Elbow, who carelessly tells them they are to become forced organ donors.

The story doesn’t end there. The elders will escape that threat, only to face another. Late in the novel, they receive help from an unexpected source, a repentant killer reluctantly hoping for redemption.

As mentioned, this is a good read. As with pulp fiction, there are plot holes. It’s hard to believe that the pair’s mission president would sit still and wait for the missionaries to come to him. When he first makes contact with Carson, he expects them to arrive in hours, yet days pass by with no appearance by LDS authorities or consulate representatives to rescue the pair. That’s not a huge objection, though. The isolation the missionaries experience, along with the constant threads of danger that arrive every few pages, are what makes this pulp fiction work so well.

“Millstone City” merits more readers. Despite this review, I still haven’t touched on more than a small fraction of its positive traits.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published in StandardBlogs in 2011.

Acid Test: LSD vs. LDS is an '80s Mormon punk conversion memoir

Review by Doug Gibson

"Acid Test LSD vs. LDS," 2020, Zarahemla Books, is a long-awaited memoir from Mormon writer, editor and publisher, Christopher Bigelow. At its foundation, it's a re-conversion tale. The author chucks away his Mormon faith -- proclaiming it bland and conformist -- after graduating high school, and re-converts after a short spell of trying to acclimate himself to what he describes as a "chaotic neutral" existence, to use a Dungeons and Dragons term.

The seeking-to-be-"chaotic-neutral" period involves sampling or observing modes of life his religion prohibits, or frowns on: including semi-communal living, a brief sojourn back to his childhood area, Southern California, drug use (particularly LSD), shunning higher education, scattered low-paying work life, attempts at a punk lifestyle, launching a punk 'zine that focuses more on critical thought than reviews and interviews,  fornication, mooching from parents, satanism, petty theft, and homosexuality.

At its heart though, "Acid Test," I suspect, is an homage to an era of Salt Lake City counterculture of the mid-1980s, when the city boasted an often unique punk and New Wave culture, with local bands, and musical venues and clubs filled with younger adults embracing a movement at odds with Mormon culture, and for that matter, Reaganism. Even readers, such as myself, with musical tastes that never approach punk, will smile with nostalgia as Bigelow recalls journeys to Cosmic Aeroplane shop or the Blue Mouse theater. This was also the era of Mormon conman/murderer Mark Hofmann, scamming gullible LDS Church leaders with fake memorabilia, and bombing people to death.

It really was a crazy time.

The very young Bigelow packed a lot of life into the short time this memoir covers. In Salt Lake area lodgings that eventually became packed with friends and squatters, he stayed in several locations. At times the reader forgets he's a youngster, 17 when the tale starts. He has an endearing immaturity mixed with an unfeigned quest to challenge conventions. At the beginning, nothing frightens him. Even the occult is a subject worth exploring.

The author's family history is etched in Mormon history, Heber C. Kimball, Brigham Young, and many more, all related to the author. The teenage Bigelow is perceptive enough to understand that the corporate-life LDS Church he shunned in 1984 was once a progressive, way-out-of-the mainstream religion when Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were its prophets. Many early church policies and doctrines we don't talk much about today fascinate Bigelow and his adventures in Acid Test seem an effort to connect with the spiritual bohemianism of his early-LDS ancestors

For someone who has never taken LSD, Bigelow's vivid descriptions of what the world appears like to an LSD user tripping is fascinating and almost, but not quite, tempts this reviewer to sample it. However, later in the memoir, Bigelow's enthusiasm for drugs is tempered, replaced by a fear that it's a tool of dark entities to lead souls away from spirituality.

Bigelow was already an accomplished 'zine publisher as a high school student. In Acid Test, he recounts efforts to start a 'zine, called Flourishing Wasteland. After a spotty start, he works very hard on issue 2. However, his interest wanes and then concludes as he begins a re-conversion to the LDS Church.

The author's effort to cast aside concepts of good, and evil start to shake a bit after he takes LSD a lot. He senses deception in his LSD experiences, questions how real they are. He is also fascinated with the Stephen King novel, "The Stand," which involves a near total loss of human life and survivors who gravitate toward locations with leaders who represent good and bad.

There is a central reason Bigelow returns to Mormonism, and this memoir (a trilogy is planned) ends with the author's mission approaching. I don't want to give away the distinct event that motivates Bigelow to give up an alternative lifestyle and return to staid Mormonism. Getting around that, reading Acid Test made me think about all those Bible-like quotes in the Book of Mormon that talk about a sinner being past the point of redemption and consigned to hell. I don't like any idea of a literal hell but Acid Test posits to me the possibility that those types of scriptures, in the Book of Mormon or The Bible, are talking not about a hypothetical lake of fire but instead a consistent state of wickedness that goes on too long, leaving the sinner devoid of grace, incapable of repentance, and redemption.

Another reason for the author's disillusionment for "chaotic neutral" is more simple. He loves a teenage girl. Her promiscuity causes him normal pain. He includes her in his re-conversion efforts. She joins in the effort but the relationship seems shaky as the memoir ends.

Bigelow is a very talented writer. I read a review that compared Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" to the memoir. It's probably apt but I thought more of George Orwell's memoir/fiction when I was reading. Bigelow's conflicted thoughts, yearning for a meaning, and despair of a shaky love reminded me Orwell's "Burmese Days." His at-times narrative, matter-of-fact, without-self-pity accounts of unpleasant circumstances (including a date with middle-aged male "chicken-hawk" ) remind me of the style of Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London."

Late in the book, Bigelow laments that, for the most part, he's not getting the spiritual charge he's led himself to believe that conversion to the faith promises. The Scriptures are a tough slog, church meetings are still regimented, even the Temple lacks the spiritual manifestations that others have talked of. It's a reminder that spiritual experiences are rare commodities for most of us, and that endurance is a more valuable tool toward church activity.

Bigelow grew up in a family with parents that represent an earlier generation follower of Mormonism, one that talked more of the Three Nephites, of Cain roaming the earth, of White Horse Prophecies, and demons struggling to lead us into darkness. Each life is a battle between good and evil. Spiritual manifestations seemed to be more common in "those days." Bigelow mentions his mother having several spirit observances. On a side note, my parents were that way. My late mother once told me she saw the Savior's profile in the temple.

Ultimately, these traditionalist Mormons serve as a catalyst for the author's return to his family's faith. They never abandoned their son, and were often ready to provide assistance. This underscores another strength of the memoir; that love is still a commandment, even if the recipient is not living as parents, or others, might wish they lived. Some of the characters in Acid Test had depressing futures and ends. Others had better futures. Some of them did not receive unconditional love.

You can buy Acid Test LSD vs. LDS via Amazon here.

Mormonish stories from Peck tap into the subtexts of our faith

A while back, Steven L. Peck, a biology professor at Brigham Young University, wrote “A Short Stay in Hell.” It was a fascinating piece of Mormonish fantasy, with a protagonist sent to hell after being assuaged of fears of burning lakes and pitchforks. The hell he eventually becomes resigned to, however, proves to be more soul-decaying than anything envisioned in the Old Testament or by Middle-Ages artists.

Peck has a spare, to-the-point writing style, with strong dialogue that engages dilemmas. Through plot and the personal motivations of characters, the dilemmas sometimes find surprisingly simple solutions. The determination of the narrator or main characters, is ultimately rewarded.

Peck has also published a collection, “Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck,” published by the outstanding Mormon-themed house, Zarahemla Books. (zarahemlabooks.com) The short fiction is a mixture of LDS-themed science fiction, fantasy and the contemporary. I wasn’t disappointed by any of the fiction, which varies from a few pages to long stories.  

A top offering of the science fiction and fantasy is “Avek, Who Is Distributed,” in which Elder Windle is faced with telling Avek the discouraging news that church leaders have decided that distributed AIs cannot be baptized. As Windle tells Avek, “You must understand. The difficulty is that your intelligence is distributed across three planets in thousands of computational nodes ...”

Avek responds, “And yet I am one thing. A unique individual. Someone that thinks singly. Someone who can feel. Who longs for things. ...”

In the story, “AIs” have long been baptized, with questions of gender long settled. Elder Windle, and church leaders eventually reach a decision that allows a measure of achievement and relief for all him and Avek.

An excellent contemporary short story is “Bishop, Banker, Grocery, Fry,” in which our protagonist bishop is visited by the wife of an active family, a picture-postcard LDS family. Like an attentive spouse, she knows something is amiss with her husband, that there’s a unsettling change in their life. She’s unaware of what it is, and he’s not telling her,

The bishop goes undercover for a day, following the husband through a workday. The very first clue that the wife’s suspicions are on target is that the husband’s career job, the bank, is not on his agenda. Instead they make stops at a grocery and a small restaurant.

The resolution of this tale will resonate with very overwhelmed, working-too-hard career parents who wonders if it’s worth it.

“Wandering Realities” contains the elite of short Mormon fiction. Besides great tales, it enriches the reader with a diverse look at Mormon culture and sentiments. It’s a good deal via Kindle at $4.99 as well.

-- Doug Gibson

--- Originally published in StandardNET