by David G. Pace
Twelve stories that span the Mormon Corridor—a geographical as well as, now, globally psychic space inhabited by America’s most “successful” indigenous religion.
At times rendered through life’s daily grind (politics, marriage, acquiring an STD… and too many parking tickets), other times through the supernatural and fabulist (angels and personified names of the dead ripped from the real-life Utah mountain vault filled with genealogical records), these are Latter-day Saints who see things “Mormonly” (with apologies to “New Englandly” Emily Dickinson) both driven and riven by their frenetic and sacralized sense of community, their orthodoxy, their doubts and their awkward (often futile) rebellions to comical, poignant, sometimes harrowing ends.
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These stories “convey the longing of those who are in some sense out of communion: lonesome, solemn, wandering, cast out, unrecognized by the Church or their own people. But they need not worry that there is no book that—transcending orthodoxy and disbelief—captures enough in-between-ness to find themselves in. David G. Pace has written it. That’s what you call the power of a text.
—From the Foreword by Christopher T. Lewis
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David Pace’s exhilarating new collection, American Trinity, fashions a new set of mythologies from the material of Mormon America—tales of doubters and believers, angels and heretics, the sacred and the profane. With wisdom and humor, these ambitious stories use the particularities of LDS culture and history as a lens to examine the most profound, universal elements of human life—producing a collection that speaks powerfully to Mormons and non-Mormons alike.
–Shawn Vestal, author of Daredevils and Godforsaken Idaho
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Pace’s short fiction is affecting and illuminating. He writes unflinchingly, depicting those at the margins – the doubters, the diffident, and the disconsolate, with sensitivity, compassion, and humour.
–Carys Bray, author of A Song for Issy Bradley
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There is deep pleasure to be found in the pages of David Pace’s gorgeous collection of short fiction, American Trinity. These are moving narratives, steeped in wise and evocative contemplation, luminous with Mormon Americana. Pace deftly plumbs the sometimes dark, often difficult depths of faith and loss with an insider’s knowledge and an angel’s compassion. He is, without doubt, one of the finest storytellers to come out of the Mormon experience.
–Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author of The Contortionists and Dancing Naked
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A former Mormon, David Pace with his deep concern for humanity and marvelous insights, brings members’ struggles to light, showing how the LDS religion both feeds and strains the heart. These stories are brilliantly rendered, wildly funny and touching, as Pace reveals his characters’ conflicts with their beliefs in Mormonism’s rigid rules. We learn about the quirks of baptism of the dead, how sexual relationships are affected, as well as members’ unique turmoils about leaving the religion, or going back to it, and much more. A lapsed Catholic, I feel that any Mormon or other person raised with strict faith, will love these stories as well as non-religious readers curious about the secret lives of the Mormon faithful, and unfaithful. I could not put this book down. Well researched and intelligent, this is some of the finest fiction I have read about a religious culture, and some of the finest fiction I have ever read.
–Nancy Takacs, author of Dearest Water
