New Release! The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction, edited by Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh

Oct 16

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The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction

Edited by Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh

The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided community to repentance, a baptism gone very wrong, and spiritual gifts that extend far beyond the apostle Paul’s list. The characters stretch from wayward bishops and helpful home teachers to cyber-Seventies searching for lost sheep in the metaverse, with settings from the slums of Mumbai to a heaven that turns out to be more difficult than expected. Some characters reject the path’s restrictions and expectations, while others can second the reported words of J. Golden Kimball, “I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure in hell try to cross it as often as I can.”

Excerpt:

One night, more than deep into the night, Laura sat at the dining table. Alone. Reflective. Suddenly, she sat forward. She’d just finished eating a bowl of late-night ice cream, which hadn’t pleased her as much as it usually did. Ice cream = always satisfying. But not tonight. Even the candle she’d lit to create a romantic atmosphere didn’t do anything except cast a shaky light on the walls. Then, out of the blue, like a flash of lightning, she was filled with foreboding.

I don’t have much time left, she panicked. Her heart began to race.

Laura took the empty bowl to the sink and rinsed out the remains of salted caramel. She turned it over onto the towel where she aired dishes. She poured liquid soap and then water on her spoon and put it on the same towel. Straight next to round: the way a spoon should be set next to a bowl. Things needed to be put right before … She didn’t want to think about it anymore.

But it was more than she could control. Against her better judgment, she asked herself the question that had disturbed the margins of her consciousness before, especially on the day Peter died. Time. How much is left? She stood motionless at the sink, feeling the ghost of the bowl’s curve in her hands and thinking of Peter—her husband of forty years. He was gone. Last year. He’d run out of time, some had said. Out of gas. She smiled; she couldn’t help it. But this was not the time to make light of anything. She placed her hands flat on the granite counter that surrounded the sink. The surface felt cool on this hot night, but she couldn’t hide from the fact that a good part of her believed she’d reached her limit.

From "After Midnight" by Phyllis Barber

About the editors

Andrew Hall is an Associate Professor of East Asian History at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He co-edited A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020) and is the Literature Book Review Editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. In his academic life, he writes on Japanese colonial education in China and Korea, including editing and contributing to Education, Language, and the Intellectual Underpinnings of Modern Korea (Brill, 2022).

Robert Raleigh edited In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions, another short fiction collection published by Signature Books, and recently had an essay published in Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships. He is currently working on a documentary about the Indian Student Placement Program. He lives with his wife and kids and many animals in Happy Valley, Utah.