In considering the stories collected in David G. Pace’s American Trinity: And Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor, I keep thinking of lineage. Not priesthood lineage but the literary kind.

Mormon writers—excuse me, Latter-day Saint writers—have inherited the problem of genre writers through the ages. Each generation of storytellers draws upon the lineage of previous work. And yet it’s easy for narrative breakthroughs to be lost to readers who haven’t been invited into the literary congregation.

For female writers and thinkers, for example, feminist works often have been received “as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present,” wrote poet Adrienne Rich. “This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.” Latter-day Saint writers face a similar challenge. In Rich’s words, each new generation of LDS stories might be received as “sporadic” or “orphaned of any tradition of its own.”

That’s why an insightful, illuminating opening essay by Christopher T. Lewis is one of the blessings of Beyond Common Consent’s thoughtful publication of American Trinity. In his foreword, Lewis asks readers to consider what came first, which serves as an excellent invitation into these 12 stories. Pace’s characters are eternally caught between the faith of their childhood and their own mature unbelief. They are bruised, yet nostalgic for a time when their ideas about God, family and the future seemed less complicated. Above it all, these characters could testify that it’s Mormon mythology to which they still hold fast.

In fact, LDS mythology is a literal imprint in “American Trinity,” Pace’s weighty, satirical title story about Zed, the cynical Third Nephite. For those who didn’t grow up steeped in Latter-day Saint scripture, the Three Nephites are disciples of Jesus described in the Book of Mormon (3 Nephi 28:7) who become translated beings called on a mission to live on earth and do good deeds until Jesus returns. As a writer, Pace takes the mission seriously. His character, Zed, has been called—Zed thinks of it as a curse—on an eternal ministering mission. He admits he has lost his faith, admits he would rather eat oysters and observe humanity by watching Broadway plays than continuing his work of translating scriptural texts to contain “the requisite miracles.” Still, despite his weary cynicism, Zed believes in the power of The Book.

Zed’s a delicious, satirical character, and Pace’s story of religious magical realism is filled with insightful questions about storytelling. “Without our own inspired, and inspiring book, those of us residing in the New World would always be relegated to the step-sheep of God.” That’s from Zed’s argument with Mormon, the warrior prophet whose name would be the title of a book of scripture and, for generations, a shorthand nickname for a religious people. “We are more than the sum of our battles.”

Are LDS readers and writers more than the sum of our mythology? It’s an intriguing question that Pace, who has served as a literary community organizer in Salt Lake City as well as a writer for this publication, explored earlier in his 2015 novel, Dream House On Golan Drive. In that novel, a version of Zed serves as a guardian angel to a very lost, very contemporary soul.

Doctrine turns literal in “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” In the mirrors of the women’s dressing room in an LDS temple, Gloria is troubled by a vision of dead celebrities, “but all the Lanas were moving away from her, busy in eternity’s endless tasks, looking for the man of their dreams, the warm studio lights, the adoring eye of the camera.”

In the pages of American Trinity, there’s a Sunday School bandit (not to give readers too many ideas), as well a nightwatchman who guards grubby LDS relics, and Paul, a lost Saint who befriends Saul, a befuddled Jewish man, who comes to serve as his doppelganger. It’s in the dark notes of the stories that readers may hear universal notes. That’s in particular for readers who didn’t grow up with stories of golden plates and ministering angels, but who may have struggled with their own religious doctrines.

Many of these stories grow out of autobiography, but readers don’t need to trace that history. Instead, this is more helpful: the writer might be considered a cultural anthropologist of LDS culture. Once, when asked in a 15 Bytes interview if he considers himself a Mormon writer, he answered, wistfully: “Hopelessly.”

For a couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about Pace’s title story as a flashy anchor for the collection. But two stories with more everyday plots, “Stairway to Heaven” and “Caliban Revels Now Ended,” have started to claim more literary heft in my mind. In “Stairway,” a young man learns about the limitations and hope of prayer while a reckless friend goes missing. And in “Caliban Revels,” a man returns to the town where, as a LDS missionary, he and his companion read the Book of Mormon to an older man who had lost his ability to speak due to a stroke. Nothing is resolved, nothing falls away in these stories, but the complexity of being caught between feels like the best, and most honest, kind of fiction.

American Trinity: And Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor
David Pace
By Common Consent Press
2024
215 pp.
$11.95

Ellen Weist

Ellen Fagg Weist, a Utah writer and editor, works as the communications manager for the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement.