So I’m looking through my stats and come upon the search phrase, “is there a correlation between mormons and vampires.”

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Just like every other organized religion on the planet. And those who submit and bare their necks to the teeth do so willingly. Or not. Maybe. Kinda sorta.

Faith—any faith, one that takes into account the possibility of a higher being—requires something of you. It asks you to believe in something you can’t see, can’t feel, can’t touch. Then it sets down the philosophies that this faith’s higher being represents. Further, it asks that you take these philosophies upon yourself; whether it asks you to simply believe them or live them or proselytize them is yet another philosophy it asks you to take upon yourself. Then it sets forth boundaries of behavior that you agree to in order to function within that higher being’s philosophical boundaries. And last, it may ask you to present yourself accountable to a human functioning as the higher being’s representative; if not a human, then to the higher being itself at some time in your future.

I know quite a bit about evangelicals. You know, born-again Christians: Southern Baptists. Pentecostals. Those folks. I know quite a bit about Mormons. You know, ’cause I are one. I don’t know much about anybody else.

Christianity generally asks you to believe the following:

1. That a higher being (hereinafter referred to as God) created the world and humankind in 6 days (could be literal, could be metaphorical) with his hands.

2. That he set up a number of rules (also known as the Law of Moses) for the people to follow.

3. That he alternately rained death and destruction down on his chosen people or those who would slay his chosen people, depending on who pissed him off that day.

4. That he asked his chosen people to slay a lamb as sacrifice and atonement for their sins.

5. That he somehow magically impregnated a virgin with his divine baby-making matter so that the son she bore would be half-man, half-god (hereinafter referred to as Jesus) and therefore perfect.

6. That he wanted Jesus (aka his son) to take over the whole sacrificial lamb gig so his chosen people wouldn’t have to do it by hand with an actual lamb anymore. And oh, this has the added benefit of saving everyone else who believes in him (Jesus), too. No more raining death and destruction on anyone. Jesus’s atonement for everyone’s sins makes him the savior of mankind.

7. That God, Jesus, and a heretofore unmentioned wraith (hereinafter referred to as the Holy Spirit) form some sort of triad of purpose and/or existence.

Note: Evangelical Christianity (which is really what I’m talking about because that’s all I know outside my own faith) asks you to believe that these 3 entities are 1. Somehow. Like, a trichord in music, or an egg, or well, you know, anything with 3 distinct parts bundled up in 1 package. 3-in-1. This doctrine is hereinafter referred to as Trinitarianism.

8. That God/Jesus/Holy Spirit set forth a new set of rules to follow, the first of which is to believe that Jesus died to atone for everyone’s sins.

Note: Evangelical Christianity is particular on this point, because it doesn’t matter how much other good stuff you do in the world, if you don’t get this first point down, you’re going to burn in a lake of fire for eternity. If you never had the opportunity to hear the gospel of the atonement (hereinafter referred to as the Good News), you’re going to burn in a lake of fire for eternity. Sorry ’bout that. And oh, if you profess belief after a life of absolute assholery, you’re going to heaven, so good on ya!

And what is heaven, by the way? What do you do there? You sing praises to God. You live in a mansion (the one that Jesus prepared for you) that is built on a street of gold. You wear a crown. The jewels in your crown denote HOW good you were. Is there a ghetto in heaven, where people who were assholes live? And wear nickel-plated steel crowns set with cubic zirconia?

And how do you manifest there? Are you the gender you are? (I’m told no; that you become some androgynous person mingling at the Great Cocktail Party in the Sky™). Are you married to your honeybunny there?

9. To prove this measure of faith, you get dunked in some water to baptize you and cleanse you of all your sins. Metaphorically speaking.

10. And also, that God asks you to tithe 10% of your earnings, however you define that.

Carrying on.

Mormonism asks you to believe points 1 through 10

Except for the side notes. We are generally silent on the subject of creation versus evolution. Quite frankly, I don’t know any Mormons who stress about this and I know quite a few (including me) who figure it could have been done any number of ways and in any number of combinations and are kind of scratching our heads over why creation and evolution seem to be mutually exclusive.

PLUS the following:

11. That some specially dispensed Jews were asked of God to build a boat and head west about 2000 years before Columbus did and settle in (but arithmetic isn’t my strong point, so check me on that).

12. That these people survived and thrived for a long long long long long time before being wiped out. But before they were wiped out, they scribed out their history on plates of gold.

13. That somewhere in the early 1800s a kid by the name of Joseph Smith was visited by God and Jesus (who were, by the way, NOT 2-in-1) and given instructions as to the nature and history of the specially dispensed Jews, instructed to be their spokesperson by translating the golden plates, was visited by the Angel Moroni on a regular basis, received continuing revelation from God, and pretty much spread all this information around.

Note: At the time in history that this was happening, there were a lot of crackpot religious theories going around that people believed and wanted to believe and subscribed to; it was just that this one had a better marketing team.

13a. That polygamy was commanded of God and that the stoppage of polygamy was commanded by God. That blacks weren’t eligible to hold leadership positions in the church because of some holdover Victorian bullshit, but then they were. Yay! But we don’t talk about those, not really, no. It makes us uncomfortable, you see. Move along. Nothing to see here.

14. That we make certain covenants with God (in our temples) that include things like giving your time and your talent and your resources to the building of the kingdom of God on earth, and well, chastity (meaning, if you’re single, don’t do it and if you’re married, only do it with your spouse). Okay. Well, that’s certainly groundbreaking. Welcome to Christianity 101.

15. That when you get married in the temple (or re-married, which term is “sealed”), your marriage is for eternity as long as you obey God’s commandments and don’t break the covenants you made in #14. Also, any children you have are yours for eternity also (but there are THOSE days with the Tax Deductions when that’s not the most attractive thing in the world).

16. That it is possible to become a god, with your own world(s).

Yeah, we’re not encouraged to talk about that in public, either, but hell, everybody BUT US talks about it and to me, this is THE selling point of the whole deal. Criminy! Can you imagine being imbued with all that knowledge and skill—and having a workshop big enough to create worlds and creatures? I’m so jumping through whatever hoops for the possibility of that kind of an eternity.

Mormons didn’t come up with this idea by a long shot; we simply actively, quietly really believe it. But really, I’m going to believe this is a possibility whether hoops are involved or not—because it suits my nature to believe this.

17. That God has asked you to obey certain rules as a token of your faith.

18. More rules.

19. More rules.

20. More rules.

Technically, we believe in salvation by grace. In practice… Not so much. The party line is: You are saved by grace after all you can do. But the “all you better do or else” starts adding up really fast.

The “or else” isn’t couched in terms of punishment because the concept of “hell” (the burning lake of fire kind) is a non-starter for us. It’s always couched in terms of rewards you will not have earned.

21. That “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the prophet” is actually God’s words and not the prophet’s because heaven forbid a prophet remain fallible after he becomes the prophet. See 13a.

To summarize:

Christianity in general asks you to believe a lot of weird shit.

Evangelical Christianity asks you to swallow the idea that there’s some kind of 3-in-1 thing going on with God; it also asks you to swallow that people who’ve never heard its doctrine are going to hell by default.

Mormonism (a Christian denomination, as noted by the words “Jesus Christ” in our official church name) asks you to swallow a whole boatload of other weirdness beyond what Christianity in general asks you to believe.

But the thing is, if you can swallow mere Christianity, if you buy into any belief system with a higher being who demands something of you, you’ve already tendered your neck to the fangs of religion. Religion is a vampire.

Which vampire bit you is kind of irrelevant once you’ve decided to submit.

But ours sparkle.

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By now I’m sure everyone’s heard about the backlash against what is reputed to be the shoddy workmanship of Breaking Dawn and the push to return it to the bookstores after having read it. Mind you, the complaints ranged from the fact that Meyer tore her own world’s rules asunder to the poor editing job (i.e., grammar, spelling, typos). I found more than a few of those in Twilight and it bugged me then that a major publisher would release it like that. It looked so [sneer] vanity published.

I’ve heard ad nauseam about the gatekeepers, the agents and the editors, whose self-appointed Prime Directive is to keep out the unwashed masses of illiteracy who think they have a bestseller in them somewhere. They are there to not only 1) screen out the dreck and vet work that is potentially money-making, but once that is finished, to 2) put out a product that is well edited, well designed, and doesn’t look like it’s [sneer] vanity published.

Well, with Twilight, they did the first part right: They found a piece that would make money.

With the second part, they dropped the ball (especially with regard to Breaking Dawn) and Meyer ended up being put on the spot for a) bad writing, b) violation of her world’s rules, and c) bad editing in all stages.

I think that’s totally unfair.

I’ve been thinking about one particular Breaking Dawn post/thread on Dear Author for over a month now, wherein the commonly held die-hard fan opinion [that Meyer wrote by whimsy alone (putting forethought and craft aside)] was reiterated by author K.Z. Snow:

What’s so irksome is this: Meyer seemed to have a serious–and, to me, really appalling–lack of commitment to and respect for the craft. So shoot me for idealizing what we do, but one doesn’t become a writer on a freakin’ whim. I’m not surprised there’s been a degeneration from one book to the next.

and I opined:

I think this is clearly a case of wringing blood out of a turnip by the publisher and editors. They’re the ones who control the channel to the marketplace. If Meyer doesn’t have a commitment to the craft, who’s to blame? Meyer? No. The publisher and editors who facilitated her in that. If she has any thought about “craft” at all, I’d be surprised–and that’s not her fault. She hasn’t been required to to sell a gazillion+1 books.

Nora Roberts disagreed with me:

Yes, it is. Her name’s on the book. It’s her work. [...] But it is the author who’s responsible for what’s on the page.

And this comment is what’s had me thinking about this for so long after it’s been done and gone.

Ms. Roberts’s comment is borne out in the fact that Meyer alone was held accountable for what’s widely perceived as shoddy workmanship. Do we know who her editors (content, line, and copy) are? Undoubtedly somebody does, but they aren’t the ones being burned in effigy. I wonder if they got dragged into a meeting to find out why so many die-hard fans took their books back? I wonder if they got sent to Remedial Editing? I wonder if Meyer went back and said, “Hey, why didn’t you do your job? You made me look bad and you’re supposed to make me look good. You’re the gatekeepers.”

She was also responsible for selling those gazillion+1 books and making a helluva lot of money for those gatekeepers, whimsy and shoddy workmanship and all.

Yet why should Meyer bear sole responsibility for what is obviously a case of “Bless her heart. It ain’ her fault; she doan know no better”? Moreover, she doesn’t know she “doan know no better” as evidenced by the fact that she’s trying to defend the book by blaming readers. “They just didn’t get it.” Well, maybe they didn’t, but you don’t say that in public. If you can’t keep from digging yourself into a hole, shut the hell up.

(And ahem, Stephenie. You’re college educated. Could you not have gone through your manuscript to make sure you caught all the typos? Oh, right. That was the copy editor’s job, wasn’t it?)

Meyer’s editors, in looking for a quick buck sooner rather than later, threw Meyer to the wolves. They, as the self-appointed gatekeepers should have done their jobs and when they didn’t, they let her take the fall because, as Ms. Roberts points out, it’s her name on the book.

They also threw the readers and die-hard fans to the wolves–who howled loud, long, and with their checkbooks. Who knows how many die-hard fans felt betrayed who did not take their books back and did not burn them (as some did)?

I have come to no conclusion except that, at this point, I think both Ms. Roberts and I are right. But how can that be? I don’t know, because obviously Meyer was held accountable for it, but she wasn’t the one who enthusiastically put it in the editorial pipeline. I can’t think she had much control over it after that other than galley proofs.

Right now, though, I only have two questions:

1. What, again, are the gatekeepers for?

2. How did such work warrant such gorgeous covers?

 

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THE JEWEL OF MEDINA by Sherry Jones

A resident of the Ivory Tower, who apparently called dibs on A’isha (child bride of Muhammed) as her personal and exclusive domain of study and forgot to send the memo, raised a ruckus about a book she didn’t like and managed to get Random House to pull it after the author had been paid her $100k advance and the presses were rolling. I say it’s an academic hatchet job.

You can read the prologue here and then you may come weep with me that we won’t get to read the rest of it unless someone else picks it up. I like midrash-ish treatments like The Red Tent (although I haven’t read Card’s series on Rebekah, Sarah, Rachel and Leah yet).

I’m not going to wade in on all the outrage and outcries of what normal Muslims do and don’t think (’cause I ain’t one), but naturally, they’d be offended that their prophet is written about in a secular and therefore, profane, way. Catholics were offended by Dogma and The DaVinci Code. Jews were offended by The Passion of the Christ. Christians were offended by The Last Temptation of Christ and Piss Christ. Mormons, well, you know the drill. Anyhoo, my question is this: Why does a major publisher pull “offensive” material about one religion’s sacred icon but nobody else’s?

Update from today’s Galleycat: The dude who wrote Prophets & Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammed to the Present opined:

“I agree with [the aforementioned Ivory Tower resident]…You don’t turn scripture into soft core pornography.” While admitting that he hadn’t read any of Jones’s novel…

WTF?!?!? These people are scholars?

eBOOKS, iTUNES, iPHONE, eREADER, and STANZA

So Teddypig of The Naughty Bits blog has a most excellent article on epublisher website design, which I use as a guideline when I’m building and coding. I may not always get it right, but I’m working on it. Anyhoo, he directed Smart Bitches toward a functionality of iPhone to set up ebooks as applications in the iTunes shop for download to iPhone. Apparently, the process is a little whacked (because it’s an application, not a text/data file), but I’m all for getting ebooks out there via iAnything. Steve, I shall ask again: Where is your iBooks store? I don’t want the Kindle to be the only game in town and it looks like Sony’s all but given up the ghost.

Fictionwise’s eReader was downloaded on 130,000 iPhones in a month and Stanza is apparently only a little behind that as the ereading software alternatives to downloading ebooks-as-applications on your iPhone. I am a-quiver.

NEWSPAPER BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS and THOSE DIRTY BLOGGERS FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS

So the LA Times book section shut down amidst weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. Color me clueless. I never read book reviews before Smart Bitches and Dear Author (which sites I read religiously). The elites got all in a tizzy because review sites whose reviewers obviously don’t know what they’re doing started popping up all over the place.

Hey. Newspapers. Publishers. You can’t go home again.

FIGHT AUTHOR ABUSE

What is it about publishing accounting I don’t understand? I mean, I was a college student once and pretended to take accounting 101 for an entire semester. I get it. First, there’s reserves against returns. Second, there’s returns (aka consignment, tyvm, and say, how’s that Breaking Dawn return-don’t-burn campaign coming along?). Third, there’s the actual tallying which seems to be done by typing monkeys. You know, the ones who can’t count.

On a different front, there’s the copyright and plagiarism issue, which seems to be thought of in PublishingVille as the crazy aunt in the attic of intellectual property law. What, publishers, you don’t have enough stake in seeing that your property is stolen that you can’t do something about it?

In the most egregious and outrageous case I know of (aside from Cassie “The Ferret” Edwards), Janet Dailey stole from Nora Roberts. Thieved. As in, took something that wasn’t hers and got off with a slap on the wrist. Ms. Roberts calls it “mind rape.” Indeed. So if that weren’t enough (I don’t even think I can bear this, but I’ll take one for the team), Jane of Dear Author writes:

Nora was also subjected to many people arguing that she shouldn’t have gone public with the copying (although it was a fan who had made the case publicly in the first place); that she, Nora, was being petty and vindictive.

Crabs in a bucket, I tell you. One attempts to climb out, but the rest just pull her back in. Yes, I used “her” on purpose.

So I was amused to note on Charles Bock’s copyright page of Beautiful Children (also the result of Random House’s research into how DRM doesn’t work and passing out free ebooks without it does), the following notice: This is our intellectual property, so kindly don’t fucking steal it. I haven’t read this book yet (I got a copy when it was hot off the interwebz), but it’s in my queue somewhere up front because his last name begins with B.

And finally…

LOVABLE ASSHOLE WHO NEVER ENDED ON AN UNSTRESSED SYLLABLE

Lots of profanity here, which of course means that I like it. A London restaurant reviewer seems a wee bit testy about the way his articles are randomly edited by People Who Don’t Get It.

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable.

You know, I only love this guy because I don’t work for him.

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Backstory: LDS fiction
(aka Mormon fiction)
is analogous to, say,
what Steeple Hill puts
out or any other run-
of-the-mill Christian/
evangelical inspira-
tional romance. No
swearing, no sex, very
clean. No taking the Lord’s name in vain,
no smoking, no drink-
ing, no allusions to any of these things. For all intents and purposes, the term “LDS fiction” has come to be defined informally in the same milieu as inspirational romance category fiction.

The lines get a little muddy when you have people like Orson Scott Card, who is an observant Mormon, who occasionally writes in explicit LDS terms but mostly doesn’t. Does he write LDS fiction or not? I say no. I say he’s an author who is LDS. His work isn’t marketed as LDS fiction and Mormons aren’t his target audience.

Then you’ve got Eugene Woodbury who has single-handedly managed to blow up that minutiae of the intrawebs interested in writing LDS fiction, publishing LDS fiction, reading LDS fiction, loving LDS fiction the way evangelicals love Janette Oke. Poor guy’s taking a beating (but then, he might like that; I don’t know his kink).

Aside: I urge my genre romance readers to go here and read his book, offered online, Angel Falling Softly, about a Mormon bishop’s wife making a deal with a vampire to save her daughter’s life. (It’s also available in Kindle and print.) Except for a teensy bit of Mormon culture that goes unexplained but which I think you can get from context, I think you’ll enjoy it. Unique take and no preaching and oh, a nice love scene (and, er, a little necessary girl-on-girl so the vamp can eat, but you didn’t hear that from me).

Which is why the LDS fiction contingent is blowing up even as we speak. For some reason, there is the perception out there that it was marketed as LDS fiction. It wasn’t. It was offered by an avant garde publisher of fiction that has its basis in Mormon culture. I mean, I expected to see a little of this, but for cryin’ out loud!

Then we get into the inevitable comparisons to Twilight, which is an erotic book. Whether it was intended to be, I don’t know. I don’t think so, though Janine from Dear Author disagreed. Mind, the majority of LDS readers who are online don’t get the heavy sexual subtext and think it’s a nice, clean read for their girls. To compound the problem, the vampire code for blameless sex is completely lost on the LDS culture in general (I don’t know why that surprised me).

Which is another reason everybody’s having hissy fits. Apparently, the back blurb with the word “vampire” in relation to saving a kid’s life wasn’t enough of a tipoff for LDS readers who thought they might be getting a Twilight clone with regard to its “cleanliness.”

So anyway. I’m watching all this going on, the sarcastic worry over the fate of Eugene’s salvation and standing in the church, the hand-wringing over the label “LDS fiction,” who should be writing it, who shouldn’t be writing it, who should use the label, who shouldn’t use the label. It’s all amusing, but sad at the same time.

What’s even sadder is that while they “feel” Eugene mocked the doctrine, mocked God, mocked Job, they don’t say how. (Hint: He didn’t.)

What I see are people who are so unwilling to venture away from the shelves of Deseret Book that they A) don’t know the obvious cues the back blurb is giving them, B) don’t want to acknowledge that moral ambiguity exists within the minds and hearts of good Mormons much less deal with it head-on, and C)
all too willing to condemn one of their own in specificity. For instance,

I think a lot of the problems the church is going to have in these last days are going to come from within. There are some disturbing trends coming to light and this is a prime example.

And:

I am very glad that I don’t have to be there when Mr. Woodbury has his next priesthood interview!… Too bad the rest of us LDS authors may have to spend years making up for the damage this book will do.

Mind, I am not making fun of these people. That’s why I didn’t reference the comments with a link, because I don’t want anyone else to, either. They are my people. I go to church with them, I have friends like them, I am one of them. I’m not sure which of the above bothers me most, but I think it’s the rigidity, the soul-deep certainty that good people are blessed not to suffer pain or doubt or make difficult choices that have no right answer–and that people who have pain and doubt and have to choose between bad and worse somehow deserve it.

Check your pride at the door, folks. Maybe you did feel duped because you assumed it was LDS fiction as it is typically understood–and I am empathetic with that response; I’ve been ambushed, too. However, it was a vampire story. There was no ambush awaiting you. And please, be more careful in the future because when you read a back blurb that contains this:

Milada is Homo lamia. A vampire. Fallen. And possibly the only person in the world who can save Rachel’s daughter. Uncovering Milada’s secrets, Rachel becomes convinced that, as Milton writes, “all this good of evil shall produce.”

As the two women push against every moral boundary in order to protect their families, the price of redemption will prove higher than either of them could have possibly imagined.

you probably ought to think about what that might entail, even if you have no clue that vampire is code for sex and think Twilight was squeaky clean.

PS: Twilight Fangrrls. I have apparently become obliged to disclaim that I liked Twilight. Just…probably not for the same reason you did. Hawt. (Though that could just be my touchy libido.) No literary outrage need be expended on my behalf today, although I thank you for thinking of me.

PPS: I won’t be tagging my book LDS fiction, either, nor seeking shelf space at Deseret Book, so you are safe.

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Perhaps I should admit upfront that I consider myself an undemanding reader. I’ll happily go wherever the author wants to take me as long as it’s logical, consistent, and interesting. Let me add that I don’t even particularly care whether a story is plot-driven or character-driven; give me something to chaw on intellectually and I’m good to go. Make me laugh and I’ll forgive almost anything.

This is one reason why, when I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, I was highly annoyed. I like vampires. I’ve studied vampire myths since I fell in love with Vlad the Impaler somewhere in the early ’90s, so her inconsistent worldbuilding, her habit of telling rather than showing, and her mostly flat characterizations grated.

By contrast, Eugene Woodbury’s take is haunting. Poignant, even.

Rachel Forsythe is an LDS bishop’s wife who is drowning under the weight of the responsibilities tearing at her: a dying daughter and the latent grief of one daughter’s inevitable death, the need to give the other daughter the attention she needs, the burden of carrying on mostly alone while her husband tends to the needs of his congregation, not to mention the regular everyday duties of a mother and wife. Then she gets a new neighbor.

Milada is a vampire temporarily out of her element in a very sunny Salt Lake City to explore an investment opportunity. She lands herself in a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood in a split-level ranch, surrounded by people she views as a bit odd, but nice. When Milada is invited to a barbecue at the bishop’s house and ends up saving a little boy’s life, her secret starts to unravel.

Once Rachel realizes and accepts what Milada is and understands the unique properties of her dining habits, she must decide how far she would go to save her daughter’s life.

This isn’t a vampire story. It’s a character study of the things we, as Latter-day Saints, might do when pushed into a corner with no apparent way out. It also asks if we have faith in what we say we believe.

The theme of the entire book can be summed up in one line. When Rachel presents her idea to Milada, Milada says: “Christians claim to believe in eternal life. So why are you so afraid of death, Rachel?”

I don’t know if Mr. Woodbury intended for the reader to believe Rachel’s answer, but I didn’t believe her. It doesn’t make any substantive difference, though; the effect would have been the same. At the end of the day, no matter how much faith we have, we do not know what happens to us when we die.

Rachel herself seems somewhat scattered and toward the middle of the book, it seemed I hadn’t heard much more about her dying daughter and I almost forgot she had one. Though that was corrected posthaste, I would have liked to see more distress at her daughter’s situation more consistently, and though I (as a mother) could appreciate that she was probably emotionally numb, I felt the daughter actually didn’t exist for a few chapters. I just don’t feel Rachel’s distress very deeply until she starts connecting Milada’s dots. That said, I do like Rachel and find her sympathetic.

With regard to this vampire’s world, I believed it. Mr. Woodbury gave me a different physiological and anatomical (i.e., plausible) reasons to believe that these creatures exist and how. Mr. Woodbury doesn’t shy away from the innate vampire-sex connection. He does not use the act of biting and drinking as a metaphor for sex, accidentally or otherwise; he makes a clear case that sex is necessary for the vampire to get her nutrients.

Mr. Woodbury also displays a sly humor that abuts worldly sensibilities to Mormon culture and deftly captures the irony. For instance, when Milada checks out the art her interior decorator chose, she muses: “Considering the milieu, Milada would have recommended O’Keeffe.”

I can’t say that the end was a surprise because there were only three logical ways it could have gone and any one of them would have been perfectly workable; two of them would have been relatively comfortable. He took the uncomfortable path. What I’d like now is a sequel to explore the fallout of that ending.

Mr. Woodbury does nothing the easy or expected way in this story. There are no Relief Society and Elder’s Quorum platitudes. She doesn’t consult her husband either as priesthood leader of the home or as bishop. Rachel makes a unilateral decision that has no precedent in LDS history or culture or doctrine; she doesn’t know if it’s wrong or right and she clearly doesn’t care, she doesn’t spend a lot of time dithering over the details of what could happen, and she doesn’t even pray about her decision. She acts quickly and on pure instinct, as any vampire ever did. There are a lot of questions in this book and almost no answers—and I liked that.

Moral ambiguity amongst faithful Mormons: More, please.

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