Review
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Title: The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction
Editors: Andrew Hall & Robert RaleighPublisher: Signature BooksGenre: Fiction, Short StoriesYear Published: 2023Number of Pages: 295Format: PaperbackISBN: 9781560854678
Price: $21.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction, edited by Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh, is a standout new collection from Signature Books, featuring many of today’s greatest Mormon short story writers (at least a good chunk of my favorites). The editors provided the authors with a scriptural passage, 2 Nephi 31:17-21, and the instruction to write a Mormon story. The results are delightful and provocative! I hope to read many more collections inspired by this approach, and if they’re half as good as this one, they’ll be well worth your while.
The twenty-three stories included here cover a wide range of genres, tones, and relationships to Mormonism—not to mention the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and styles. With the shared scriptural passage as inspiration, there’s a loose unifying thread throughout that helps the stories speak to each other (often this speaking to each other comes quite naturally in stories that follow one another, a sign of Andrew and Robert’s thoughtful arrangement of the stories, though the stories also often rhyme with each other across the entire collection).
The stories explore ordinances, covenants, and what it means to live a life as a Latter-day Saint, alongside a variety of other ideas and themes—apocalypse, cyber missionary work, alien encounters, growing old, dying, magic powers, and more. Some pairs of stories that spoke particularly potently to each other for me in the way the collection is organized, along with what shared theme or motif, or idea caught my attention follow.
David Pace and Charity Shumway both explore relationships and gender dynamics of LDS dating and marriage, focusing on different stages of the relationship, both featuring the temple as an important idea.
William Morris and Mattathias Singh both explore missionary work and conclude with some ambiguity that relates to the different angles on the theme that they’re exploring.
Holly Welker and Ryan Habermeyer’s are a fascinating pair, but I can’t articulate why without spoiling them, so you’ll have to take my word for it and check out the collection yourself to see!
I loved so many of the stories that I can’t do justice here to all of them (though, in full disclosure I count many of the authors as friends and more as delightful acquaintances). I can certainly say many gave me images, ideas, and phrases that I’ll be thinking about for a long time—one such being Theric Jepson’s “The Curse,” which I’m still working on thinking through an interpretation that makes sense of the title and feels true to the story.
Though I cannot do justice here to all of the good and truth and beauty found here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight three stories that stood out to me above the rest—Alison Brimley’s “It’s a Good Life”, Danny Nelson’s “Narrow is the Gate,” and Steve Peck’s “Sister Carvalho’s Excellent Relief Society Lesson.”
Alison’s stunned me with its quiet magical realism, and understated narration. The use of journals is fun (and very Mormon), and the whole story has a very teen-girl vibe, which is fun to see here. Struck me as a compelling faith crisis metaphor, along with a variety of other possible symbolic interpretations, telling a sort of faith crisis story but in refreshing language and ideas. Just a great time.
Danny’s is incredibly my jam—aliens! Speculative elements! Folk magic stuff fused with science/advanced technology! A wild, deceptively simple premise run with as far as it can go! Loved the way this played with revelation, restoration, politics, religion, etc. (Especially loved how the aliens were religiously oriented, that they knew nothing about their tech but had these other more cosmic, spiritual questions.) Dug it!
I’ve been a fan of Steve Peck’s work since I read A Short Stay in Hell years ago. But I never know quite what to expect, and this story is no exception. A shockingly good story, blending absurdity and profundity, with laugh-out-loud elements and just emotionally devastating scenes, both in the best way. A stunning piece of work. Brilliant. Can’t recommend it enough.
If you like Mormon fiction, The Path and the Gate is for you. If you want to taste some of the breadth of what Mormon short stories have to offer, The Path and the Gate is for you. If you like short story collections that are thematically unified, diverse in genre and style, and high quality, The Path and the Gate is for you.
Be delighted! Be provoked! Laugh! Weep! Read The Path and the Gate!