Titles: The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories
Author: William Morris
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Short fiction collection
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 226
Reviewed by Theric Jepson
Not easy to overstate how successful William was with this project. He’s been saying, for what seems like y e a r s, that his new collection would do things we hadn’t seen before in the Mormon arts.
At first I was skeptical. Although the first story is terrific and unique, I, ah, had read it before. But let’s talk about the collection’s penultimate story for a moment: “Certain Places.”
In short, a person loses their self and appears in another person making them the same self even though they both existed separately and maintain those memories. And then they both become a third person, while ceasing to be what once they were.
Besides being quite the concept, he plays it very Mormon. For instance, you could interpret the story being about polygamy and/or sealing. Or you could say it is a commentary on the Church’s contemporary sexual politics. Just for two examples. But to reduce the story to such commentary is to fight against its core strangeness, and the experience the characters are having. They are living these impossible lives and the “moral” is not their concern. They are motivated by their hopes and their regrets and not by what message we might take from their decisions.
The story that follows it, the collection’s closer, “A Mormon Writer Visits Spirit Prison,” started out rather annoying, to be honest. The form struck me as needlessly complex (and it did require flipping pages all the way to the end) but it did pay off. This is a writer you can trust, even when he seems just to be messing with you.
Which gets to his commentary on “A Ring Set Not with Garnet but Sardius.” He posted this shortly before I read the tale and I was glad, because when I got to the end of the story it made a clear allusion by which I mean it clearly was an allusion, but I had no idea as to what.
But reading of his process was great anyway. Largely for its intended purpose (to expose his process), sure, but also because reading once through for pleasure does not reveal as many details as this sort of story can provide. A few things came up which I had only vaguely noticed.
Which is to say two things:
Chris Ware said it takes a thousand times as long to make a comic as to read one. This ratio may or may not apply to Darkest Abyss but it should remind us to slow down. Waterskiing over the surface is delightful, but the fish! the fish!
And this is unquestionably a volume that will reward rereading.