Title: The Scholar of Moab
Author: Steven L. Peck
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Genre: Novel
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 302
Format: Paperback, Kindle
ISBN: 978-1937226022
Reviewed by Liz Busby
This book is my third Steven Peck novel (fourth, if you count his short story collection), and he continues to surprise with his range of strangeness. The Scholar of Moab is a novel in the form of found documents: journals, letters, scientific publications, ward newsletters, and more. The voice of each artifact is unique and seamless; they really sound like they are written by an uneducated rural man, a European scholar, or a pagan poetess.
The plot revolves around Hyrum Page, a seasonal laborer who through a series of hilarious mishaps accidentally falls into pretending to be a prophet, and Dora Tanner, a self-proclaimed witch and poet who experiences an alien abduction. The connections between the two sound crazy even before you throw in the two-headed cowboy.
I read this book as part of our LDS speculative fiction class, which I am grateful for because I wouldn’t have made the connection to LDS documentary history on my own. Chris Blythe pointed out that you could read this book as a construction of what the Joseph Smith described by No Man Knows My History would have to have been like. In a way, the outlandishness of Hyrum Page’s rise to stardom and his just-as-sudden demise form a sort of inverse testimony of the prophet, showing the impossibility of the con-man-turned-prophet having much staying power.
The satire of the far-right conspiracy culture found in some parts of the church is also spot on. There were some scenes that reminded me strongly of the time my husband and I showed up to a new ward and found them discussing Julie Rowe’s theory of the four eclipses instead of the appointed curriculum. Sometimes, Mormons can get carried away with themselves. This portrayal works for me in a way other portrayals (like Under the Banner of Heaven) don’t because I know Peck is an insider, and because he also provides a few fringe characters in the novel who are more normal church members by which you can know that he’s not painting all church members with the same brush.