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 Liz Busby
The Darkest Abyss is what is exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of short stories with plenty of speculative elements combined with innovative uses of LDS culture, history, and theology. If you know anything about my reading tastes, you know this collection was right up my alley. I had previously read a few of these stories in the Mormon Lit Blitz anthology, but the wide range of William Morris’s work contained in this volume was extraordinary. He has a talent for spinning stories all across the genre map that imply so much more than fits inside their tight word count.
A few genres you’ll find in this volume:
Tall tale-type humor: The entertainment value of pieces like “Proof That Sister Greeley is a Witch,” “There Wrestled a Man in Parowan,” and “The Elder Who Wouldn’t Stop” cannot be denied, though they are less “deep” than the others.
Mormon supernatural: More serious than the previous type, these stories have a fantastical element that is largely left to stand on its own unexplained. From tales of a Mormon dryad in “Wild Branches,” a haunted (or blessed?) revolver in “Uncle Porter’s Revolver,” and children rescued from a mysterious cult in “The Only 15,” I was compelled along by a desire to understand only to be left with no real explanation, and still loved it anyway. The stories really replicated the feeling of listening to a ghost story: many specific details and a kind of internal logic, but no final conclusion as to their relationship to reality.
Explorations of theological ideas: “After the Fast” is a three Nephites story that manages to be contemplative rather than campy, a hard thing to accomplish in my opinion. “A Mormon Writer Visits Spirit Prison” explores very effectively why anyone would choose not to be saved, though the jumping back-and-forth format really didn’t work for me and I ended up piecing the four conversations together straight through instead. “With All Our Dead” takes seriously the many genealogical ghosts in LDS tradition with interesting effect.
Alternate history: I was amazed at how Morris deftly builds a whole backstory of a future (or past) Mormonism that never was, with only a few allusions and key details. “The Darkest Abyss in America” posits a future where the church had to flee the United States to Japan, while “Emma Goes West” tells an alternate history of the split of the restoration movement. (If you can catch exactly what’s going on in that second one the first reading, you’re better than I, but the well-crafted language means you don’t mind toying with the puzzle.) “Ghosts of Salt and Spirit” pushes this genre to the extreme of a spacefaring socialist/communist version of the church, still with the same scripted historical missionary tours. And don’t even attempt to understand how we got from now to the high fantasy Mormonism described in “A Sword Bathed in Heaven,” but I’m pretty sure there’s a way to piece it together if I just keep rereading.
This book really expanded my understanding of what Mormonism and speculative fiction can accomplish together, which is very exciting as someone who hopes to write more in that space. I hope people will pick up these strange stories; they deserve a chance to speak to a larger audience. So often, writing in an LDS setting is seen as a bit campy and lame; Morris makes the reader see again the wonder and mystery of our own tradition as something worthy of attention.