In Levi S. Peterson Western literature and Mormon literature finally have their Flannery O'Connor. The human experience of the American West long ago produced a literary soil as rich in tragedy and guilt as O'Connor's South. In particular, Western frontier Mormonism fostered religious exaltation and crisis as potentially fruitful for stories as O'Connor's own Catholicism mixed with the Protestant fundamentalism of her characters. Peterson, however, is the first Western writer to use that potential to create, as O'Connor did, imaginative visions of the possibilities and paradoxes of theology instead of merely writing as a local colorist or exposing the problems and tensions of Western history and culture.

Peterson learned from Southern writers the literary power of “grotesques”—the physically or spiritually wounded and marginalized humans who paradoxically can touch the very center of religious and ethical experience and feeling. In his mature work he has moved beyond revelation...