Spin
Order from By Common Consent Press or Amazon.
When Lily’s powerful husband takes everything in their divorce, even their child, Lily knows she can neither outfox her ex or discover where he has hidden baby Anne, Lily turns to the irrational. Using a thrift store spinner, she finds her child and runs. For two years she runs, traveling nearly two thousand miles as the wheel takes her from Salt Lake City to Canada and beyond—Spin!
Bennion balances on a fine thread between fiction and explication of his process, but ultimately, his portrayal of the fictional Lily wins out. She is a heart-rending, believable, and rewarding character. Rarely the winner in the usual sense, she discovers triumph in her tenacity to "be there” for her daughter. A fine fiction, indeed.—Phyllis Barber, author of The Desert Between Us and Raw Edges: A Memoir
John Bennion’s novelistic forebears are the great Victorians like Eliot and Hardy. But Spin, with its metafictional and theological or philosophical digressions, may suggest an affinity with a postmodernist like Milan Kundera, or John Fowles, who said “Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan — that is the rule.” But then, authorial/narratorial intrusions are hardly new (think of Trollope, or Eliot in Adam Bede or Middlemarch, or Tolstoy in War and Peace). Bennion looks well on the way to become the largest --- and the most theologically provocative --- Mormon novelist of his generation, of this time. Kudos to him, to his daughter Amy for the illustrations (like and not-like the Victorians’), and to BCC for so handsomely publishing a novel that may keep you up all night, or several, and surprise you on almost every page.—Bruce Jorgensen, writer, poet, and literary critic
Read Julie J. Nichols’ review in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Listen to this collaboration between me (John Bennion), my daughter Amy and my son Christopher (performing with Catherine Leavy): “Spin.”
Read my introduction to Spin on Dawning of a Brighter Day (the AML website).
An Unarmed Woman
Order from Signature Books. Read reviews at Amazon, Association for Mormon Letters website, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought website.
“Secret marriages, hidden rooms, fractured families, cold-blooded murder. Seventeen-year-old Rachel O’Brien and her polygamous stepfather, J.D., are hot on the trail of the shotgun demise of two federal deputies one wintry Oquirrh-mountain night. This snowy ride with Rachel and J.D. will test your mettle, as it does Rachel’s devotion to a faith that mostly pleases her but riles her sensibilities too. Rachel’s riveting journey provides crucial insights about the tangled and strained loyalties that came with living ‘the Principle.’” –Heidi Naylor, author, Revolver
“Bennion has written a mystery worthy of the Old West landscapes. A compelling story set in pioneer-era Utah, with one of the most original and captivating protagonists to appear in Mormon literature—Rachel O’Brien, a fearless and savvy tracker of truth. She adroitly exercises logic and insight into human nature, in a way that rivals Sherlock Holmes, as she attempts to sleuth out the mystery of who in the their small community killed federal deputies sent by the US government to ferret out Mormon polygamists.” –Steven L. Peck, author, Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of Rats, and Science: The Key to Theology
“In this absorbing narrative, John Bennion shows his mastery of yet another genre, the murder mystery. Set in a Mormon town on the edge of Utah’s west desert, this tale reveals the tensions of polygamy among the Latter-day Saints of the pioneer era—virtually engaging as it does the entire population of the town, which has good reason to fear the wide-ranging effects of the crime. Among the more remarkable features of the novel is its narrator, Rachel O’Brien, whose acute observations and unladylike forwardness in making her opinions known show her to be a sort of proto-feminist.” –Levi S. Peterson, author, The Backslider, and Juanita Broooks: Mormon Woman Historian
Ezekiel’s Third Wife
Available from Amazon.
John Bennion’s novel Ezekiel’s Third Wife immerses us in the Utah Territory of the late 1880s—a time of hardscrabble farming, plural marriage, and outsider suspicion. A dead body in a ditch after midnight raises questions of murder. But deeper still, this is a novel about individual and communal values: What debt do we owe others, and what joy can we claim for ourselves.
--Jack Harrell, author of Caldera Ridge
Aridity, Wallace Stegner wrote long ago, is the “ultimate unity” and “the one inflexible condition” of the American West, and survival there demands cooperation and community, which aridity will test to the breaking point. Nowhere has this been more true than in the West Desert of Utah where John Bennion was born and bred. Bennion’s ruralist literary roots may reach toward Hardy and Lawrence, but grow deepest into that desert dust he has never wished to shake off. Descended from 19th century British converts to Mormonism who sought to make the West Desert fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy and “blossom as the rose,” Bennion has soaked his imagination in the felt life of his patriarchal and polygamous forebears, and in this novel he summons out of the dust the voice of Rachel O’Brien Rockwood Wainwright Harker, a young polygamous wife, secret rebel, and apprentice sleuth, who discovers that “Only lust for water was strong enough to make a good person kill.” Listen for the story she has to tell.
--Bruce W. Jorgensen, writer, poet, and literary critic
Falling Toward Heaven
Read reviews at the Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought website.
Alone at the airport, Howard Rockwood considers two years spent away from home. He has said good-bye to his mission president, but now his head aches. Can he fall back into the routine and expectations of his parents in Utah? Can he muster the drive to follow his instincts to figure out what he has been unable to wrap his mind around? He thinks of Allison, the young woman he met, who visits his dreams. She is educated, quick-witted the kind of "man-eating pagan" that his senile grandfather warned him about but who nonetheless makes him feel alive. If in order to find yourself you first need to become lost, then Howard is taking a first step toward self-discovery.
Alone at the airport, Howard Rockwood considers two years spent away from home. He has said good-bye to his mission president, but now his head aches. Can he fall back into the routine and expectations of his parents in Utah? Can he muster the drive to follow his instincts to figure out what he has been unable to wrap his mind around? He thinks of Allison, the young woman he met, who visits his dreams. She is educated, quick-witted the kind of "man-eating pagan" that his senile grandfather warned him about but who nonetheless makes him feel alive. If in order to find yourself you first need to become lost, then Howard is taking a first step toward self-discovery.
