Night Soil: New Stories by Levi Peterson

Night Soil
New Stories
LEVI S. PETERSON
Hardback. 200 Pages. / 1-56085-002-7 / $14.95

Levi Peterson's collection of iconoclastic short stories picks up his hallmark themes of sin, guilt, and the struggle with human passion. His unforgettable characters—mavericks, misfits, and eccentrics—inhabit the dark areas that only ambiguously separate orderly faith from individual desire. Pickett, a reprobate who regularly pays respect at the graveside of his amputated leg, hopes that if he is kept out of heaven for his sins at least his leg will be resurrected with glory. Dillis, a middle-aged art professor frustrated with academic formality and crippled by his own mediocrity, forges petroglyphs on southern Utah cliffs to leave his mark on the history of world art. Sheila, a New Age mystic, uses crystal healing to cure her lover of his tobacco habit and enable him to become sealed in the temple to his deceased wife.

Levi S. Peterson, professor of English at Weber State University, is the author of Aspen Marooney, The Backslider, The Canyons of Grace: Stories, and Juanita Brooks. He is the editor of Greening Wheat and a contributor to Bright Angels and Familiars, A Literary History of the American West, Multiply and Replenish, Tending the Garden, Where Coyotes Howl and Wind Blows Free, and The Wilderness of Faith. He has received Best Book and Best Short Story awards from the Association for Mormon Letters, the BYU Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature, the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies (USU), and the Utah Arts Council.