Summer Fire

Summer Fire
DOUGLAS H. THAYER
Paperback. 258 Pages. / 0-941214-18-4 / $7.95

For a devout young Mormon, confident about his adherence to church guidelines, the first stumbling block in life can come with the onset of adolescence. Owen Williams, Thayer's protagonist, used to check a list of commandments monthly to see if he was approaching perfection. But at age fourteen he stopped because he was experiencing conflicts for which he had no categories. Owen's first experience away from home is a summer ranch hand. He is mortified by the vulgarity of the older employees, one of whom asks if Owen "plays solitaire." "Come on, kid. Ninety-nine percent of all you boys play solitaire," adding that "the other one percent are liars." Thayer skillfully addresses this universal coming of age dilemma heightened by guilt. Believing in his own perfectibility, in his ability to control himself and circumstances, he expects a great summer. Instead he is confronted with Staver, the ranch foreman, who is cynical, coarse, intimidating, and relentlessly demanding. Owen finds his preconceptions about himself and his environment irrevocably challenged.

Douglas Thayer teaches English at Brigham Young University, where he has served as director of composition, chair of creative writing, associate department chair, and associate dean. He has received various awards for his fiction, including the Karl G. Maeser Creative Arts Award. He is the author of the novel, Summer Fire , The Conversion of Jeff Williams and two collections of short stories, Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone and Under the Cottonwoods and Other Mormon Stories, and has been published in the Colorado Quarterly, Dialogue, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He and his wife—in her last year of law school—have two children currently on LDS missions.