The stories are set in Provo, Utah's most Mormon city. The characters are decent people, comfortable in their moderate affluence and in the unexamined assurances of their faith. Then for each character Thayer creates a disturbance—the comfort is threatened, the faith 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.