But as he so aptly quips, “it takes a village” to bake the crisis he created, and it’s so fucking true. Bill even draws some subtle and ironic parallels between his own crisis and the days before Joseph Smith’s death.īill takes unflinching responsibility for the nearly 30-year-old incident that permanently banned him from Canada. As a former, two-minute Mormon myself, I recognized much of that story, between what the missionaries that had taught us at our house and the heretical books I’d devoured in my post-Moroni years. I especially loved that he weaves into his personal narrative an engaging retelling of the history of the Mormon Church.

In TAT, he gives both a hilarious and painfully honest description of his struggle under the threatening heel of both his abusive father and his church community. The consequences for bailing on this expectation are enormous in Mormon culture, affecting everything from future career potential and church stature to marriage options and reputation.Ī budding science fiction writer and silent doubter, Bill was destined to suffer as he tried to carry out this expectation. The Church chooses where they’re sent, with no input from the missionary or his family. Who knew? (I did, that’s for damned sure.) All I know is that, as I read, I found myself wishing I’d seduced some Mormon missionaries in my younger days.įor those who don’t know, every 19-year-old young man in Mormonism is pretty much forced to leave school and go on a two-year mission. Religious insanity, it turns out, is alarmingly similar among both orthodox and heterodox sects. And like Laake’s book, I could relate strongly to much of The Accidental Terrorist, even though my family had only been Mormon for a few months. I’m not going to spoil the climax of this page-turner, but I will say that it’s the perfect “companion” (see what I did there?) to Deborah Laake’s terrific Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman’s Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond, which I’d read some time ago during my own deconversion from Christianity. Luckily for us, he self-published the memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, and it’s simply fabulous. He explained that publishers seemed reluctant to put out the memoir he’d written about it because of the “T” word, which I could totally believe. As we savored the cocktails and curries of Rasika, Bill relayed his experience as a Mormon missionary and how it led to him accidentally committing a terrorist act in order to keep one of his fellow missionaries - sometimes known as a “companion” - from fleeing his two-year mission.

when I had dinner with him, his agent Barry Goldblatt and my friend Scott Edelman. I first met Bill Shunn last year at World Fantasy 2014 in Washington D.C.

Secret ceremonies by deborah laake