Wandering the Afterlife, Never Knowing the Plot: Review of Tales of Unworthiness by Paul H. Dumm

The clue to the narrative engine is in this book’s title: “Tales of Unworthiness,” three stories crafted by Paul H. Dumm. The pen name for author Scott Stevens—a play on the name Paul H. Dunn—sets the tone for this 103-page book of speculative fiction of Mormon life. A  popular speaker during the 70s and 80s, Dunn, an LDS general authority, told many faith-promoting stories about his days playing baseball and his service in World War II. Many were inspired by his stories, and he was in much demand as a speaker. In fact, when I served an LDS mission in New England during the early 80s, it was “Elder Dunn” in whom I confided by letter about my deep angst over how my father, a BYU religion professor, had been publicly savaged by one of Dunn’s own colleagues: Apostle Bruce R. McConkie. The incident was over a book my father had written about developing a personal relationship to Jesus Christ. 

Despite the warmth I and thousands of others in the Church felt for this spectacular storyteller, it was eventually discovered that Dunn had exaggerated and conflated elements of his stories. The sense of betrayal that drifted through church members hounded him until Dunn was put out to pasture in 1989. 

I mention all of this because Stevens’ use of “Dumm” as a pseudonym for his debut collection of fiction signals to readers like me, and many others, that the truth claims of not only a general authority but of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to which Dumm owes his subject matter, is also cast in a dark shadow of mendacity. This, even while the author celebrates the dignity of his Mormon characters.

This is not to say that the three stories here are slavishly critical of Mormonism, only that from the get-go the reader is already being told through the author’s nom de plume to recognize that the stories we have been told as Latter-day Saints and that we have, in turn, told one another deserve closer examination. 

Beneath the Stage

With this as context, Dumm renders his stories with a sympathetic eye to his Mormon protagonists, the first of whom is a young, soon-to-be-ordained twelve-year-old named Timothy in the story “Beneath the Stage.” The stage in question is the one that sits to one side of the “cultural hall/gym” in your favorite LDS ward house. It turns out that Timothy is never worthy for any one of the three routine “offices” in the Aaronic Priesthood. This, determined by Timothy’s cruel and prurient bishop who is required to first “recommend” or approve the boy for advancement. The theme of unworthiness is blunt here: each time Timothy is scheduled to advance to the next office in the “lower” priesthood, the bishop routinely declines the soon-to-be twelve-year-old, then soon-to-be fourteen-year-old, and finally the soon-to-be sixteen-year-old until the kid repents of his “sins.” This requires that Timothy show remorse (and do penance) by abstaining from taking the sacrament for a designated time in front of his family and fellow ward members. 

The sins here are comically petty: lying here and lying there, dirty thoughts and of course the ubiquitous sin of masturbation which the author typically declares, euphemistically, in all of his male characters with the term “slipping up” (no pun intended). This is where the bowels of the stage come in. Lost in an ecclesiastical Catch-22, Timothy can’t catch a break from his bishop who might as well be scoping his young charge out every two years during his worthiness interviews through the barrel of a shotgun. Always, Timothy comes out as “unworthy,” and only a mysterious character right out of Dungeons and Dragons “known to be a champion of the pure in heart, and tormentor of the unjust” can promise him relief from and revenge on the boy’s persecutor. In the end, the tale turns fantastical, clearly Dumm’s strength, when “Malbon,” a kind of Mephistopheles character looking to make a deal, determines Timothy to be “pure.” 

”The heavier your burdens, the deeper the hooks, the more fun I’ll have casting them off!” Malbom exclaims to Timothy, and he does have a great deal of fun, as does the reader, in a scene straight out of Marvel Comics. 

The Blessing

From the tender and terrified feelings of a young male Latter-day Saint, Dumm next offers up “The Blessing.” Its hero might as well be Timothy all grown up, married but still guilty of slip ups. This time he is named “Joseph” and has managed to become an Elder in the higher priesthood with the power to give blessings to the sick and injured. But Joseph is reluctant, not only because he’s perpetually “unclean” but because he isn’t confident in channeling the Lord’s will. 

Dumm’s skill at storytelling is complicated here by telling the same scene through the eyes of three different characters, a flair that gives the narrative texture and depth. In this story which mostly takes place in an emergency room where Joseph has been literally called to administer to an injured man he home teaches, our hero, along with the injured man’s son and wife, are harboring deep doubts about their own worthiness while entertaining that the accident to their father and husband, respectively, is at least in part because they have not been honoring their covenants.

This is painful to read because of how ubiquitous this kind of stinkin’ thinkin’ exists in Mormonland. I found myself squirming with recognition and empathy for the impossible situation that Mormonism, as we have come to live it, wrecks its havoc, despite best intentions. This is true in the meta text of reading this collection as well as in the narrative itself. It doesn’t take long for a Mormon reader to realize that if these stories were to be held up as evidence of institutional malfeasance, the devout (a bishop, a general authority or just your stick-in-the-mud-Latter-day Saint) would have a ready riposte about  how these injuries are somehow the fault of an “unworthy” individual. Period. (After all, the Church “is true” whatever that means anymore.) Unworthiness in the LDS Church is not only circular thinking but a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is the dilemma of these scorchingly rendered characters who suffer from what has been identified as “scrupulosity”: whether it’s not wearing the garment of the holy priesthood with exactness or, again, being guilty of “slip ups,” aka “self-abuse,” “Tales of Unworthiness” is the play-book of this religious compulsive mental disorder that seems everywhere in the culture right now.  

Section 69-G

Scrupulosity is in full panoply in the final story titled “Section 69-G” which refers to a unit in the post-resurrection Telestial Kingdom, the lowest heaven in the Mormon cosmology where those who rejected the true church on Earth are relegated for eternity following the great judgment. Ironically, the main character here is not a Latter-day Saint, but one of the unfortunate “gentiles” in the world who have been recorded as having “rejected the Truth” in their mortal life. 

The after-life setting of this third and final story is a weird and weirdly-suggestive cross between the TV show The Good Place and Star Trek, complete with “transport cylinders” that allow those in the higher heavens to visit those in the lower kingdoms. In this tale our hero is, of course, stuck in the lowest kingdom and we follow his adventures from first waking up in the resurrection to being guided through what will be eternity for him in a sterilized, unhappy place where denizens have been relieved of their genitals.

Dumm is clearly conversant with all of the wild details of the Mormon afterlife, and he’s keen in his speculation about what it will all mean (as well as how absurd the whole notion of merit-based salvation can get). Through geologic time and a tree right out of the Garden of Eden with glowing fruit; thumb-drive-like orbs that you carry around like a drivers license or a Social Security card and have your entire life on video along with spreadsheets marked with every sin or transgression; blood that has been turned to some other kind of fluid that keeps you immortal; on-boarding bureaucrats from higher heavens who couldn’t care less that newcomers who were never Mormon are completely bewildered by the whole thing.

Finally, our hero takes things into his own hands. No spoiler here, but I will say that it is a warning to institutions of all flavors not to leave their customer service counters unattended.

I am reminded here of when the New Yorker magazine sent a reporter to LDS Church headquarters prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics that were to be staged in Salt Lake City. He referred to being in the Church Office Building to interview general authorities as being in a David Lynch film: everyone passing him in the hall kept smiling at him as if they knew the plot that he was completely unaware of. That’s what Dumm’s final story of “Tales of Unworthiness” is like. This isn’t just satire, or a revengeful reveal of the darker corners of a cosmology of a quaint American religion. Dumm leaves you with a kind of Lynchian horror that is hard to describe. 

Most who have lived the Mormon life, however, will recognize it immediately. As I did, they are likely to shake their head and, at times, laugh out loud, all the while attempting to quell the nausea of being on a stage or screen set—in a ward house or a temple—fiercely aware they are always behind the cosmic eight ball. 

And, about that letter I wrote to Paul H. Dunn in which I poured out my heart, my questions, my confusion? I never sent it. Even as a missionary, something told me it wouldn’t make any difference. And, if Dunn had responded, he would have just told me another one of his compelling fictions. Sort of what author Paul H. Dumm is doing here. But this time the knowing smile is in the reader.

For more information about the book (including where and how to purchase it), please see the author’s website.

C.L. Hanson asked both David Pace and Scott Stevens to review the other’s book for this blog. Before exchanging books neither had ever met the other. Nor were they familiar with each other’s writing. This is the second review — the first was posted here.