A Bad Deal in Mormon Land: T.I.M. Wirkus’ Novel Hits Close to Home

“My sweet spot is fiction that mixes genres,” says T.I.M. Wirkus, author of the upcoming Utah-based queer historical novel A Bad Deal in Mormon Land. “It’s what I’m drawn to, both as a reader and a writer.”

Wirkus was born and raised in the Salt Lake area and credits much of their love for writing to an English teacher at Brighton High School named Pat Russell. “She took her students seriously as writers,” Wirkus says, “and I think that was really valuable.” It’s funny, I attended the same high school and had a similar experience with my own English teacher, Ron Meyer. (Shout out to the best damn narrator of Beowulf this world will ever know!) It’s amazing what a few passionate teachers can do for an entire generation of young writers.

During Wirkus’ formative years, they were reading novels from the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, two authors who Wirkus says approach genre fiction “in a character-based way, and in a way that’s really attentive to the language.” This is the kind of thing you can expect from Wirkus’ third novel, A Bad Deal in Mormon Land, which is set to release on Oct. 1 and will have a read-and-sign release party at The King’s English Bookshop on Oct. 23.

A Bad Deal in Mormon Land synthesizes queer and historical fiction, and does so through multiple point-of-view characters and a healthy dose of humor. Much of Wirkus’ inspiration for approaching history through a queer lens — namely Salt Lake City in the year 1908 — can be traced back to Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam. They’re particularly fascinated with the history of vaudeville theater,  gender-bending performance art that took the streets of America by storm from the late 1800s to the early 1930s. “It’s a space in which trans people very likely existed,” Wirkus says. “And so it provides an exciting opportunity to tell a trans story that could have plausibly happened in history.”

Wirkus’ novel includes vaudevillians and follows an itinerant spirit medium named Madame Ilsa von Hoffmann, who takes an odd job in Utah from a man named Roger Marsh. Ilsa is tasked with summoning the ghost of Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS church, to ask him for his blessing of Marsh’s new sect of Mormonism. The plot thickens as we meet other eccentric characters, including a relentlessly orthodox Mormon apostle, a copper magnate with a fetish for polygamists, Marsh’s rogue third wife and a vengeful private investigator from Ilsa’s past.

“Salt Lake,” Wirkus says, “is a place with such a mythos around it from an outside perspective — and I’m very fascinated with the ways in which that mythos overlaps with my own experience here…While I have both a lot of affinity for and a lot of frustration with Mormonism, I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself post-Mormon.”

As a queer Utahn who studied their undergrad at Brigham Young University and still deems themselves culturally Mormon, Wirkus’ brings a unique perspective to Salt Lake City’s religious history. In this novel, you can expect a refreshing and often satirical spin on our fraught cultural landscape. I relish in anything bold enough to walk the tightrope between Utah’s mainstream religious culture and the Salt Lake counterculture, and that’s exactly what Wirkus sets out to do in A Bad Deal in Mormon Land.

Wirkus hopes their latest novel — of which you can grab a signed copy at The King’s English on Oct. 23 — is, above all, a fun read that grounds queer readers in their shared history. “There have always been queer people,” Wirkus says, “and I think there’s value in knowing that. I just hope it gives people a sense of community — because queer community saves lives.”

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