The Storm Testament is an older series, but it’s quite good. It follows the saga of the Storm family, starting with Dan Storm and his adventures during the Mormon pioneer era.
The first two books were a lot of fun, and formed a sort of duology. The third book followed Dan’s son Sam’s romantic adventures, and while I don’t think it was as well written as the first two, the story kept me guessing right up to the end.
But the fourth book, by far, is the best one so far. It follows Dan Storm and Porter Rockwell during the Utah Wars, specifically the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This is one of the more controversial periods in Mormon history—the sort of thing where everyone tends to pick a side and double down with their tribe whenever the topic comes up.
But Nelson didn’t do that at all. In fact, the most sympathetic character from the book is a woman names Susanna from the Fancher wagon train, who escapes and survives the massacre. She’s a genuinely good person, and also genuinely hates the Mormons for killing her husband, among other things. And it’s not like she has some sort of sappy conversion experience where she forgives the Mormons or becomes one of them. She sticks to her guns through to the very end.
At the same time, most of the Mormon characters are also treated sympathetically, including historical figures like John D. Lee and Porter Rockwell. You see things from their perspective and get the sense that these are good people caught up in tragic circumstances, where there are no good options left, only different kinds of bad options. And yet, when they do ultimately make the decision to carry out the massacre, there is no sugar-coating it either. The whole time reading it, you feel like grabbing them and shouting “no, don’t do it! You don’t have to do this!”
That’s what makes this book so great. If Lee Nelson had picked one side or the other, it would have been a cheap and forgettable story—or worse, a thinly-veiled piece of propaganda that’s memorable for how bad it is. But at the same time, it’s not like he sits on the fence, refusing to take a side at all. Rather, he somehow manages to take both sides, and the effect is that the conflict feels less like a loss or a victory and more like a genuine tragedy—less like a monolithic conflict between two sides, and more like the struggle of genuinely good people who are caught up in tragic circumstances.
The best civil war fiction does exactly the same thing—and I suppose when our current era is over, the best fiction set in our own time will show good and honorable people on both sides driven reluctantly into conflict by forces beyond their control. It’s not everyday that you read a book like that, and when you do, it really makes you sit back and think.
I already enjoyed Lee Nelson’s books, but this one bumped him up a couple of notches in my estimation. He’s not just an author of pulpy historical adventure fiction, but a genuine bard in the best sense of the word. Highly recommended.
The Storm Testament IV by Lee Nelson
When the Fancher Company rides through town, Dan Storm learns that his old enemy, Dick Boggs, is traveling with them. However, at the insistence of Porter Rockwell, Storm leaves the territory to scout out a force of U.S. troops who set out from the East to unseat Brigham Young and install a new governor. When he later finds out that Boggs and the rest of the company are headed south - toward his home in American Fork - Storm sets out to protect his family from Boggs, but arrives too late. Furious, Storm joins the Gosiute chief Ike in trailing Boggs and the rest of the Fancher Company to Mountain Meadows, where an unusual sequence of events triggers one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of the American West. A beautiful blind woman, the kidnapping of two little girls, a frantic chase through the Utah wilderness, and an unanticipated romance make this one of the most intriguing historical novels of Western LDS history.
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