After the Wolf

It is the mid-19th century, and the growing Latter-day Saints movement is hounded beyond the boundaries of the frontier by ex-believers and opportunists as rabid as wolves. Electrified by a handshake with the prophet Joseph Smith, Altus Pace, a newly baptized Mormon, is called westward with his fellow believers. In California, he is alarmed by the practice of polygamy and the heavy-handed patriarchy of Smith’s successor, Brigham Young. Ignoring Young’s call to gather in Utah, Altus and his wife, Octavia, go to Texas to raise four sons in faith and isolation. When the family takes in a stranded young woman and Altus becomes a practitioner of the polygamy he once despised, his third son, Jacob, returns to the west to build Pace Ranch and continue his father’s pursuit of faith in isolation. Over the course of a century on Pace Ranch, four consecutive generations of Jacobs walk the line between polygamy and adultery, patriarchy and feminism, tradition and family. In 1994, history seems doomed to repeat itself with the arrival of a young graduate of Brigham Young University. What ensues is a family’s faith being tested to the limits, a painful attempt to reconcile tradition with contemporary values, the crippling apprehension of man’s transgressive nature, and ultimately the shock of displacement from the idealism of Pace Ranch to the imposing chaos of New York City. After the Wolf is an epic with the scope, intelligence, and insight found only in the greatest American westerns. Through fury, through faith, through art and madness, this devastating debut taps into the deepest recesses and darkest corners of what it means to search for belief and belonging in a world that is increasingly hostile to faith and tradition.