Guest Blogger: Spencer McKay

Robison has traveled to the deepest jungles of Africa to hunt The Most Dangerous Game. In his absence, please welcome one the newest and brightest authors in the LDS fiction market, Spencer McKay. His new book has been getting rave reviews. Today he describes this acclaimed work, and gives his thoughts on writing.


Greetings fellow literati! I'm appreciative of the invitation to speak with you today. While my novel isn't exactly the same kind of thing you authors write, I do feel a sort of kinship with you. We're all passionate about our craft; we all yearn for the soft, gentle sound of pencil caressing paper; we all know the joy of a surprising anacoluthon--could we not love it?--as well as the despair and anguish and frightened terror of well-placed polysyndeton.

Yes, like many of you, I have literature in my blood and grammar in my bones. It was this burning passion, this uncontrollable drive to create that led me to my novel. It took years to write. There were times when I turned my eyes skyward, crying to the heavens and pleading with Sweet Mercy Above, desperately asking "Why was this writing talent, this sweet gift and devilish burden, given to me? Let me have peace!" Alas, there was no solace for my driven soul until I tore my heart out of my chest and let it bleed onto the page.

(To date, no publishers have dared to print this masterwork; the book is far too realistic, plumbing the depths of the human existence, and those charlatan editors fear the public outcry! Consequently, I've published it on my own. Printing individual, unbound copies on my desktop printer only adds to the gritty realism.)

Thus presents The Friberg Code, a gripping novel of intrigue and desperation, and entirely devised from my own genius and a diabolical Muse.


The story begins like this: Kitty DeAngelo is a research assistant at BYU-Idaho, studying ancient linguistics. Unlucky in occupation and unluckier in love, Kitty spends her days in the cold, drafty library and her nights alone by the window, watching the snow swirl and drift on the wretched streets below. Oh, how she longs to be back in American Fork, Utah, with her former high school sweetheart--now Special Agent Jack Handsomeson. But that was long ago. Oh, so very long ago.

Jack has problems of his own, however. A recent string of murders has occurred across the country, connected by only two things: the victims are muscled, body builders, and their lifeless bodies were arranged into strange vignettes. Jack, though his life in the FBI has jaded him to his former faith, still can remember the pictures he used to see in church, and recognizes the crime scenes: a dead old man between two dead leopards; a dead George Washington look-alike by a dead white steed. When he finds a dead muscled man on top of a city wall--and without a single arrow wound in his body!--Jack fears are confirmed.

Meanwhile, Kitty has stumbled onto a terrifying truth: a secret organization has been hiding ancient mysteries which the academic community had thought lost to the world. What are these mysteries? (SPOILER ALERT LOLZ!) The organization is comprised of no less than the greatest minds of the last two millennia: Rene Descartes, Kaiser Wilhelm, Lil Abner, Art Garfunkel and more. And--dare she think it?--was there a living Grand Secret Chairman of The Sacred Committee alive today? Was it... Arnold Friberg?

Well, suffice it to say that things go from bad to worse. There's a car chase through the Louvre, a knife-fight atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and someone burns down the Reichstag.

In the end, the truth is revealed, the truth that can change the world and bring us all together as one! That truth: King Arthur was a Mormon.

P.S. Jack gets active in the church and marries Kitty in the Vernal Temple (after the dramatic climax at Dinosaur National Monument). Jack's boss, hard-bitten cop Frank Gruntleson, gets baptized. Arnold Friberg escapes in a hot air balloon, to fight another day.