“These stories, couched in earthiness, take their roots in faith and commitment. Michael Fillerup can take me wherever he pleases, and I follow, comfortable that he will bring me out safe and sound.”
— Richard Cracroft, co-editor, A Believing People
“Fillerup takes on the easy, bankable clichés, the cross-stitched tole-painted articles of faith and industry, to prod and worry and punish them into stark new metaphors for a precarious earthly estate. The familiar furniture is there, the playpens and hide-a-beds and framed religious photographs, but the floors are in motion and walls and windows dissolved into alien landscapes of inescapable portent.”
— Neal Chandler, author, Benediction: A Book of Stories
“What Michael Fillerup does is to transform the typical and mundane acts of everyday Mormon life into an art that keeps pace with the hectic and often frantic lifestyle it reveals. Whether his characters are committed or lapsed or something in between, he manages to render lives with compassion and insight with a language that draws attention to the agonies as well as the ecstasies of what it means to be human.”
— Pauline Mortensen, author, Back Before the World Turned Nasty
“Fillerup understands that the world is not black and white, that moral decisions are never obvious, and that yoked to the joys of human life is an irreducible amount of doubt and pain.”
— Brian Evenson, author, Altmann’s Tongue
“Embracing the river of life, Fillerup funnels it through his unique creative soul and distills it into an intoxicating brew.”
— Elouise Bell, author, Only When I Laugh
“For Beyond the River Fillerup has chosen a tricky genre: coming of age for adults. Instead of chronicling the loss of the soul to debauchery, Fillerup gives us Jon Reeves, a restless middle-aged man redefining his identity. Behind the quick prose is a touch of natural sweetness which only a truly moral writer can deliver from the heart.”
— Jerry Johnston, book editor, Deseret News
“Fillerup shines most when his characters confront the harshly beautiful desert and intractable world view of the Navajo, finding their hardest reconciliations within themselves.”
— Linda Sillitoe, author, Windows on the Sea
“Fillerup tells a spiritually moving story of discovery and rediscovery of faith and love and overcoming the desert of mortality. A significant contribution to Mormon fiction, Go in Beauty is remarkable for its fresh and fascinating vision of atonement.”
— Richard Cracroft, Nan Osmond Professor of English, emeritus, Brigham Young University
“Many fine young writers have wrestled with the paradoxes of the LDS life. But the depth and the breadth that Michael treats is unique. He paints the lows, yes, the sorrows, he impasses, the soul-searching. But he also captures the highs, the joys, the glories even amid the searing pains.
There is a completeness, a richness I have not found else where in the fiction of Latter-day Saints. . . Whereas not a few books about the Latter-day Saint life have won readers who nod knowingly about the heartbreaks and the paradoxes, these same books, alas, often quickly alienate the very readers the writers seek to comfort, or, even more important, to awaken. ”
— Elouise Bell, Professor Emeritus of English, Brigham Young University
“Michael Fillerup’s stories are often about Mormonism in that direct way that subverts probity with good intention—or would, if the writing were any less wary than his, or any less open to complication, misgiving, ambush. A kind of home teaching, perhaps, but here set forbiddingly far from home. His characters are often profound loners, twice estranged. They find themselves marginalized in a culture—for them—already marginal, where what they do and are is sustained by religious commitment, and religious commitment is imperiled by what they find themselves doing and what, in fact, they have become. Faith, in these stories, is a terrible gift.
“’Lost and Found’, published in a Christmas anthology of mostly far-too-well-intentioned writing, is just such a story, a kind of counter-Christmas tale, in which a painfully unwise man is called on a starless Christmas Eve to bring his foreign gift, not to mark the miracle virgin birth, but to find something not unlike miracle in the long-deflowered ordinariness of death. As in Fillerup’s other work, the story plunges along with seeming artlessness where careful shaping would surely not seem to take it, and all the while it draws us deftly on with urgency and realism. It is a hard-nosed, rawly detailed, icily coercive read. And ends however improbably still quite believably in magic. In revelation.
“With ‘Lost and Found’, Michael Fillerup has braved a labyrinth of sentiment, all the more treacherous for its familiarity, to achieve a story whose probity might even make the world safe again, if only momentarily, for Christmas. That too is a terrible gift. ”
— The Association for Mormon Letters, Citation for Best Short Story 1991 (“Lost and Found”)
