"Utah" . . . . . . . . . . "Christian fiction" . . . . . "Love stories" . "The backslider" . "The backslider"@en . . . . . . . . . . . "Humorous fiction" . . . "\"Recognized as a Mormon classic twenty years after its release, The Backslider features longstanding Christian conflicts played out in a scenic, sparsely populated area of southern Utah. A young ranch hand, Frank Windham, conceives of God as an implacable enemy of human appetite. He is a dedicated sinner until family tragedy catapults him into an arcane form of penitence preached among frontier Mormons. He is saved by an epiphany that has proven controversial among readers, who interpret it either as an extreme impiety or as a moving and entirely plausible rendering of a biblical theme in a western setting.\"--"@en . "Fiction" . "Fiction"@en . "Frank Windham is just a Mormon cowboy--hard-working, trying to be honest, convinced he is going to hell for incurable lust, and convinced that he deserves to. He has an ultra-pious mother, a brother who is more than just a little touched in the head, and a comfortable Lutheran girl friend who knows she has been saved. Set in southern Utah's canyon country in the 1950's." .