Many Are Called: A Deseret Adventure Trilogy

One of my beta readers asked me why I wasn’t more explicit about the various weapons employed by the characters in The Lion of Deseret. My beta reader compared my writing to Jack Carr, who goes into tremendous detail on the weapons used in his books. In the shooting industry, this is known as “gun porn.” It’s a fair question, given the genre.

I’ll be honest: I’ve never read a Jack Carr novel. Shocking, I know! I work in the shooting industry and Mr. Carr’s work is beloved there like Tom Clancy was beloved by “conservative” technocrats in the 1980s. I’m very sure Mr. Carr is a fine man, and he’s certainly a more successful author than I am ever likely to be. I enjoyed the Amazon adaptation of The Terminal List, though admittedly a lot of that was because I like actor Chris Pratt – a strongly Christian, patriotic family man.

Here’s the thing, though: most people aren’t gun enthusiasts, and that’s perfectly okay! Sure, there’s crossover with gun people and readers of pulpy adventure stories like Many Are Called. But I wanted MAC to be accessible to everyone, and that specifically includes people who don’t know a rifle from a shotgun or a pistol from a revolver.

Then there’s realism. Despite what we may think or read or assume, my long experience in the shooting industry and the Army has shown me that most warriors aren’t really “into” guns as such. To them, a firearm is just another tool in a big toolbox, not some object of anthropomorphized lust. Hey, I really like guns, but I was an outlier even in the infantry.

Thus, while I’m perfectly capable of writing them, I’ve left out the long-winded, lovingly-detailed descriptions of weaponry in Many Are Called. There’s enough detail for a non-enthusiast to understand a given weapon’s capabilities, where it’s relevant to the story, but that’s where it ends.

So there’s no porn in Many Are Called, whether of the gun or sexual variety. Sorry, Jack Carr fans!