"What I always say is, I am the writer and he is the storyteller and world builder," Weis said. "I can do what I want with the characters and then call Tracy and say, 'Everybody is going to die unless you can find a way out of this,' and he does."

Hickman, a Utah native who lives in South Jordan with his wife, Laura, and their four children, said that a lot of the stories he writes are inspired by his Latter-day Saint faith.

"I write my faith," he said. "What I do for a living and what I believe are one and the same thing. I don't differentiate between my work and my faith, it's all part of one … I feel strongly that everything I am involved in needs to have a moral and ethical center and needs to address this call to faith."

Hickman said that the themes of brotherhood, cultural divides and bridging differences in the novel were inspired by his LDS mission to Java, Indonesia.

"That journey, for me, brought me into greater contact with new cultures and gave me an expanded view of the world," he said. "It brought to me a great love for the brotherhood of man, and I'd like to see that reflected in this book."

While Weis draws inspiration on character development and description from Dickens, Hickman said that he uses the Joseph Campbell story model of crossing over into a different world, seeking salvation and then returning to your creator and home, perfected, for his stories.

"This Campbell model is what I think of as the alpha story, the first story, which I think is the story of salvation," Hickman said. I think all story is a call to that, that all story is a type or shadow of this great story. That is the story of all of us."

E-mail: emorgan@desnews.com