Reading Your Way Into the Deeper Mysteries of Cults

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I joined my first cult when I was…just kidding. Mostly. 

When I was born in the early 80s, my parents were part of a church in Virginia Beach, an area influenced by the likes of Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network as well as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These are the kinds of organizations that helped fuel the Satanic Panic, decrying games like Dungeons & Dragons and any Halloween celebration that wasn’t spent as a simple “Harvest Festival” in a church gym. My family’s Southern Baptist Church was no exception, inviting my parents to break their classic rock records in order to avoid “backmasking,” the supposed subliminal evil messages encoded in rock songs and only discernible when played backwards. 

Some might view what my parents were experiencing in the early 80s as a religious moment; others, as a cultish craze. My family’s church provided community, comfort, and belonging, but it also, by default, often dictated how members voted, which media they consumed, and their circle of friends. It’s all about perspective, but a decade and a half later, my parents very much regretted the fact that they’d broken some of their favorite records at the church’s behest. 

When I began developing the idea for my third novel, Watch It Burn, I knew that I wanted to investigate an organization declaring itself #notacult while also subtly infiltrating an entire community. I soon found that the hardest part of writing a book with a cult at the center is figuring out the appeal for potential members. How does one person or one couple or one small group of leaders assert themselves as ‘the supreme authority’ while also remaining charismatic enough to draw followers in? 

This question—the how and the why of cults—is one I explored as I dove into the story at the heart of Watch It Burn. The mystery seems simple at first: a sixty-five year old woman drowned in only two inches of the Guadalupe River. But as three women in the town—a journalist, a teacher, and the dead woman’s daughter-in-law—grow suspicious and begin digging deeper into the family and the self-help organization they own, the women find concerning ideology and a slow-burn takeover of their tiny Texas town. Infiltrating and exposing the cult becomes their ultimate goal.

I knew I needed inspiration as I wrote Watch It Burn, so I sought out other works that could serve as mentor texts for me to study and also provide a bit of entertainment as I developed my own creepy cult. Here’s what I found and the six books I’d recommend to anyone looking for a creepy cultish read.

According to Amanda Montell’s nonfiction Cultish, many of us are part of organizations that have cultish elements, some beneficial (like extending opportunities) of belonging, and some, well, less so. Montell tackles traditional cults like Jonestown and Scientology as well as groups that use common language that invite others to join. In Montell’s appraisal, MLMs, SoulCycle, marketing companies, and religious communities make the cut for cultish status. Reviews online sometimes berate her for going this far, but I thought that her reasoning was part of the appeal of the book that is aptly named for not exactly being a cult.

Inspired in part by the Sarah Lawrence Sex-Cult, Ashley Winstead’s The Last Housewife explores the long-lasting effects of trauma in early adulthood just as a young woman is coming of age. The novel opens with Shay Evans, all grown up and living a quiet and privileged life in a wealthy Texas suburb when her past comes calling. Her friend Laurel, who was involved in the cult that Shay has pushed far into her past, has been found dead. With the help of a podcast creator and old friend, Shay embarks on a quest to find out what really happened to Laurel and how she can bring justice—and perhaps, revenge—to the man who has caused so much harm.

When Delilah Walker returns home for the funeral of her teenage sweetheart, she suspects that there’s more to his death. The church at the heart of the rural community has grown into a mega-church, and the pastor, who espouses misogynistic teachings and ultra-conservative ideology, seems, in Del’s mind, to be the primary suspect. In Amy Suiter Clark’s Lay Your Body Down, Del sticks around to explore what’s really been going on in the cultish church that has overtaken her hometown, and more importantly, to find out what actually happened to the love of her life.

The Family Upstairs is my favorite Lisa Jewell book, which is saying a lot since I’m an adoring fan. Libby Jones is aching to find out the identity of her birth parents, but when she discovers the truth on her twenty-fifth birthday, she may regret ever having wanted to know. Libby learns that she was one of the lone survivors, a baby found in a crib, in a tiny cult taking up residence in an abandoned London manor twenty-five years earlier. Now, Libby knows the truth and has inherited the manor where three adults, all dressed in black, were found dead decades ago.  

From the very first page of Alison Wisdom’s The Burning Season we meet charismatic Papa Jake and his ‘miracles,’ and we’re transported to a tiny Texas enclave where no one is allowed to call 911 as long as only one house at a time burns to the ground. Rosemary, in an effort to save her struggling marriage moves to the town of Dawson and joins its church, but even after trying to fit in, she is aimless in this conservative community. After meeting a new mother in need of a friend, she finally feels as if she’s found a purpose, but the fires are spreading, turning everything around her to ash and ember.

In The Body Next Door by Maia Chance, Hannah is eager to keep up the façade of a happy, rich young wife and mother, but when a construction crew unearths bones next door to her family’s second home on Orcas Island, she must face the past she’s tried to bury. As a child, she was connected to a cult on the island, and she knows more than she’s saying about those troubling years and the pile of bones next door, but will she be brave enough to face her past and to confront her own secrets—and those nearest to her—in an effort to protect her and her children’s future? A speculative element at the heart of this cultish story makes this a true page turner. Chance’s novel launches this summer, so PreOrder today.

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