Tag Archives: cults

The Haven- Amanda Jennings

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Tara has long wanted to get out from under her parents’ expectations. What they want, “conventional achievement. Money. A successful career. A sensible car with comprehensively researched insurance. A well-showered husband and two polite children” is not necessarily what she wants for herself. When she meets Kit and his best friend, Jeremy, at university Tara feels as though she has found her people. In Kit, more specifically, she has found her person.

Life becomes more complicated for Tara and Kit when they discover they are pregnant. Although Kit comes from a lot of money, he doesn’t necessarily get on with them and wants nothing to do with their money which he resents because they’ve done nothing to earn it and they have so much “while people struggle to make ends meet.” Because he doesn’t want to access his trust fund, Kit and Tara and soon baby Skye are living in a grubby bedsit in London. That’s when Jeremy makes a crazy suggestion, partly fueled by the fact that he is convinced the world is going to go nuts when the calendar clicks over to 2000.

Anger, resentment, and dissatisfaction are boulders we lug around. It’s time to cast them off. The establishment hold us in contempt. It imposes rules and we obey like sheep. When we don’t they lock us up. Well, not anymore. I’ve had enough talking and marching. Writing slogans on homemade placards and being ignored. It’s time to start doing. I want to make a difference. Be the change I seek. […]Let’s do something. Build something. Start living properly.

So, Kit accesses his trust fund and buys Winterfell Farm on Bodmin Moor near Cornwall. Soon they have a small community working and living together in harmony.

Until, you know, things aren’t so harmonious anymore.

Amanda Jennings’ novel The Haven is a top heavy book that, while certainly easy enough to read, doesn’t actually go anywhere until the last 50 pages. The cast of characters is small and I did feel like I knew them and cared about them, particularly Tara, Kit and Skye, but not a lot happens in the first 200+ pages – unless you care about people working together to get a rundown farm back on its feet. The introduction of a couple new characters sends some ripples out into the water, but the cultish aspects of the commune come late in the game and aren’t particularly sinister.

This is more a book about a group of people with good intentions who lose their way.

Hell Followed With Us – Andrew Joseph White

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Andrew Joseph White claims his debut novel Hell Followed With Us was written because he was angry. On his website, we’re told “His work focuses on the intersection of transgender and autistic identity through the lens of horror, monstrosity, violence, and rage.” Got that right.

Benji is on the run. His father has just been killed and the Angels and their Graces are hunting him down, except that there is not really any place to go. That’s because these people – part of the cult that raised Benji – have unleased Armageddon via The Flood, decimating the world’s population.

The hellscape of the world White imagines is unlike anything I have ever read before. This is a world devoid of humanity, where goods are bartered with the exchange of human ears, where the monsters are

made of corpses and the Flood – sharpened ribs lining its back in a row of spines, eyeballs blinking between sinew, muscles so swollen they split the skin

At the beginning of the novel, when Benji is recaptured by the Angels, it is not so they can kill him: he’s important to the cult because he is a Seraph, or about to become one anyway. He has the power to control the Graces and The Flood and also, his mother is kind of a big deal at New Nazareth. Before they can get Benji back to New Nazareth, though, he is rescued by a ragtag group of teen resistors from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Centre (ALC). It is his relationship with these people, specifically the handsome sharp-shooter, Nick, that propels Benji on a dangerous mission to take down New Nazareth once and for all.

Hell Followed With Us is an allegorical tale. Before Benji was Benji, he was Esther, betrothed to Theo. At their engagement ceremony, Benji’s mother tries to find a passage about marriage, something that would “hammer home” Benji’s role as a wife, something that could “beat the boy” out of him. Throughout the novel, Benji struggles to find acceptance and while the monsters might be dreamt from Whites very scary imagination, the big ideas- of acceptance, or personal autonomy, of the dangers of blindly following are anything but fiction.

Great read.

Little Eve – Catriona Ward

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Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street was fabulous, so I snapped up a couple more of her novels for my tbr shelf and Little Eve was the first to be read.

This is the story of Evelyn, Little Eve, who lives with her “family” on Altnaharra, an island off the coast of Scotland. This family consists of her “Uncle”, two adult women, Nora and Alice, and her “siblings” Dinah, Abel and Baby Elizabeth – who is actually eleven. This de facto family is hunkered down on Altnaharra waiting for the arrival of the Adder. Power is transferred from one person to another by way of Hercules, a snake, that will choose one of them to “see with his eyes”.

Yeah – it’s a cult.

When the novel opens, James MacRaith, town butcher, has been called to deliver a side of beef to Altnaharra – a rather unusual request, but everyone in Loyal knows that what happens on the island is unusual anyway. When he arrives, he finds the gate at the end of the causeway open and Jamie enters, eventually making his way up to the house where he follows the “trail of mud and blood” to a ghastly scene.

How these events come to happen and the aftermath that follows is the plot of Little Eve.

Did you think you had heard the last from me? No, I have more gifts for you; more days I do not need. It has been ten years but the memories are still bright.

This is a book that I wish I had read in one or two settings because at some points I sort of got lost in its labyrinth. I enjoyed the writing and subject matter (I am a big fan of books about cults) but I have to admit that I didn’t always catch how I got to where I ended up. That’s on me, not on the author. This book is atmospheric and compelling.

Together We Rot – Skyla Arndt

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Wil Greene is on the hunt for her mother and she’s not getting too much help from Pine Point’s sheriff. She is convinced that her mother’s disappearance has something to do with Garden of Adam, a strange church deep in the woods. Her mom’s disappearance has thrown her life into turmoil: her father spends his days drinking and Wil has lost her best friend Elwood Clarke, who just happens to be the son of Garden of Adam’s pastor.

Told in alternating first person narratives, Skyla Arndt ‘s debut YA novel Together We Rot, has a lot going for it. Wil is fierce and, ultimately, fiercely loyal, and Elwood is trying to figure out how he fits into a world that was chosen for him. The demons in this book are both real and figurative.

When Elwood discovers what his father (and the church) have planned for his future, he runs away and ends up forming an alliance with Wil. In some ways, this is a fairly straightforward story about rebellion. Except, you know, for all the fantasy elements. I am not really a fantasy reader (and I keep saying that and yet I keep reading fantasy), but I did enjoy some aspects of this story – although I have to admit that I thought I was getting a cult story. And yes, there is a cult story here, but it’s all wrapped up in some very imaginative mythology that requires blood sacrifices.

Together We Rot is filled with descriptive writing. Wil describes the run-down motel where she lives with her dad:

The place feels especially haunted tonight– there’s a quiet sputtering somewhere, a faucet dripping, pipes creaking. Walls grown tired of holding their weight, floors shifting and crying beneath my feet. Shadows find their way in from outside. Wind slams at the door in violent gusts. The parking lots lights tear through the darkness, but beyond them the world has grown pitch-black.

Sometimes the description gets in the way of the pacing because, ultimately, this is a story about friends banding together to fight evil. Anyone who loves fantasy would likely love this book, but I think I need to give fantasy a rest for a bit.