Godshot

When I was in the Peace Corps, our country director would always tell us, “You're not here to suffer,” by which he meant that Peace Corps volunteers often have a mindset of, “Well, I'm supposed to be roughing it and I'm here to help people, so I guess I should just put up with XYZ unacceptable behavior.” This was both a funny thing to hear repeatedly and also reassuring.

Anyway, I picked up this book because it had a sparkly gold cover and it had something to do with cults, and I like sparkles and I'm interested in cults. This book seems to be about a fairly standard-issue patriarchal cult with one questionably charismatic male leader who is interested in subjugating all the women of his flock. It was hard for me to tell if this is meant to be a satire or not–the cult leader's name is Vern and people say things like “In Vern we trust” which seem comical to me, but it's set against some extremely grim details and I didn't make it very far into this book.

I got a few chapters in and it was clearly just very gritty and bleak in a way that I'm not generally interested in reading. And then in chapter 4 there was a detailed description of a dead cat on the highway as well as a metaphorical anecdote about how that same cat had previously killed her own kittens because she wasn't ready to be a mother, and the book's child narrator discovered the dead kittens.

And I read that, and I kept going for one more chapter, and then I said to myself, “You're not here to suffer,” and I did myself the favor of returning this book to the library.

If you are a cult enthusiast with a stronger stomach than I have, perhaps you will appreciate this book. It's pretty clearly not for me.