Trigger Warnings: Mass suicide and Bad Times in a cult are massive plot points in this book, and are mentioned in this review.
A cult living on the outskirts of a town in Michigan commits mass suicide, while the cult leader vanishes. The only survivor is Claire, who discovered the other members of ‘The Flock’ after they killed themselves. This wasn’t the first death associated with the group. A few weeks earlier Laurel Tai who was a) a member of the cult and b) also the winner of a local beauty queen pageant went missing and then was killed. Oh and she happened to have been Clarie’s cult BFF, and the one who brought Clarie into the fold. Err, into the Flock.
Flash forward to ten years later, Clarie is still living in town, and trying to live some kind of life while haunted by some PTSD. A true crime podcaster (Arlo Stone) shows up and starts digging into the past forcing Clarie to look back at her memories of that time. The town’s feelings also get stirred up and scrutiny is placed back on Calrie and what she may know about the suicides and Laurel’s death. And oh yeah, Clarie’s father is the town’s mortician who did the autopsy on Laurel and the other dead cult members.
Full disclosure I was kind of cranky while reading this book because of various things going on. My patience and willingness to immerse myself in the world of the book was not at an all-time high, and reading about horrible things happening to these characters was not the distraction I thought that I needed. That may be colouring my review, but I will say that from the jump, when I first picked the book up from the library I thoguht that the synopsis on the back was a lot. Cult, true crime podcast, dead cult members, and a pageant queen! But I have picked up books before that seemed to have a lot going on and loved them.
I honestly feel like there was too much going on here. While the podcast angle was interesting, and very much drove Clarie’s actions, it sort of felt to me as a reader that it took a bit of a backseat. Which is fair because agin a lot is going on here. (I know I am fixating on this, but a woman who was living in the woods, as part of a cult, entered a beauty pageant and won. Why I am having a hard time with this and can normally suspend a lot of disbelief for books, I do not know. But it bothered me from the jump.) There are more twists and turns as the book goes on that ends with …. Honestly kind of a fizzle for me.
I did like that the book was clear that Calrie was going through it, that she had incredibly justified PTSD. The book jumps between the present via Claire’s POV and the past via other cult members’ POV. It was interesting to see how Clarie thought about the cult in the present, and then see how others were viewing her in the past. I really enjoy it when novels do that, and we get to see the main narrator from others’ points of view.
The cult bits were interesting, although full disclosure I may have consumed too much true crime in the past because nothing the cult did came across as terribly shocking. How the leader beat his followers down and ended up controlling them was very much from the Cult Leader Playbook. To be fair, it is made clear the cult leader in the book is knowingly working from said playbook. The cult bits and the recruitment tactics did make me pause and go “Man, could I end up in a cult?”
(Sidebar, I did have some girls really aggressively try and get me to go with them to their “Church” when I was in university. Dodged a bullet there I think.)
Overall, wrong book wrong time I think. I saw some promise in it, but in the end, I think I had expectations that weren’t met, plus my general bad mood soured me on the book.