One of his six favorite "weird cult novels—which is to say, cult novels that don’t follow the typical tropes that cult novels do," as shared at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:The Shelter Cycle, by Peter RockRead about the other entries on the list.
Peter Rock’s The Shelter Cycle is about the Church Universal and Triumphant, an actual cult based in the American West that in the 1980s believed the world was going to be destroyed by nuclear war and began building survival shelters. What makes Rock’s book weird is the degree to which it’s less the cult that is unsettling, but someone who has survived it—someone who, having lost his rudder, might be capable of anything. We like to think that when we leave a cult we enter safety, but Rock’s book is partly about how cults continue to live inside us, evolving and changing, spawning other sorts of things, even long after we leave.
The Page 69 Test: The Shelter Cycle.
--Marshal Zeringue
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