MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.Fascinating. Both the context of a modern, original cult under surveillance by law enforcement, and the heroine herself -- religious studies Professor Anne Waverly.King likes to head each chapter w. some sort of passage. This time, it was multi-media - sometimes a drawing or hand-written math calculations by one of the characters, sometimes an excerpt from a letter or report or lecture transcript or book by Waverly.Anne Waverly is truly a mystery that isn't solved by book's end. Her sexual relationship w. her FBI handler, to whom she's both attracted and repelled, is casebook weird. Since they get together so rarely, each sexual encounter has its own distinct brand, according to the agent, Glen McCarthy.Her technique of deducing what persona she needs to convey in order to successfully go undercover -- and how she has to 'exorcise' her regular self for that duration -- is thought-provoking. At book's end, one wonders whether in fact Anne will just adopt her two "acquired" children (Jason and Dulcie) and Glen will just go off to marry his blond, athletic fiancee (who never outright appears in the book) and they'll never see each other again ... or whether Anne and Glen will get together. The latter would be the conventional ending, so I'm glad King just lets the reader imagine what happens after the book is over.One loose end that I noticed and disliked -- Dulcie confides that Dulcie isn't her real name, but the author never tells us what the real name is, why it was changed, etc.(Among other problems, it raises the question of how the Change cult can get passports for people w. fake names.)It seemed unlikely to me that Anne would actually march into the cellar-level lab at the British home while Jonas and Mark are right there -- thus exposing their work, as well as demonstrating how snoopy and disobedient she is -- and still not get attacked or expelled from the community. Instead, Jonas allowed her to stay and help out? I wasn't able to suspend my disbelief at that.I know King was striving to create some really new, unique sort of cult, but the fire-alchemy worship thing never seemed dire to me, despite the supposed death of a young male Japanese acolyte thru abuse in a giant alembic.The only thing that, in the end, turned the cult's premise into a crisis was the psycho nature of Jonas, leader at the cult's British site. That was credible.Have to say, I liked "Beekeeper's Apprentice" much better than this, tho it was fun to see King describing modern U.S. settings, occupations, pop culture trends, etc.
I found this paperback sitting on my shelf so I wonder if I read it before, but I don't I remember doing so. And I should have remembered because it is very well written and gave me so much to think about. The main character is an older women, a professor of religion who has built "a persona on the wreckage of her former life. She had paved over the rubble, sealed up the debris of catastrophe with the clear, hard shell of academic discipline." Each chapter begins with extracts from her lessons or letters or books or journals that shed light on the basic situation of the novel--understanding and communicating with cults. Very interesting. Anne Waverly is also a sometimes FBI undercover agent, who infiltrates communities and brings out essential information to help the authorities deal with the group without an explosion of violence like at Jonestown or Waco. And Dr. Waverly is perfectly suited to blend into these kinds of groups because she belonged to a cult years before, only narrowly missing the mass suicide that took the lives of her daughter and husband and left Anne emotionally scarred. I was intrigued with the idea of pressure and heat bringing about change in people, which is the underlying philosophy in the Change movement in Arizona. There seems much to agree with and applaud in the community, but the pressure and fear mounts as Anne discovers secret, inner beliefs and practices. I had a few issues that kept me from giving this book a five-star rating. One, I didn't like the one-night stands that Anne Waverly seemed to feel necessary to help her morph from a professor to a cult member. Perhaps it explains the odd hate/love bond she has with her FBI handler. Two, I also felt an odd lack in the Arizona Change community that kept talking about how pressure changes a person into something harder and stronger, but they don't say what you change into, what you should be focusing on. Just enduring without a goal seems unproductive. And last, the climax seemed not quite realized, a bit of a cop-out, the ritual of change not explained in enough detail to make me believe the leader reaching for ultimate change would really think it would work. Admittedly he is a bit crazy but he is also supposedly brilliant. So the ending didn't work for me. But I sure have been thinking a lot about the book since I finished it.
Do You like book A Darker Place (Anne Waverly) (1999)?
The mass suicide by members of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997 may explain why I originally thought of A Darker Place by Laurie R. King as a book about cults. I read it soon after it was published in 1999. Cults were in the news, and here was an inside look at what goes on in one. But this riveting novel is about much more than that, as I recently discovered when I reread it. King brilliantly weaves the theme of self-transformation into the nonstop action, when the FBI, suspicious of a cult called Change, recruits Anne Waverley as their spy.Who IS Anne Waverley, the woman at the center of this thriller? Is she the professor of Religious Studies we meet on the day the story begins, the self-possessed woman who presides over a lecture hall full of devoted students? Or is she the troubled person living a hermit's life, who sleeps all that night on the porch chair, afraid to face the nightmares of her past? Identity is important in this book. It is fascinating to watch Anne change herself into Ana Wakefield, New Age drifter and seeker of the truth, and see how quickly she is absorbed into the cult. Will Change's leader figure out her real identity as he gets closer to her? Will Ana be able to separate her past life, when she belonged to a different cult and suffered the death of her child and husband because of it, from the present danger?Pay attention to Prof. Waverly's scholarly notes on cults and to the stages of Alchemy (translated from the Latin) cited at the beginning of each chapter. Keep your eye on Anne Waverly.Laurie R. King is the author of two other similarly-themed stand-alone books, Folly and Taking Charge, plus the Mary Russell series, the Kate Martinelli series, and the Harris Stuyvesant series.
—Linda
Fascinating and engrossing thus far.ADDENDUM: Marvelous; I especially love the snippets provided from Wakely's case notes and lectures which precede each chapter. Though I suspect I will never love or dissolve as easily into any book of hers as I did The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which world I found myself physically aching for after having finished it), I liked this quite a lot. Perhaps the only reason I haven't given it a full five stars is because the central working behind Change is one that doesn't intrigue me at all; I found myself skimming through the sections dealing with it.
—Jennifer
I had to wait a few weeks to write my review, I just could not rehash this book so soon after reading it, it was that disturbing for me. This was a powerful book grappling with the forces of good and evil within the context of religious community. Laurie King is a master of character development and I have never felt more empathy for her characters than I did in this book. The story develops as a sort of train wreck. You know something terribly bad is going to happen but you are praying it doesn't. I give this book 4.5 stars (I reserve 5 for classics) for amazing characters and sense of place (the desert scenes were beautiful in their rendering of this stark landscape) and the courage to deal with both the good and the bad of religious community. Gripping and powerful! I highly recommend it but don't look at it as escape reading!
—Suzan
