Books about cults

I enjoy reading books about cults - preferably fiction. Thanks

Mystery fiction with a cult at the center of the story: Half Past by Victoria Helen Stone

Always Watching by Chevy Stevens also has a cult at the center of the story.

Kraken by China Mieville

Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

A Gift Upon The Shore by MK Wren

My Life with the Liars by Carla Carter

You Too Can Have a Body like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

The Chosen One by Carol Williams

Some of the below are based closely on religious sects that I would consider cults but their adherents would not....

We Sinners by Hanna Pylvainen (one of my favorites!)

Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman

Devoted by Jennifer Mathieu and The Book of Essie by Meghan Maclean Weir -- both look at a kind of Duggarite evangelical world (the latter pretty explicitly) but I think ultimately fail to capture the world as truly dark as it is in Gothard-dom

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

Hush by Eishes Chayil

The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham

I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovitz

American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar (truly excellent novel)

>2 Hope_H: thank you. Will check them out.

>3 sparemethecensor:. Are you familar with all these books? Thanks for the list.

>4 dianeham: Yes! I have read them all. (I share your interest in cults in fiction. :) )

This is the list I generated from my own library tags of either "cult" or "insular community," removing nonfiction and a couple novels I disliked.

>5 sparemethecensor: how cool! I'll have to check out the nf cult books in your library. I have a few you might be interested in. Let me check.

Some cult fiction I've read

Agnes at the End of the World apocalyptic virus. I gave it 4 Stars
How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar 3.5 stars
Clover Blue 3 stars
The Origin of the Brunists 2 stars from me.
Severance

I only know a single book about a cult, and I'm not sure it's translated. But it does fit! :)

Gevangenis met een open deur (Prison with an open door) by Jan Terlouw.

Edit
Why do these touchstones never work?

"The Sun Collective: a Novel" by Charles Baxter (Nov. 2020). While I am a fan of Baxter's earlier works, I think his more recent work, including this one, is not very good. But if you have interest in cults and their role in contemporary U.S., you might want to take a look at this one.

>7 dianeham: thanks, I'll check those out!

>8 Ennas: >9 Lasitajs: thank you

The Poison Garden by A.J. Banner is about the aftermath of a mass death at a cult. The story focuses on three survivors and flashes back and forth to before the event (within the cult) and after.

>:3 A book I read which probably belongs in the second half of your post is Unfollow which is about the Westboro Baptist Church by a young woman who grew up in it. When Diana (Princess of Wales) and Mother Theresa died at roughly the same time the pastor declared jubilantly from the pulpit "Two whores in a week!". I'm not sure about the second of these but I guess it was on account of her being Roman Catholic. I believe this man (author's grandfather) has died and church policies may have changed.

Trance by Christopher Sorrentino is a really good novel that imagines Patty Heart's life during her kidnapped months.

Sway by Zachary Lazar is a gruesomely good novel about the late sixties that covers the Rolling Stones at Altamont, nostalgia for old Hollywood, and the Manson murders.

The Girls by Emma Cline is a great novel about being a young girl/woman and about a Manson-like group.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews is a very good novel that isn't about a cult but about a strict, isolated Mennonite community that feels cult-like to the reader.

For when your whole country feels like a cult:

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Everything on Nazi Germany, North Korea, & similar places.

(The touchstones were working, then I edited & they're not -- sorry!)

>13 PossMan: That's memoir/nonfiction, correct? I excluded nonfiction from my list but agree with your assertion that WBC qualifies as a cult. I read another nonfiction book about them and it was truly horrifying.

>12 megbmore: >13 PossMan: >14 susanbooks: Thank you very much.

Maybe we need to start a cult of people who read about cults.

>14 susanbooks: about touchstones. I had the same problem. I think you have to reload the page after you edit.

Gospel of Luke?

I came here to rec Cline's The Girls and Toew's Complicated Kindness for the same reasons. Trying to link them now for your convenience.

Edited to fix this linking to wrong Girls

A YA book from an adolescent’s POV after their parents join a religious cult, Armageddon Summer.

>19 nessreader: I came here to say The Girls as well. I thought that book did a pretty good job of describing how someone may get caught up in such a thing.

Laurie King's The Birth of a New Moon is about a professor who looks into new or changing cults for the FBI after losing her husband and daughter to one.

NZ author Fleur Beale has a three book series for kids, starting with I am not Esther that are really good. She also wrote the Juno of Taris trilogy which is a more scifi/fantasy story about a cult.

Planetfall by Emme Newman is about a woman who has a vision that tells her how to build a spaceship and where to find a haibitable planet, and the people who go with her. It's one of my favorite books.

Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End has events at a past cult in its story.

My Next Bride by Kay Boyle is a novel about her time with Raymond Duncan's (brother of Isadora) cult outside Paris in the 1920s

>14 susanbooks:: Mentions "Complicated Kindness" by Miriam Toews. I haven't read it but one of her books I have read is Women Talking which I enjoyed very much although it may be disqualified by being at least based on true events. Perhaps that is why it doesn't seem to have been listed here.

I just got Complicated Kindness on hold from the library thanks to this thread. I'm looking forward to reading it next.

I saw this article, What to Read and Watch Next If You're Finding Yourself Oddly Fascinated by the Idea of Cults by Cate Quinn, in my daily email from CrimeReads.com the other day and immediately thought of this thread. I haven't read any of the books or seen any of the movies recommended or discussed in the article, so I can't vouch for their quality myself, but I thought that you all might be interested all the same:

What to Read and Watch Next If You're Finding Yourself Oddly Fascinated by the Idea of Cults by Cate Quinn

I liked Origin of the Brunists more than >7 dianeham: did, evidently.

Pahluniak's Survivor is narrated by the last living member of a suicide cult.

Masters of Atlantis is not about the sort of high-stakes coercive "cult" that has come to define the concept in recent decades. It's about a sort of quasi-Rosicrucian esoteric fraternity. But absolutely classic, and relevant to the topic.

There's a persistent and interesting cult sub-plot in The Solitudes.

Madsen's Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf supplies cult action in the 16th century.

I'm sure I'm forgetting many pertinent titles from my own reading. This is a topic of interest for me too.