We’re about to go overseas for a month, and so I’m hoping that the next post here will be a recap of all the things I get through during fifty-odd hours of flights and however many hours of sitting in gardens.
HOWEVER that means that I need to clear my backlog of books read before I place myself at the tender mercies of security at the international terminal.
So let’s get to it, because fuck knows I’ve got a lot of pre-trip packing and organisation to get through.
Rajneeshpuram by Russell King.
My rating: three stars.
Last year we watched the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country about the Rajneesh movement‘s takeover of Antelope, Oregon. It’s a typical story of religious intolerance met with attempted murder, wholesale spreading of salmonella and vote-rigging played out across a backdrop involving a bearded sex-positive guru (later called Osho who also thought Hitler was quite cool) doing the usual cult leader stuff like buying more Rolls-Royces than any person could possibly require, making adherents marry each other (for visa purposes) and generally letting his cronies run roughshod over the people who provided the funds and grunt-work to make their city in the middle of nowhere a reality.
Needless to say, it was a blast. I remember seeing the infamous “tough titties” 60 Minutes interview when I was a kid, so it was pretty enjoyable to have distant memories tickled and then brought into focus through the documentary.
This audiobook, read by the author, covers the same ground but in a lot more depth. It’s unsurprising that it’s so well researched: King is behind a successful podcast about the cult and has convinced ex-members who had otherwise been silent to share their stories. The writing isn’t necessarily the most engaging I’ve come across in books about cults, but it’s in earnest and filled in a lot of gaps.
If you’re short on time or only want the dramatic beats of the story, hit the Netflix documentary. If you’ve time to kill and are after a little more meat, King’s your man. You won’t necessarily be changed by getting through this, but you will have several how the fuck questions afterwards.
Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn.
My rating: three stars.
Look, I keep coming back to Jeff Guinn books and, like someone chasing that high from the first hit of smack, shit just won’t measure up. I absolutely loved his book on Jonestown, but then had my faith dented by his lacklustre tome on Charles Manson. Third time’s a charm, right?
Yeah nah.
Waco is an adequate retelling of the story of Vernon Howell’s transformation into David Koresh, and how his biblical scholarship and gun modification practices had a horrible collision with government agency operational fuckwittery. It conveys the establishment of Koresh’s base and the horrors of the period after the ATF raid – particularly well, in terms of the split between negotiation and active arms of the team, who basically ignored each other – and humanises the followers of this end-of-days goblin It gives light and shade to the experiences of the people tasked with securing the Mount Carmel compound, and generally tells the story.
Is it that on some subjects Guinn is a competent but not brilliant writer? Signs are pointing to yes. I have a feeling this book hadn’t been given subbing to the level required, because there was a lot of repetition through chapters that felt like erroneous inclusion rather than reiteration of a point. It felt as if some parts of the story had been written in a different order than they appear in the book, which perhaps explains duplication – can you remember what you wrote six months ago? – but not the fact that such echoed text made it through the revision and production cycle.
It’s fine. The book is fine. But I guess I’m expecting something more than fine if something’s going to take my time. Tick tock, motherfucker: I’ve got a lot to read before a dirt nap, and I guess I’d rather not spend it with fine.
(The narrator, Jacques Roy, was fine. I don’t recall any particular downsides to his reading of the text: it fit with the tenor of what was going on, but was otherwise unremarkable.
The Deluge by Stephen Markley.
My rating: five stars.
Speaking of books that needed a good subbing pass, let’s discuss Stephen Markley’s The Deluge. Somewhere in the opening chapter, on the opening page – I believe it’s the second paragraph? – there’s a peak/peek error slotted in. This is either a cunning authorial lol, or it’s the fact that someone at the publishing house looked at this 900-pager full of diary entries, paste-up interstital pages, fake reports, first-person recollections and other strains of narrative and just went “yeah, fuck that noise!” and hoped that Markley had everything right.
He didn’t. And look, while I feel a bit like this for complaining about it:
…it’s still annoying to find errata through the book. Especially, well, this.
*breathes out*
Other than that, though, this thing is fucking remarkable. It deserves the five-star rating even in the face of eye-twitching text errors. The ambition is incredible. Essentially this is an eco-thriller, set in the very near (post-Trump) future, where environmental collapse and right-wing emboldenment (is that a word, if not let’s assume it’s perfectly cromulent) combine to ensure the future – replete with wild tornadoes, temperatures incompatible with life and floods that make it look like everyone on the US coast have left their taps running for a couple of years – is fuuuuucked.
What follows is a bit hard to put into words: there’s the story of the regular bloke trying to get (and stay) sober. There’s a Tom Cruise figure (who undoubtedly is not Tom Cruise, for the benefit of Mr Cruises’s well paid and highly litigious team) that becomes a religious leader. There’s a rebirth of radical activism, and an examination of how cults of environmentally-laced personality work in terms of effective (or violent) praxis. There’s the Florida real estate market, there’s family drama and political expediency. And then there’s the Washington wonks and their data-driven politicking, conveyed incredibly well.
As bureaucrats have rediscovered again and again from time immemorial, getting people to do what is in their best interest is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures.
There’s everything – a deluge of water, of topics, of boots on the ground and bodies on the barricades. And though it shouldn’t fit together – others have criticised the book as being a bit sloppily structured – I was suitably impressed by how the disparate pieces worked to sound the author’s WAKE THE FUCK UP warning. There’s some soapboxing, sure, but it’s in the service of the narrative, and I bought it all.
It seems, judging from The Bad Review Place, that people love or hate The Deluge. Ever the contrarian, I did both, but don’t let that stop me from foisting it upon you if you’re even remotely interested. If you’re into books that aim high, this is absolutely worth your time.
Preacher of Death by Martin King and Marc Breault.
My rating: two stars.
This is a book I’ve read before. For some unknown reason – maybe because it was the only book on the Branch Davidians that I’d read at that point? – I gave it four stars.
Past me was a dick. Because frankly, two stars is a bit generous.
Rereading Preacher of Death (I swear to god that fucking title) I found myself cringing at remarkably regular junctures: there’s the usual references to “the madman” and the “Hell” that he had created. I shouldn’t be surprised – King was a reporter for ACA, for fuck’s sake – but I was surprised how grotty I felt after reading this. Not because of the content – we all know what happened during the raid, the standoff and the ultimate inferno was horrific, with blame due to all sides – but because of the breathless, tabloid-friendly manner in which it’s all related. It feels fucking gross.
There’s obviously a great book to be written about the Waco siege, the Branch Davidians and the cascade of failures that caused so many deaths. King (and Guinn) haven’t written them, though.
Telluria by Vladimir Sorokin (tr. Max Lawton).
My rating: three stars.
If you reckon drugs are stupid, Vladimir Sorokin is way ahead of you, because in this dystopian future earth-returns-to-medieval-geographies tale of a future where tech has taken a back seat (unless you’re a neo-Templar riding a catapult-fired robot suit – tech is fine for them), you take drugs by having a nail hammered into your skull.
Then you can see dead relatives, or fuck good, or… well, your mileage may vary.
If I were to try to define the current state regime of Moscovia, then I would call it enlightened theocratocommunofeudalism.
This is less a novel and more a collection of splintered missives from a future where Islamic war has ripped through Europe and society as we know it doesn’t exist. There’s links to the present if you look for them, but mostly there’s a serf/master split and what we get are the exceses of the ruling classes and the hardscrabble lives of the downtrodden.
And centaur tales. And donkey-girls. And giants and gnomes. All of whom are looking, more or less, to get psychotropically nailed and to get by in this world where a search for the least-worst option is considered a good way to spend your time.
I understand Telluria is set in the same world as another Sorokin novel, Day of the Oprichnik, and I wonder if the fragmentary nature of this book would be ameliorated somewhat by reading that novel. I enjoyed a lot of the imagery in here (albeit through my dodgy grasp of Russian history) but I suspect I’ll enjoy the collection of Sorokin’s short stories that’s in my TBR pile a bit more.
(Max Lawton’s translation is brilliant, however, as there’s some highly stylised or slang-ified language in here that I imagine wasn’t the easiest to move between languages.)
OK. That’s the reviews. I gotta go pack. I’ll be back in July.
And I want to take a moment to remind you to hug your pets again, because another of my fellers is no longer with me, and it fucking sucks.
If you’re after some good bookish times, please check out my profile on TheStoryGraph.
If you’d like to buy me some books to review, there’s a wishlist over here.
Yeah nah. 