Review: Russell Kirk, Ancestral Shadows

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Brian Bixby

russell kirk ancestral shadows

There are devils that lead to your downfall, and there are devils that make you extend yourself. My reader Judy of Janthina Images is of the latter kind. Knowing that my personal politics are a bit left, she sent me a collection of ghost stories by a conservative writer, Russell Kirk’s Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales (2004).

Russell Kirk (1918 – 1994) is considered to be one of the fathers of contemporary American conservatism. I’d never heard of him.[i] So I went hunting on my bookshelf, and found his introduction to The Viking Portable Conservative Reader (1982), which turns out to be one of his notable pieces. Mr. Kirk reveals himself to be a thinking man’s Burkean conservative,[ii] dedicated to the idea that our social institutions embody the wisdom of the ages, and should be altered slowly and only as needed.[iii]

But why bring this up at all in reviewing Kirk’s ghost stories? Because Kirk’s conservatism, which most definitely includes his Catholism,[iv] is central to his stories, which he describes in an essay appended to this collection as “experiments in moral imagination.” And by and large, when Kirk’s moral imagination works well, so do his stories. When it fails, his stories fail, too.

One of the themes in Kirk’s moral imagination is that this is a Christian universe. Salvation and damnation are open to every man with free will, and by free will they so choose. “Lex Talonis,” a story about two criminals, one of whom isn’t quite what he seems to be, is a good example; so is “Saviorgate,” an amusing and even thoughtful look at what might lie beyond death. “Balgrummo’s Hell” is a more traditional scary ghost story of punishment in the vein of M. R. James, not the only one Kirk wrote by far, but probably the best.

While most of Kirk’s tales have a Christian background, late in his career he wrote two stories that are essentially pagan, “The Last God’s Dream” and “The Peculiar Desmesne of Archvicar Gerontion.” They feature a character beloved of conservative writers, the man who possesses a natural nobility, often paired with amazing abilities and sometimes even noble birth.[v] Kirk’s Manfred Arcane lacks nobility by birth, but he runs an entire country and is a naturally courteous man when not plotting to kill his enemies. While officially Christian, Arcane’s sympathies lie with such figures as Diocletian. The two stories explore the limitations of great power in wonderfully atmospheric settings.

Combine these two themes together, and you get the very best story in the collection, “The Princess of All Lands.” Kirk’s protagonist in this story is as extraordinary as Manfred Arcane, thanks to her special abilities, but her heart and soul are resolutely Christian. So when she is confronted by supernatural evil, her central concern is salvation. But for whom? And at what cost?

However, there is a sinister undercurrent that often sends Kirk’s moral imagination astray. He loves righteous violence and killing. The Christian God behind some of Kirk’s stories is not the God of the Beatitudes, not even the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament, but a macabre Vincent Price preparing to torture the damned, and feeling self-righteous doing so.

This is why I can’t praise the award-winning “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” Kirk’s protagonist is an improbably chaste petty criminal and drifter names Sarsfield. Kirk tries to suggest Sarsfield is another extraordinary character, essentially pure in soul if dodgy as a social being, but the guy really comes off as a trimmer at best, one who is neither saved nor damned. Nevertheless [SPOILER ALERT: blue text], Sarsfield wins his way to Heaven by a spree of justifiable homicides. Now killing bad guys is usually considered a good thing in the secular world. But is it the right thing to do when a man’s immortal soul may yet be redeemed? We must assume for the sake of Kirk’s protagonist that these were hardened criminals, though we know almost nothing of their history. [END SPOILER ALERT] And that’s the problem with the story: it’s really a secular view of good and evil, Wild West-style, grafted onto a Christian universe.

In addition, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” features another of Kirk’s weaknesses, his tendency to bring contemporary politics into his stories. Kirk misunderstood M. R. James’s warning against including sex in ghost stories. The problem isn’t sex per se; the problem is that including sex in a ghost story can easily jar the reader out of the atmosphere the author is trying to build up. Unfortunately, Kirk couldn’t resist tweaking his political opponents in his stories, often in ways that disrupt or diminish the effect of his stories. So in this story, our protagonist Sarsfield sometimes serves as a “jailhouse lawyer” to his fellow prison inmates. Yet he twice improbably disparages the Escobedo and Miranda decisions,[vi] which many inmates would have found useful. Since nothing in the story depends on this, the only reason this appears is clearly to allow Kirk to express his ire over those decisions, which displeased many conservatives. In another few decades, people will have forgotten this controversy, and it will be relegated to an explanatory footnote in Kirk’s story, if it should endure that long. But Kirk was willing to disrupt the believability of his story to make a political point. It’s not a good sign.

The larger problem with incorporating politics into religion is that it threatens to cheapen, trivialize, and corrupt religion. So by trying to mesh his own political issues with the Christian universe, Kirk sometimes trivialized Christianity and ruined his story. Perhaps the worst offender in this volume is the very first story, “Ex Tenebris,” an otherwise forgettable story of supernatural vengeance whose object is a civil servant trying to implement government housing policy! Well, yeah, we’d all like to see the “revenooers” get theirs, but in this story and the next, “Behind the Stumps,” we’re getting into bad 1950s EC Comics territory, without the benefit of the art.

I should note that those stories are among the earliest of Kirk’s in this volume. In general, Kirk got better as he got older and more experienced. The stories in this volume are very roughly in chronological order, and you’re better off sticking toward the back than the front. And to close, I’ll mention one other story worth reading, “The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close.” It’s the only story set in the 18th century, it allowed Kirk to give his social conservatism free rein without getting into contemporary politics, and it’s a good yarn, too.

 

[i] In contrast, I knew quite a bit about his more media-savvy ideological colleague, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925 – 2008).

[ii] And like Edmund Burke, Kirk’s conservatism has a religious basis. Critics of Burkean conservatism argue that it has a mystical basis, supporters, including Kirk, disagree, but I suspect that this is quibbling over a term because of its often pejorative connotations.

[iii] Although Kirk is called one of the fathers of contemporary conservatism, his Burkean conservatism is actually at odds with contemporary right-wing politics in America. To judge from the Wikipedia entry on Kirk, he understood this himself. It must have been a bitter realization.

[iv] He converted in 1963. Reading his ghost stories, I had to wonder why it hadn’t happened sooner.

[v] Readers of the Zimiamvian trilogy of high fantasy stories by E. R. Eddison (1882 – 1945) will recognize Lessingham as another of this type.

[vi] Escobedo guaranteed suspects the right to a lawyer during police interrogations, Miranda that police had to inform suspects of their rights.

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Chapter 13 of Prophecies and Penalties

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Brian Bixby

Emily Fisher may have a clue that points to Alex Bancroft, the Prophesied One, as the killer of High Councilor Stephen Nash. So she’s less that thrilled to run into Alex before she’s had a chance to investigate further. It turns out Alex has an agenda of his own. Is he chatting Emily up for a date, or does he have a more ominous design? Questions get asked, questions get answered “In the shadow of Sacred Mountain,” chapter 13 of Prophecies and Penalties, my weekly serial about the investigation of a murder committed at a religious commune in Vermont. If you’re not reading it already, you can start with the first chapter here.

The last time I showed this, I didn't mention it was on the Shaker's holy hill

The last time I showed this, I didn’t mention it was the sacred ground with fountain stone on the Shakers’ holy hill

While mountains or hills figure in many religions, the specific inspiration for the Sacred Mountain of this story was the holy hills of the Shakers. Starting in 1837, the Shakers underwent a remarkable religious revival (which I’ve mentioned once before) that featured extensive contacts with manifestations of God and notable spirits from history and the Shaker past. As part of this revival, in 1842 the Shakers set up a sacred hill on the outskirts of each village, featuring an enclosure around a fountain stone, where they gathered to worship in special ceremonies that were not open to the public. These ceremonies had an extensive symbolic spiritual content, notably including sacred feasts and the sacred fountain itself. However, as the revival ended, the ceremonies on the holy hills were abandoned, the fountain stones were taken down and buried, and the sites reverted to their natural state.

Looking down from the Holy Hill to the stone dwelling house

Looking down from the Holy Hill to the stone dwelling house (and the chapel added by a Catholic monastic order)

I’ve visited several Shaker villages in recent years. Although the holy hills were abandoned as sacred sites, most are identifiable. I’ve stood on several of them. Mount Assurance at the Enfield, New Hampshire village offers a pleasant view of the village itself and Lake Mascoma beyond.

Although the Shakers served as the inspiration, readers will find that the Children of the New Revelation use their mountain in a different fashion. Indeed, more about the mountain will be revealed in a later chapter, when someone actually goes up there!

And, as a final thought . . . some chapters are a bear to write. Others are a lot of fun. Chapter 13 was fun to write. I hope it is as much fun to read.

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Fictional religious communities

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Brian Bixby

There have been a lot of fictional religious communities. The Children of the New Revelation in my running serial Prophecies and Penalties are hardly the first. So I thought I’d take a look at four examples, two from the 19th century, two from the 20th.

They are evil! (Image copyright by E.J. Barnes)

They are evil!
(Image copyright by E.J. Barnes)

Just as they founded some of the earliest religious communes, so, too, the Shakers figured in some of the earliest American fiction about such places. All the way back in 1824, Catharine Sedgwick (1789 – 1867) wrote a novel, Redwood, that featured an evil Shaker elder, driven by lust and greed, who intended to carry off an unwilling young woman and loot the Shakers’ bank account. Sedgwick didn’t know it, but she had formulated the most common story line about a religious commune: that hypocritical leaders mislead their followers to satisfy the leaders’ own passions. Sometimes, as in Redwood, the bad leader is an exception, but in other stories the entire community is corrupt.

Sedgwick’s own purpose in writing Redwood was to contrast good religion, meaning mainstream religion, with unhealthy enthusiasms and atheism. The Shakers get to be the people of excessive religious enthusiasm, while the title character is a man who abandoned God out of disappointment with the world. As you might expect, Mr. Redwood regains his faith at the end, and I don’t mean the faith of the Shakers.

Shirley Shaker Village, from Howells's "Three Villages"

Shirley Shaker Village, from Howells’s “Three Villages”

In Sedgwick’s day, the Shakers appeared to be a threatening group, growing powerful and buying more land. By 1880, they were in decline, and seen as quaint, not threatening. In that year, William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920) wrote The Undiscovered Country. He used the fictional Shaker community of Vardley (a combination of the names of the genuine Shaker communities in Harvard and Shirley) as an Arcadian paradise, and yet one flawed because its denial of sexuality is a denial of life. And like Sedgwick’s story, Howells’s story became the prototype of many such stories celebrating religious communes as temporary refuges from the world’s cares.

In Howells’s story, a doctor and his daughter, whom he uses as a spiritual medium to communicate with the dead, find themselves stranded in a Shaker village. The daughter, who has been fading away under the unnatural effects of trying to communicate with the dead, regains her vigor in the Shaker community, and then falls in love with someone from back in Boston. In contrast, the father dies, and presumably finds out what the afterlife is firsthand, not that his daughter tries to reach him!

Both evil leaders and the commune as a refuge feature in Iain Banks’s Whit, or Isis Among the Unsaved (1995), a novel about a contemporary religious commune in Scotland. However, Banks (1954 – 2013) is writing satire, so the commune has a mix of common and outlandish features. For example, the Founder committed “self-heresies” in the early days, and the members are allowed to use telephones, but not to talk over them, only to ring another party in code. The protagonist is the outlandishly named The Blessed Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Elect of God, III, heir-apparent to leadership of this commune because she was born on February 29. For Isis, the commune is a paradise, until someone in the leadership tries to deprive her of her position. She has to go out into the world to find the clues that will reveal the truth about the Luskentyrean faith and restore her to her former position. Not that the outside world escapes Banks’s satire. The Luskentyreans think the outsiders are too busy to be fully human and spiritual, and Banks shows that they’re often right. Which, coming from an atheist, as Banks is, is quite an unusual criticism. Toss in a room filled wall-to-wall with a bed, an illegal London squat with paid utility service, a Texas grandmother armed with lawyers, and haggis pakora among many other amusing things to make this a light-hearted adventure with a warped perspective and a serious bite.

Probably the oddest of religious communes I’ve ever encountered in fiction is by the always troubling Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965), partly because it’s a borderline example. In The Sundial (1958), one member of a family living in a mansion hears her dead father warn her that the end of the world is coming, and that only people living in the mansion will escape destruction. What happens when the rest of the family decide to believe her, and as some of the predictions come true, forms the plot of this novel. The characters, who at first seem normal, become increasingly grotesque, both because they are adjusting to the idea of the world ending, and as they jostle for their position in the family and in the future world order. Readers of her other novels, including Hangsaman, which I reviewed in an earlier blog post, will find the transition from the normal to the disturbing feels familiar, even though it takes a different form in each novel.

Those of you following Prophecies and Penalties will notice I’ve borrowed a bit here and a bit there from these books. I admit it. There will even be a touch of Sharon Falconer from Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1926) showing up. But the design of my story is my own.

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Chapter 12 of Prophecies and Penalties

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Brian Bixby

On one hand, Emily Fisher should be congratulating herself. Quasopon’s police chief, her old friend Bonnie Knowles, told her the only way to solve High Council member Stephen Nash’s murder was to get involved in the affairs of the Children of the New Revelation. And, oh boy, over the course of the last six chapters of Prophecies and Penalties, Emily is definitely finding herself getting sucked in.

On the other hand, Emily thinks she really ought to be investigating the murder just like a real detective. You know, hunting for clues and such? So, even though she gets involved in the Children’s affairs even more, Emily is finally happy that she’s getting a chance to act like a real detective in chapter 12, “A clue?”

Prophecies and Penalties is my current weekly serial. A new chapter goes up every Friday morning. If you’ve not been reading so far, you can start with chapter 1.

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Bad movie night, cinematic history, and “Salem”

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Brian Bixby
It just doesn't get any sillier than this

It just doesn’t get any sillier than this

We have a tradition in my household of holding “bad movie nights.” These are evening when we bring together a number of friends of humorous (or at least sarcastic) disposition. Once together, and properly provided with food and alcohol, we watch and criticize movies that are so bad they are laughable. Any of you who have seen Sean Connery in an orange diaper in Zardoz (1974) or William Shatner “speaking in tongues” in Incubus (1966) know what kind of movies I mean.

We haven’t done too many historical films, primarily because historical films tend to go wrong by showing anachronisms, elements out of place in the time depicted. I’ve yet to see a mobile phone in a movie set before 1990, but I suspect it may well happen in my lifetime. And, far, far too often, movies depict characters in the past who are really contemporary characters transported into the past. My favorite for some years has been Rolfe the Viking in The Long Ships (1964), who is clearly a 20th century scoundrel and conman, unlike any Viking who ever lived.

I mention this because, thanks to another blog’s post on the series, I tracked down and watched the first episode of the new series Salem the other night. Salem  is supposed to be about the witchcraft hysteria in Salem in 1692. Except, in this series, witches are real. OK, if I can write “historical” stories in which magic is real, then I guess a television series producer can do a series based on witchcraft being real. It’s not going to be historical, but at least it can be set in the appropriate era and maintain some historical verisimilitude.

Rather than being in the appropriate era, the episode I saw tended toward the inappropriate error. Salem looks too primitive, while its inhabitants are too sophisticated in clothing and manners. This is a prosperous late 17th century port with an extensive rural hinterland in fact, but not as depicted. And then there’s John Alden, our heroic male lead. He is no 17th century character, no. He is a 21st century enlightened man with our standards, who in addition can beat the nasty evil Puritans at their own game of Bible-quoting.

Witch, n. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the Devil. -- Ambrose Bierce

Witch, n. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the Devil. — Ambrose Bierce

That the historical John Alden has been “lifted” from Plymouth to be the off-screen founder of Salem, and the father of the John Alden of the series, I just put down to the writers wanting to use a familiar name. Similarly, that all of the female witches appear to be young and attractive is to be expected; this is another series which might be described as historical soft-core porn, and the ladies will be required to strip down frequently. Audiences who saw Rome or The Tudors will know what to expect. And one can forgive some minor details; a 19th century obelisk in a cemetery will only upset people who know better (like me).

I do give the writers credit for an interesting premise for the series: that the witches are using internal divisions among the Puritans to destroy themselves. It bears some relation to what the inhabitants of Salem and Massachusetts-Bay actually did, killing their own people because of social tensions within their community. Though further thought raises questions about the premise. I doubt the authorities in Boston would sit still during all this. And witchcraft “works” because people use it to affect other people. If the witches succeed in destroying the Puritans, who will they lord it over?

 

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Chapter 11 of Prophecies and Penalties, and a musical interlude

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Brian Bixby

Not everything among the Children of the New Revelation is benign, and even benign things can sting, as Emily Fisher finds out in “Hazards,” chapter 11 of Prophecies and Penalties, my weekly serial about a murder investigation set in a Vermont religious commune.

We have plays with music, musicals, so why not books with music? In the old days, writers would sometimes quote song lyrics to set a mood, expecting the reader would know the tune and the song from which the lyrics came. I would have thought the logical progression would be books with music discs included. (I actually do have one.) But the more common practice these days seems to be for writers to give the reader a list of popular songs that are supposed to go with the book. The idea is that the reader will download the songs into an mp3 player, and listen to them while reading.

I’ve never seriously considered doing this myself. Like many people, I have less time and interest in following popular music as I get older. So if I were to construct such a list for my stories, it would be heavily weighted toward songs that are decades old. And I normally am happy to let my stories stand on their own.

However, every so often a particular episode or story reminds me of a song. This chapter of Prophecies and Penalties, particularly the opening section, is one such example. It evokes an old Paul Simon song, one from when he was just starting his solo career in 1972. It was a minor hit then, but I’m happy to see it listed among the “under-appreciated songs” of Simon’s career, and that it was even got recycled onto a movie soundtrack in 2006. Anyhow, here’s a link to the song, “Duncan.” Give it a play just before or after you read the chapter, and let me know what you think.

All female street preachers should look like Sister Sharon Falconer (played by Jean Simmons from the movie "Elmer Gantry")

All “young girl in the parking lot” preachers should look like Sister Sharon Falconer (played by Jean Simmons from the movie “Elmer Gantry”)

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A birthday, a discovery: Elaine May

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Brian Bixby
Nothing like a smart lady playing a clueless one!

Nothing like a smart lady playing a clueless one!

Elaine May (born April 21, 1932) is one of those people I’d heard about, but didn’t really know about. Which is not surprising, because her career was at its peak when I was very young. By the time I grew up, she was most famous for that cinematic and financial disaster, Ishtar (1987), which I admit I’ve never seen.

However, at some time or other, I saw A New Leaf on TV. This was a movie that May wrote, directed, and starred in, along with Walter Matthau, in 1971. I was actually watching it because I liked Matthau and his hang-dog look. I don’t really remember much about it, but somehow Elaine May’s name stuck in my head.

Nichols and May (although that's May on the left, if you haven't guessed)

Nichols and May (although that’s May on the left, if you haven’t guessed)

So when her birthday came up this year, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on her. It goes on and on with raves about her collaboration with Mike Nichols in improvisational comedy between between 1955 and 1961, originally as part of a troupe, then as a duo called Nichols and May.

The book is grimmer than the skit

The book is grimmer than the skit

I’d never heard their act to remember it. But these are the days of the Internet. You can find almost anything on it if you look hard enough. So I went hunting for videos. Sure enough, I found a bunch of them by searching YouTube for “Nichols and May.” And given the themes of this blog, I offer one for you to watch: “The $65 Funeral.” It’s hilarious. It’s even more hilarious if you know that they were satirizing actual practices in the funeral industry, which had just been documented in an industry exposé entitled The American Way of Death (1963) by Jessica Mitford.

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Chapter 10 of Prophecies and Penalties

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Brian Bixby

You ever have one of those days when you don’t seem to be making any progress, and nothing comes out right? Well, that’s been Emily Fisher’s day so far. She’s encountered a half-sister she’s not sure she wants to have, talked with an evasive religious leader, and then ineffectively quizzed the main suspect in a murder case. So Emily decides to do just what you or I would in the same circumstances: see if she can screw something else up, too. It’s time for a family reunion with her parents and sister in chapter 10, “Elsie,” of Prophecies and Penalties, my weekly serial about a murder set in a religious commune.

This sort of gives you the idea of the tenor of Assembly Day

This sort of gives you an idea of the tenor of Assembly Day

There’s one quaint custom Elsie mentions which may be unfamiliar to many readers. Back before there were standardized tests in schools, and school plays that only the parents of the children attend, there was something even worse, a custom Elsie calls Assembly Day. The purpose of Assembly Day (by whatever name it was known) was for the school teachers to demonstrate to the community how much the students had learned. All the townspeople would gather in a hall or auditorium. And then the teachers would have the students perform various exercises which would not only show off their learning but reinforce community values. They would recite sentimental verse and sing patriotic songs, be quizzed on American history, and draw maps of their home state. The exact program varied from town to town. The highlight would usually be a speech by the school’s best student, declaiming on the greatness of God, the manifest destiny of America, the glory of the sovereign state of Vermont, the virtuous town of Quasopon, the learned teachers, the wise parents, and the friendly mongrel that belonged to the gatekeeper at the town dump.

Assembly Day was a hybrid of the tradition that students had to demonstrate their knowledge in public, which is still officially the case for doctoral candidates defending their dissertations, and a community gathering to assess its own health and reassure its citizens. And as both of those practices have become obsolete, Assembly Day has vanished, usually surviving in vestigial form as the valedictorian’s graduation speech. Though a few towns continue the practice. One of them happens to be Quasopon.

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Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Brian Bixby

There seems to be a rule that “popular” writers are disdained by critics, if not in their lifetime then shortly after they die. After a few decades, if they’re lucky, some influential critics says, in effect, “Although I’m not supposed to like it, this writer was actually pretty good.” The next thing you know, critics hail the dead writer as a forgotten master of the written word. This is what happened to Robert Louis Stevenson, a “boy’s writer,” to Grace Metalious, whom I’ve mentioned elsewhere, and to a lesser extent writers such as Rafael Sabatini (still escapist, but a great escapist writer) and William Hope Hodgson, again as I’ve mentioned in another post.

ShirleyJack

Well, it now appears to be Shirley Jackson’s turn to be rehabilitated. Not that Jackson (1916 – 1965) had ever been completely forgotten; “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House ensured that fans of psychological horror would never forget her. There was more to Jackson than horror, however. Jackson was also a social observer, critic, and satirist, and a wonderful stylist.

Which brings us to Hangsaman, Jackson’s second novel, originally published in 1951 and reissued by Penguin just last year. One of the dangers of a critical revival is that everything gets republished. Hangsaman is simply not among Jackson’s best works. She mixes satire about progressive colleges with the psychological horror of being a college girl from a very unhealthy family environment. These two aspects don’t always work together; in fact sometimes they don’t have much to do with each other. And the ending is likely to leave most readers confused or annoyed, though it does fit the folk song, called alternately “The Gallowstree” or “The Maid Freed From the Gallows,” from which the title is taken.

9780143107040

So why read it? Jackson’s satire and her style. Her depictions of literary and college life are painfully funny and superbly written. Her portrayal of the mental state of the protagonist, Natalie Waite, all by itself sets the ominous mood of the novel. The novel hardly needs the occult elements that appear toward its end. Every so often while reading this novel, I said to myself, “I wish I could write this well.”

It’s also possible this novel will strike home with some readers, particularly people who can recall struggling to establish their personal (and sexual) identities in college. Natalie prefigures Eleanor of The Haunting of Hill House: both unsure of herself and drawn sexually to strong male and female characters. It didn’t end well for Eleanor; how it ended for Natalie I will let readers judge.

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Chapter Nine of Prophecies and Penalties

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Brian Bixby

Stephen Nash is dead, and the Prophesied One, Alex Bancroft, is the main suspect. How does one question a religious leader named in an age-old prophecy? Especially when he denies being the Prophesied One? Emily Fisher would like to know, because that’s the job she’s set herself in the appropriately titled chapter 9 of Prophecies and Penalties, “The man of the prophecy.”

If you’re not already reading my weekly serial about a murder in an obscure religious commune in Vermont, you can start out with chapter 1. A new chapter gets posted every Friday.

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