Yesterday I finished The Night We Burned by S.F. Kosa. Reading it was a frustrating experience because it did so many things well in the literary conversation of cults, but they were dampened by a few authorial choices that overshadowed the otherwise great read.

As usual, this blog post is not a review but a critique, and as such it has spoilers. This book is highly dependent on a few of its twists, so if you’re going to read it, I recommend holding off on this until you do so.

In other words:

SPOILERS!!!

The Set Up

The Night We Burned is a dual timeline (And secret dual POV) psychological thriller about a teen who joins a cult. One POV follows Christy, a runaway teen who meets Eszter and is taken to the Oracles of Innocence where she feels safe and protected for the first time in her life. She changes her name to Parvaneh and falls in love with the cult leader, Darius. Things in the cult sour (as they do) and the cult ends in a mass murder-suicide. During the chaos, the building is set on fire. Three cult members were not in the building and end up in jail for crimes the committed, and two bodies are unaccounted for. We assume one is Christy-turned-Dora and the book involves the mystery of who the other might be.

In modern times, Christy has changed her name to Dora and is working as a fact checker for an online magazine when what looks like a revenge murder occurs in her hometown of Bend, Oregon. The reporter following the case is good at his job, so Dora asks to go with him to guide his investigation and prevent him from discovering her connection to the cult. While she’s there, she has to face her past – both in the form of memories and by meeting the ex-cult members who are being killed off one by one.

The set up itself is a satisfying way to read about a cult. Because you already know the tragic fate of the cult, you’re allowed to gloss over the messy build up to that fate and just hit the key decision points for the cult members. We see some of Christy’s internal struggle about whether to accept the cult leader’s teachings or not, but where the cult is headed doesn’t have to remain a surprise. The “thrill” of the read is in how Christy deals with her past, not in the fateful night that changed her life. This is an approach I’ve noticed in most of the cult books I’ve read. They are either written in past tense or dual timeline. The fate of the cult is already known to the narrator, and they are sharing their why and how of everything – answering the burning question of “how could someone fall for that?”

Creating Tension In Cults: We Know It Will Get Bad, We Don’t Know How Bad It Will Get

Reading a cult book is a lot like reading a serial killer book: we know it’s going to get bad. But whereas serial killers have experienced a sort of cultural redemption (“the moral serial killer” ex. Dexter or Butcher and Blackbird), the cult has no such redemption. I have a couple of theories on why there isn’t the fervor for redemption in cult literature that there has been in serial killer literature:

1. We define a cult not as a static “thing” but as a process. Cults tend to have a clear cycle. They may start out as positive spaces for their members. Oftentimes, their leadership has good intentions. During this period it may be a movement or commune. Just a group. It only becomes a cult when it spirals into chaos – a point that is inevitable as soon as you hear the word “cult”. A serial killer is always a killer, though. While they may have their own spiral into a more frenzied state, the killer is undeniable. Basically, it is easier to contradict and challenge the undeniable than the inevitable.
2. In Western culture, our independence and social freedom is valued more than life. Some days it feels like a large swath of Americans would rather be dead than put a group above our individuality. Maybe I’m being hyperbolic there, but the dread of cults hinge on the fate “worse than death.” In many ways, a serial killer is “easier” to accept than a cult — you may be tortured, but you will die with your values and self intact (usually… unless we’re getting into something truly gruesome like The Poughkeepsie Tapes). But when you’re in a cult, your sense of identity is slowly eroded. You may not even realize you’re changing, and before you know it, you’re doing despicable things you never thought yourself capable of. In that way, murder can be forgivable, but manipulation of a person’s identity cannot.

Both of these go to say that, when writing cults, there are two built-in sources of tension. You have the looming question of how bad things will get. In The Night We Burned, we open knowing everyone died in a fire. The tension comes when things worse than the fire are breadcrumbed into the story. People were stabbed. Did the main character do the stabbing? Did she set the fire? How bad was that night, and how “bad” of a person is she?

The second source of tension is the point of no return. Even knowing Christy was in the fire, there was plenty of will she/won’t she throughout the book — the reader sees (and hopefully feels) all of the tiny decisions that erode her will and prepare her for that final night. Even knowing she won’t make the right decision, you still hope. And part of the reason you can so clearly see the wrong decisions is because they are the ones the cult is driving.

But For The Grace Of God

The main twist in the story was one I didn’t see coming and felt completely satisfying. In the first chapter, Christy meets Eszter on the streets. Christy is wary of Eszter’s kindness, but the girls — similar in age — bond over their similar pasts. Both were abused and ran away. Both carried the guilt of leaving behind a younger brother. The girls remain friends throughout the book until Darius takes a “special interest” in Christy (now named Parvaneh). Christy begins to feel possessive and jealous and thinks Eszter is trying to get her kicked out so she can have more time with Darius.

There’s a sort of rhythm in the book that points at Eszter as being the “bad” or “weak” one. As the book progresses, it is clear to the reader that Eszter feels guilty for bringing Parvaneh into the cult and is trying to save her by getting her kicked out or forcing her to leave, but Parvaneh’s jealousy won’t let her see that. Up until the night of the fire, you hold out hope that Parvaneh will wake up and see the mess she’s in. She must have, because she got away, right? But in the climax, instead of seeing that Parvaneh woke up, we see that Dora is not Parvaneh. She is actually Eszter. When Eszter escaped from the fire, she stole Christy’s identity. Then stole the identity of the daughter of the family who rescued her. Parvaneh, who we thought we were supposed to be rooting for, was never the main character. She soured and ended up loyal to Darius and the cult until her death.

The reason it was so satisfying was because it made me realize my prejudices. I didn’t think Eszter was a “bad” person, but I did think Parvaneh was a “good” person, and I had nothing to base that on except Parvaneh was able to pull away from the cult and Estzer (most likely) wasn’t. When Eszter began trying to send Parvaneh away, my opinion of her changed. But I still saw Parvaneh as my avatar and, subconsciously, as the more “worthwhile” person of the two. To suddenly realize that Eszter was the one who had the strength to get away completely flipped my opinions upside down. As a literary device, it worked really well to show me my preconceptions about what “type” of people fall into cults and who can get out. There is a lot of judgment of victims along with a lot of unfounded confidence that I’d never fall for it.

But really, many of us have a much more fragile sense of self than we realize, and falling into a cult is not a moral failing.

The Dissolution of and Search for Identity In Cults

I talked a little about the dissolution of self earlier, and it was a strong theme in the book, highlighted by how interchangeable the two main characters were. Both main characters changed their names constantly. Christy (which we never know whether to believe that’s her legal name) became Parvaneh. Eszter had her pre-cult name, cult name, and two post cult names, one of which gave her the pre-cult identity of Parvaneh. We see that their identity was already bruised and suffering pre-cult (which made them easy targets), was completely dissolved in the cult, and then they both struggled to rebuild their identity separate from the cult.

From a literary perspective, this switch up worked to pull the story away from the plot and into one of character identity, and it was beautifully done.

The Unnecessary Twists and How We View Evil

I don’t love focusing on “things I don’t like” in these critiques, mostly because I am trying to understand what I can learn from the various approaches to a topic. But I do want to mention a couple of things I found frustrating here.

The first one was unnecessary/forced tension. Dora fails to read a story from one of the college kids that will reveal who he is. To the reader, it’s fairly clear he’s most likely Xerxes (one of the children raised in the cult), and there’s no reason for Dora to not figure this out. Additionally, there was unrealistic character action (she had the story for several chapters and he kept demanding she read it). This could be a genre issue: I don’t love psychological thrillers because they often contain contrived tension. This side story distracted from the deeper concepts of identity that could have been explored, but again, maybe that was the author’s intention.

Less forgivable was what read as fat phobia in the book. Throughout the past POV, Eszter is heavy and Parvaneh is skinny. During this time, Estzer is villain-coded. Once Estzer leaves the cult, she develops an eating disorder. This is a believable control issue after leaving a high-control group. She also runs miles everyday, which seems to be her running from her past and also her making sure she can run away if things get bad. I did not have a problem with how the eating disorder was handled — it seemed like a believable issue that would develop from the psychological trauma of being in a cult and hiding one’s identity. But then, in the final showdown, Eszter (the good one) is skinny and Parvaneh is fat. The coding that fat = evil feels not so subtle and completley unnecessary. Again, this was probably meant to be part of the identity swap, but it could have been done in many ways that didn’t use weight as a factor in good and evil.

Overall, I thought this was a good read, and I learned some interesting writing techniques. I think my main takeaway would be that our cultural obsession with cults is less about the potential physical harm and more about the dissolution of identity. Focusing on the building up and stripping away of identity makes a more interesting book than focusing on the inevitable flash point of a cult.

Up next: The Faceless Thing We Adore By Hester Steel

Title	Author	Year Published	Genre	Type of Cult	Status
Mister Magic	Kiersten White	2023			Read
Geek Love	Katherine Dunn	1989			Need to Re-read
Oryx and Crake	Margaret Atwood	2003			Read
The Girls	Emma Cline	2016	literary	personality	Read
The Stepford Wives	Ira Levin	2002
The Chosen One	Carol Lynch Williams	2009
Jamaica Inn	Daphne du Maurier	1936
The Project	Courtney Summers	2021
The Shadow Over Innsmouth	H.P. Lovecraft	1936
Gather The Daughters	Jennie Melamed	2017
Seed	Lisa Heathfield	2015
Mr. Splitfoot	Samantha Hunt	2016
Godshot	Chelsea Bieker	2020	literary	religion	Read
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly	Stephanie Oakes	2015
Survivor	Chuck Palahniuk	1999
The Family	Marissa Kennerson	2014
Black Sheep	Rachel Harrison	2023
Jesus Song	R.R. Knudson	1974
Blinded by the Light	Robin F. Brancato	1978
The Cult	Max Ehrlich	1978
The Devil’s Daughter	Katee Robert	2017	Thriller/Romance	non-christian religious (Persephone)	Read
Vineland	Thomas Pynchon	1990
Mao II	Don DeLillo	1991
Bunny	Mona Awad	2019	cosmic horror	magic	Read
The Night We Burned	S.F. Kosa	2021	Psychological Thriller	commune (spiritual)	Read