This month I returned to my series of books about cults with Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to add this book to my list. I know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the sparkly glitter felt too cheesy for me. Also, I was finding so many books about conservative Christian cults and I didn’t want to get burned out on a topic that was a little too close to my personal history. But I needed another book to make twelve and Godshot was available through my library. So I gave it a shot.

OMG. The best decision ever. This book is an amazing work of art. It takes the tropes of cult-life to the next level and creates something moving, powerful, and honest. I was in the thick of it last night and could not stop reading. My reaction was full-on visceral.

Let me be clear: It is in no way a pleasant or fun read. When you think things can’t get worse, they do. When you think things are about to get better, they don’t. But it is an amazing read. And above all, the misery and violence in it does not feel gratuitous or there for shock value, which is surprising consider how shocked I was at every turn.

As usual, this post contains major spoilers. It is best interacted with after you’ve read the book.

Drought and Need

The entirety of Godshot depends on a years-long drought in central California. We see Peaches as a forgotten town — one just outside of Fresno that was deemed unworthy of rescue via water-diversion. Just going across the border into Fresno allows people to shower, buy water, and live a normal life. But Lacey May is stuck in a city of drought because of her family roots and her connection to GotS. While the drought is a very real thing, the town of Peaches seems to roll around in its dryness like a chinchilla. Vern gets a stranglehold on the town’s need by linking their faith to the drought. Bringing water in becomes a sign of weak faith. He takes a very real need and heightens it in order to exploit it as much as possible.

The dryness of the book — the drab setting, the heat, and the unending thirst — is beautifully written. But it also serves a purpose: showing how the cult members follow their leader more blindly the more desperate they get. The thirstier the members get, the more irritable they are. The more they want the drought to be over, and so they are willing to sacrifice to make a miracle happen. Especially when the sacrifice is their morality but someone else’s body.

The Cult and the Feminine

I keep coming back to the stat that women make up around 70% of cult members. Whenever I hear reasons why women are more susceptible to cults, they are statements of blame: women are more emotional. They crave spirituality. They are foolishly forgiving and want to see the best in others, so they are easily tricked. We wonder what inherent aspects of femininity push women into cults. But lately I’ve been wondering if part of that statistic is due to us holding a definition of cult as something that exploits women. Entire sections of the manosphere and military are cultish, but we don’t think of them as such because to do so would be to admit that men are just as lonely, needy, and foolish as women.

Bieker’s book is not about men in cults, though it does have one great line about the boys who enforce the cult rules and rape their sisters and cousins:

I looked around to find the rest of the boys’ club but they were gone, too. I didn’t have the energy in me then to wonder what life awaited them. What things they would have to put away deep into themselves. Inevitably, some would lie each night next to a future wife and that wife would have no idea what they had done, the things they had found themselves a part of.

Maybe we do not hold a cultural imagination of the cult-swept man because men often have the ability to hide away their participation in cults. Their scars are silent on their hearts, while women carry physical scars and… in the case of Godshot, babies that will shape their entire future.

But getting back to the cultural imagination and women in cults, Bieker’s book explores not only the nature of women, but also the social positioning of women that make them more vulnerable to cults. Yes, the women in Godshot craved connection and safety, but they were put in a position where they had to get those things from a cult because of society. The running for “woman I hate the most” in this book is tight. Cherry is seeing the rape take place right in front of her. Lacey May’s mother abandons her to the mess of the cult. Her aunt tightens the vice. Vern’s wife and daughter force others to suffer to keep themselves safe. Even Daisy, one of the heroine’s of Lacey May’s life, is problematic. But each of these women are also backed into tight corners. Lacey May’s mother was a teenage mom, pregnant from a boyfriend who was abusive and didn’t help take care of the child. There are hints that Cherry was a better grandmother before her husband committed suicide, leaving her alone with their farm in a drought-ridden city. Vern’s wife had was tight beneath his control, and had already seen the fallout of one cult. I think this book does an amazing job of not only showing how women are driven to the cult, but why they stay. The tension of wanting to leave and the need they have for the cult is palpable and, often times, material. The cult doesn’t only offer spiritual and social comfort – it offers real monetary assistance when members need it most, creating a sense of indebtedness and helplessness.

Throughout the book, Lacey May continues to return to the cult even as she begins to see Vern for what he is. But each return is more pragmatic than the the one before. She must stay in the cult because she has no mother. She must stay because her grandmother is a cult member. She must stay because she is underage and has nowhere to go. She must stay because she’s pregnant and has no way to take care of a baby on her own. In Lacey May’s situation, the cult creates these issues that it then solves for her. But often, women are left to fend for themselves in a dangerous society — one where their value is based on their sexuality and then muted when they become pregnant. It is no wonder that cults are filled with women when their position in greater society is already precarious.

Growing Up In a Cult

When we meet Lacey May, she’s fourteen and has been in Vern’s cult for seven years. Half her life and, arguably, her most formative years. When writing a cult book, the author has a few choices with positioning: a new cult member, someone who joined older and wants out, someone born into the cult. I never really thought about “child whose parent joins”, but that’s an important perspective, too. I used to think the “born into the cult” choice was one of the lazier choices because it allows you to have a character that is fully indoctrinated. Body, soul, and belief, they are the cult. This book made me rethink that position.

Lacey May does have pre-cult memories. But they are not snapshots of a happy childhood she wants to get back to. Her life pre-cult was bad. Her mother was a drunk that barely noticed her, and her mother’s string of abusive boyfriends ranged from bad to horrible. Her grandfather committed suicide, sending her grandmother into a mental breakdown. This child could not catch a break. So when Vern brought the rain, he saved her from more than a drought. He gave her years of closeness with a mother who “saw” her. Even though she was only seven when she joined the cult, she knew what she would risk by leaving the cult. Which would make you think the indoctrination of the cult would be impenetrable. But throughout the book we see the girls who come from loving, traditional families are more invested in the cult than Lacey May.

Is the only reason Lacey May able to see through Vern because he drove her mother away? Or is it because her pre-cult life was so horrible that she has a distrust of “good” ingrained in her? She wants to hope, but it’s hard when all she’s known is abandonment and abuse. In the end, I think this POV does an amazing job of showcasing the dissonance of cult members. They want, so desperately, to believe the cult leader even as they start to see cracks in his facade. They need to believe in the cult because they know just how bad life can be without the cult. They hold both concepts: the world is horrible and no one can be trusted alongside if I have enough faith, I can be saved. So often in books, we see a surface-level indoctrination. The cult members are “brainwashed” and so they follow the leader blindly. Godshot shows each of the characters with cracks in their imperfect faith. They have moments of weakness (that the reader sees as strength). Bieker managers to create a complex war inside not only Lacey May, but each character. We see a cult not as a smooth, clear organism, but as a system of constant tension that exists only because of each choice of its members.

Faith: Good, bad, and ugly

From the first chapter, I knew this would be a difficult book for me because of my own faith. Despite what my friends might say, I did not grow up in a cult. My family moved too often for us to root into a congregation. But I did grow up in a strict faith with bible studies five days a week and complete trust that God would guide my life. Until that faith broke. Looking back as a 42-year-old, I wonder if that faith broke because of the men who felt smothering, claiming my life for God, or because of the belief itself.

One of the things I love about this book is that Lacey May gets to keep her faith in God. While her false understandings of Vern as God’s second son fade away, her belief in a higher power — loving, kind, and protecting — only widens. The book is not anti-Christian or anti-faith. It shows how people can twist faith, but it does not make out faith itself to be a negative aspect of Lacey May. It is her faith that gets her through the darkest moments — and not the perverted beliefs Vern has fed her, but her belief in a loving God that she sees in the vastness of the ocean and wideness of the world beyond her crumbling town.

It feels like books often use religious cults as a “big bad” but fail to address faith in and out of the cult. If a religious movement is at the core of a cult, then it makes sense for belief to be one of the core emotions addressed in the book. But most of the books I’ve read only address faith towards the cult leader and cult, failing to address the wider concept of belief that exists in the character. Godshot pulls no punches when it comes to Lacey May’s faith, which just lends more to its richness.

The Fugue of Cults

Gifts of the Spirit is not the only cult Lacey May brushes up against in Godshot. The book felt like a fugue of cultishness blending together. While GotS was the main cult, we see another, mini-cult when Lacey May tracks down her mother in Reno. The situation she finds her mother in is surreal and difficult to parse. It seems the Turquoise Cowboy, who offered to make her mother a movie star, was some sort of paranoid man luring women into his online pornography ring and keeping them compliant through drugs. Despite being a smaller cult, the bunker of the Turquoise Cowboy echoes the GotS perfectly: the women are held to the man through their dream and faith that he is the one who can fulfill it. They do the work of keeping each other in line, and when he is shot, their absolute devotion to him is clear. The echoing of godshot raining down on them (glitter in GotS and plaster in the Turquoise Cowboy’s bunker) is devastatingly beautiful.

But the cults extend beyond that. As Lacey May’s pregnancy progresses, you have the cult of motherhood that she learns about through books and magazines. It’s a cult where women are defined by their role as mother, stripped of their name and called simply Mama. Their worth becomes how well they can sublimate their own identity and perform as Mama.

Then, in the climax when Lacey May is rescued by the police and taken to the hospital, we see a final glimpse of cult: that of society. She is surrounded, once again, by people who know what to do and don’t consider her wants and desires. We see that she is happy to rest in a moment when she doesn’t have to struggle and can let someone else take over. Don’t get me wrong — she’s earned a bit of rest — but it feels too close to the surrender and faith Vern has demanded throughout the entire book. So we get, in fiction, not cult as a specific group, but cult as the exploration of our own autonomy. Where does it begin and end. And how much choice can we actually carry on our own? How much autonomy do we want? Or need.

Surrealism and Possibility

I believe it’s Margret Atwood who says she never writes books about things that aren’t already happening. Or maybe she was just talking about how The Handmaid’s Tale was already playing out in several countries. I feel like Godshot is another of those books. At times, its surrealism feels larger than life. The grandmother who plays with taxidermized rodents and has a bull-penis cane. The meth-head boyfriend who paints lawns neon green. The use of soda instead of water for everything from baptism to drinking. The decay into eating tins of chicken liver as the shops stop stocking food. None of these things is impossible. But they feel surreal. That could never be my life.

Sometimes I feel like writing cults is a game of making cult-life accessible so it feels like it could happen to you. But maybe leaning into the surreal horror of it is the way to go. Maybe we all need to know we’re one drought away from being covered in glitter and smacked with a bull-penis.

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