I just finished listening to The Faceless Thing We Adore by Hester Steel. While I loved the narration by Amy Scanlon, it’s probably a book I should have read instead of listened to just because the writing was so gorgeous that I sometimes allowed myself to get lost in a moment, forgot to pause, then had to rewind. I absolutely would read it again and would recommend it to anyone wanting a unique take on cult lit with a cosmic horror bent.

As usual, tons of spoilers, so read this after you’ve read the book.

POV: The Initiate and the God

The point of view character in The Faceless Thing We Adore goes on a huge journey of transformation. She starts as a woman stuck in a dead-end job and abused by her deadbeat boyfriend. She then becomes an initiate to a cult, willing to do anything to prove herself worthy of being part of a group that seems filled with love and acceptance. In the end, she melds with the god, and the final part of the book is told from battling points of view as the god and the girl learn how to take up space in the same body/universe.

There is a beautiful juxtaposition throughout the book of Aoife being both the least powerful and most powerful character at all times. In the first scenes, Aoife is shown as a powerless waitress with an asshole boss. But beneath that understanding of herself, there’s also her power over the mail and access to the back room of the establishment. Now, I’m not saying she can do anything because society and the need to work and live, but she has access to power that she doesn’t realize. Similarly, she has power over her boyfriend (paying his bills). When she gets to the island, she immediately has power over the original family — and Sage and Jonah recognize it. She has a direct connection to their god and is something to be carefully controlled, lest she recognize and use her power to oust the men from their positions of authority.

As the book progresses we learn Aoife’s direct connection with the god is that she is actually the god. With the end twist being that everyone is. The god is a void that is their pain: rage and grief.

I wouldn’t call TFTWA a dual POV book. It clearly follows Aoife, breaking into the god’s POV only when Aoife dissolves into the god. So, even in those moments, it is still Aoife. Instead, the structure of the book shows the metamorphosis of the main character so deeply that, in the end, her voice becomes a completely different character — Aoife was always a god, she just had to tap into her rage at the injustices she suffered. I’ll admit that I don’t love revenge stories. Maybe there’s something broken in me, but I don’t get the satisfaction many women seem to get when the main character offs her oppressor. There’s a certain humanity lost in that action, and I tend to grieve for the main character even more when they become evil. This books definitely had aspects of the revenge tale, and maybe it tipped too far into it for my taste in the final two chapters, but there was a lot of complexity around Aoife and the Homestead — what it means to be human and to suffer and what the risks of shedding that suffering entail. To write a story from the POV of a god is… well, it’s a task I wouldn’t take on. And Steel did an amazing job of it.

Real gods vs. the evil of false prophets

I picked up this book because I asked for recommendations about “good cults”. I wanted to see a book that mirrors the serial killer trend of the sympathetic, heroic serial killer. I was curious if cult literature had moved that far in the circle of exploration of evil. After reading the book, I have a difficult time accepting the Homestead as a “good cult.” It had all the trappings of a “bad cult”:

• The charismatic leader who perverts the core beliefs for his own needs. Usually the prophet’s needs are clearly skeazy. He (almost always a he) wants power and control. He wants sex and money. Jonah felt like a more complex representation of a cult leader. In the end, he was a power-hungry man, and in the beginning he was overly charismatic. Classic cult leader. But in the middle, he was a grieving father. We get that his push towards the cave was his grief at losing his daughter. Throughout the book I was able to hold both sympathy and disgust for him, which was rare.
  I think novels rarely have time to delve into the backstory of the cult leader because the cult needs to be up and running to power tension in a book. Getting to the moment of perversion gave TFTWA layers of complexity that made the book — chewy. Humanizing the cult leader gave the book substance. Of course, at the end we lean into the corrupt prophet concept, but knowing that the corruption is borne of love and grief somehow hits harder than just having a senselessly power-hungry man.
• Members afraid to express their true desires. Ironic, because the god fed off of their pleasure. But there were several times the members wanted to leave or had doubts, and they were not allowed to act on their feelings for fear of retribution from the cult leader or other cult members. Here is the definition of a cult. If we didn’t have that tension, would it still be a cult? Or would it simply be a commune, living an idyllic life on an island? Can a commune exist without devolving into a cult?
• The distortion of a belief system. Almost all cults are built around a kernel of truth. Many of them have years where they hold to that truth and actually serve the members. But then, inevitably, there is a distortion or perversion of the belief system. In TFTWA, the roots of that perversion are in the founding moments of the cult — the members believe in a benevolent god whereas Jonah and the founding family know the god is borne from grief and loss.

So it is the definition of a cult. I loved the meta moment in the book when Craig collects Aoife from the Homestead and tells her there’s only one way things can end, and she KNOWS he’s right. She sees the horror and destruction, too. And she chooses to go back. Because, maybe, the definition of a cult contains the concept of ending in horror.

But the saving grace of the homestead was that the god was real. Their belief system was true, which made the brutal killings and cannibalism somehow less tragic. Perhaps because they could be undone? Or because they were done in service to a higher power that actually exists? I’m not sure. I still had a hard time stomaching the cult as “good” as it imprisoned its members and tore apart anyone who resisted. But as long as that is driven by a god and not a human, it’s acceptable, right? Except THOSE things weren’t driven by the god. They were the grief of Jonah taking form. They were senseless acts. So you have Jonah perverting the religion — running an actual cult — and then you have the saving grace, that the god was real. Ironic?

Through the middle of the book, when Craig arrived and until the end, I had a fun time double-reading the book. What if everything Aoife was experiencing really was a drug-induced haze. What if there was no god? Just people on a beach descending into madness? Reading the book that way makes it absolutely tragic and, at times I could barely hold the grief I felt for these made-up people who just wanted a little bit of goodness in the world. But I don’t think that’s how the book is meant to be read. I do think we are supposed to see the god as a real cosmic entity. We are supposed to explore the concepts of “good” and “evil” as they relate to a cosmic being that is beyond the pettiness of good and evil — which is a trip in itself.

TFTWA had me questioning my faith. Actually, many of the books in this series do. Every time I read a book that is about people who want to believe in something bigger than humanity, I find myself questioning my own desires to do so. It wakens a cauterized section of my spirituality I hadn’t realized I’d been neglecting. Belief is difficult. Even more so when most faith is co-opted by men who desire power. But maybe — just maybe — there is something worth believing in?

Social Acceptance vs. Self Acceptance

Perhaps the most powerful concept that cult books can explore is the concept of social acceptance. So far, my two favorites have been TFTWA and The Girls. What they have in common is that they feature main characters who are floating through a world without social connection, looking for acceptance. For me, that’s the entirety of a cult: a group of people who offer meaning through acceptance. A community in a world that has been stripped of community. Of course, reading this made me realize there is a completely separate issue of a higher purpose that I had been lumping into social acceptance. But, I still think the powerhouse of the cult story is one of “finding home.”

TFTWA managed to explore the concept of social acceptance in opposition to self acceptance without treading of hokey. From the beginning of the book, Aoife is accepted into the homestead. She is shown love and appreciation that she has not experienced before. The biggest villain separating her from her community is the voice in her own head saying that she can do nothing right and that these people can’t possibly love and accept her. For Aoife, that voice is an echo of Craig and her mother telling her she’s worthless and can do nothing right, which brings the story into a bittersweet examination of emotional abuse. But even if we had stripped out that layer, the voice could have realistically remained. Because we all have a voice saying we don’t belong. That we are unworthy of love and community. Or maybe that’s just me projecting. But I do think that there’s been a social move towards isolation in the past fifty years that amplifies that voice in us. Not only are communities difficult to find, but when we do find one, we’re paralyzed with a feeling that we don’t deserve community. Perhaps because it’s something we’ve never seen, making it something that’s difficult to trust.

Of course there are people in the cult who do not love her: Sage, Jonah, Oscar, and Julia have reservations about her because she’s disrupting the balance of their cult. Which showcases how community isn’t about being adored by everyone. Your community may have thorns in it, but it shouldn’t diminish the love and acceptance of your core group. But for Aoife, it did. She needed to be adored by everyone. Why? Because to have no resistance was the only way she could silence the voice in her.

Her power came when she snapped and let go of her years of self-doubt, studded into her by abuse. She was cleansed by her rage. But in the end, her power came from her own self acceptance. That whatever she does is just that — what she does. It is not right or wrong or good or evil. It just is. Now, I’m not arguing that we should all live in a state of complete self-acceptance, unbound by the concept of harm. But I do think that in order to inoculate ourselves from the perversion of our beliefs, the best thing we can do is to be kind to ourselves. Accept ourselves and the community will come. Or is that too hokey of a takeaway?

I WANT that to be the takeaway. So much so that I could see myself falling into my own cult on a beach, worshipping an all-destroying cave.

The Horror of Butterflies

The final thing I wanted to comment on was the absolute horror of butterflies this book brought up for me. I have two friends who raise butterflies and it just happens to be butterfly season. They are posting their voracious caterpillars and the spinning cocoons. They are discussing the blight that killed off one of their kaleidoscopes. Every year I look forward to this discussion and the pictures they post. But this year I am a bit horrified. TFTWA is about, above all, metamorphosis. It is the pain of change. The complete dissolution of self and the construction of something new. But the butterfly scene in the book, when Aoife is on the beach, drugged and in crisis from having learned she just consumed one of her friends, is absolutely tragic. I’ve never thought of the creation of a butterfly as quite so messy, painful, and horrific. It was always a scientific concept. Dry and clinical, when in real life it is anything but. I’m not sure I will ever look at butterflies the same way again, and I think that’s the mark of a great book.

Title	Author	Year Published	Genre	Type of Cult	Status
The Shadow Over Innsmouth	H.P. Lovecraft	1936
Jamaica Inn	Daphne du Maurier	1936
Jesus Song	R.R. Knudson	1974
Blinded by the Light	Robin F. Brancato	1978
The Cult	Max Ehrlich	1978
Geek Love	Katherine Dunn	1989			Need to Re-read
Vineland	Thomas Pynchon	1990
Mao II	Don DeLillo	1991
Survivor	Chuck Palahniuk	1999
The Stepford Wives	Ira Levin	2002
The Year of the Flood	Margaret Atwood	2003	Dystopian	Climate Cult	Read
The Chosen One	Carol Lynch Williams	2009
The Girls	Emma Cline	2016	literary	personality	Read
The Devil’s Daughter	Katee Robert	2017	Thriller/Romance	non-christian religious (Persephone)	Read
The Family	Marissa Kennerson	2014
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly	Stephanie Oakes	2015
Seed	Lisa Heathfield	2015
Mr. Splitfoot	Samantha Hunt	2016
Gather The Daughters	Jennie Melamed	2017
Bunny	Mona Awad	2019	cosmic horror	magic	Read
Godshot	Chelsea Bieker	2020	literary	religious	Read
The Project	Courtney Summers	2021
The Night We Burned	S.F. Kosa	2021	Psychological Thriller	commune (spiritual)	Read
Black Sheep	Rachel Harrison	2023
Mister Magic	Kiersten White	2023	Cosmic horror	vague	Read
The Faceless Thing We Adore	Hester Steel	2025	Cosmic Horror	pagan	Read