I’m about halfway through The Faceless Thing We Adore by Hester Steel, so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on the book at all, but I’ve been having thoughts over the last few weeks, and I have a feeling this book will require two posts anyway. So I thought I’d get a head start.
First, I love this book’s language. I absolute drown in it, and I can easily say it’s my favorite line-level book. While I appreciated the line-level craft in Godshot, it offered a more cerebral satisfaction. The Faceless Thing We Adore feels more like a pining love letter — the voice of my seventeen-year-old self who couldn’t help but obsess over every breath of wind that hit my skin, and I’m here for it. It is a perfect book for the combination of nostalgia and awakening that hits me every spring.
Women In Cult Books
This is yet another book that stars a female protagonist, and I realize my list of books to read contains perhaps two books that feature a male protagonist. I think I’ve written about this before, but I am once again struck by how much our society defines cult by the femininity of its members. My favorite theory of why this is rests with Amanda Montell, the author of Cultish and is so simple that, once stated, you can’t unsee it: cults mirror the power structure they come from. Which, for western cults, means old white guy at the top, a group of young white women beneath him, and everyone else at the bottom.
This got me thinking about Inside the Manosphere — a Netflix documentary with Louis Theroux about online communities that blend incel, PUA (Pick Up Artist), MRA (Men’s Rights Activists), and MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) ideology. The communities created in this sphere can easily be considered cultish. They feature a male leader who demands loyalty (and payments in the form of cash and sexual content) and often exist because that man offers a “path to salvation” to his followers. Follow his plan, and you’ll be an “alpha” (while conveniently sidestepping the obvious point that if everyone is an alpha, the hierarchy that creates “alphaness” crumbles). But this time I was looking at the women in the documentary. Women surround the leaders, giving him legitimacy and taking a bit of social currency from him that launches their own “mini-cult”. In other words, it is the exact same structure as most other cults and society at large. While that is a tangent, I am definitely itching to read some male-centered cult books. I’d especially like to find one that features the manosphere — though I highly doubt it would be called a cult book.
If anyone has recommendations on that, please leave a comment or connect with me through social media. I’m super curious. The one I found so far is:
- Hermit by Chris McQueer
I thought it would be hard for me to read a male-centric book anymore because I “rarely read books with male protagonists”. But that’s not actually true. Several of the books in my series on serial killers featured men. Which makes me come back to the idea that cults have a significantly female tilt in the social imagination. Part of that is probably because the acceptable way to write about cults is from the perspective of the victim — and the “perfect victim” is almost always a woman or, very occasionally, a teenage boy — which is something to pick apart on its own. But to today’s point, I can’t think of a book told from the POV of the cult leader. Perhaps Geek Love is the closest? I really need to re-read it. It’s not from Arty’s POV, but it gets close/sympathetic to his POV at times, doesn’t it? Maybe Fight Club? I wonder if there will ever be a surge in books that feature the cult leader as protagonist, similar to the surge in the serial killer protagonists. It would be interesting, for sure.
Sympathy for the Cult
I am specifically reading The Faceless Thing We Adore on the recommendation that it posits cults in a sympathetic light. I was looking for the cult trope’s answer to the rise of the sympathetic, vigilante serial killer. At about halfway through, I am not sure if I see it. Aoife loves the cult she has found. Despite the creeping rot and missing girl, she’s swept up in, for lack of a better word, adoration. In the first quarter of the book, we see an elaborate deception acted out by the cult members in which Aoife is constantly lied to, told half truths, and ultimately stripped of her autonomy. The choice to join the cult was not really a choice.
It feels like the book smooths over the deceit and power-dynamics by Aoife realizing she wants what the cult chose for her, and their deceit is more palatable because she was drawn to them in the first place. There is a theme of prior consent given as her will is slowly eroded. Then, the community really is a paradise after she joins. I am definitely interested to see where the book goes in the second half, but at the moment I feel very little sympathy for the cult. I do think the only way we can achieve sympathy for a cult is by making their movement real. By having an actual god on the island, some of the responsibility of the cult members is dissolved. After all, they are under a compulsion to act the way they do. In other words — the only way to have a sympathetic big bad is to have an even bigger bad that they are at odds with. In this book, it doesn’t quite feel like they are at odds with the god. They willingly worship it. And what’s so bad about worshiping a god? I think that may become one of the main transgressive questions this novel will ask.
That being said, in almost every chapter I am reminded of my younger days with the Burning Man crowd. Weekends at the beach. Holidays wrapped up together. The way we re-created society. Is Burning Man cultish? Perhaps. But it felt good to be part of that cult, and I don’t feel like I lost anything in those years. If anything, I miss them and wish I could return to a community like that.
