Books like Cult Girls

David Berg was a sexual offender who preyed on children. One of these children is responsible for writing the book Born Into the Children of God. The story of Natacha is riveting and physically painful, and it aptly illustrates the resiliency that children must possess in order to triumph over a number of traumatic experiences. This book raises awareness about the harms that are done to children who are raised in religious communities that are insular and fundamentalist.

Because I am familiar with the challenges of putting one's thoughts on paper about traumatic experiences from their youth, this book had a profound effect on me. This book is one that I would recommend to others due to the multifaceted insight it provides into the process by which child molesters in cults groom adults to the point of convincing them to take part in the abuse of their own children.

The very first time I got my hands on this book, I read it in its entirety. It was the visuals that drew me in. It was almost as though the novel that inspired the Hulu series and the pages of the graphic novel were one and the same thing. It is one of the items in my book collection that I cherish the most.

When my teenaged granddaughter picked up this book, she also read it in a single sitting. While I was milling about the house, I looked in the living room and saw that she was completely absorbed in its pages. This graphic novel tells an engrossing story, and whether you are a collector of all things GN or enjoy reading graphic novels, adding this book to your collection is an absolute necessity.

I had the privilege of spending some time with Dr. Lalich, and during that time I found her to be witty, funny, and extremely interested in the experiences of children who were raised in cults. As someone who grew up in a cult, I am grateful that she spent the time to concentrate on the children, as they are the ones who almost always fare the worst. This book chronicles the lives of several people who were raised under the sway of repressive religions. I am honored to be one of those people.

Dr. Lalich conducted the first in-depth study of its kind, conducting interviews with sixty-five individuals who were either born into or raised in thirty-nine distinct cultic groups spread across more than a dozen countries. Many of these individuals eventually made the decision to leave the cultic lifestyle on their own, which is something that is very unique… show more.

In this novel, which is set in the late 1970s, the protagonist, Celena, is abducted by two extremist women who are members of the Synanon cult. She would later find out that one of those women was her mother, whom she had not seen for more than two years at the time of the kidnapping. The culture of Synanon was one of abuse and deviation. This book packs a punch, and its story is an important one in the ongoing battle against cults that recruit parents to give over their children under the guise of improving their quality of life.

The accounts of survivors of the troubled teen industry are extremely upsetting due to the cultic practices of the industry, which include shunning, abuse, the use of forced labor, sexual assault, and more. It is essential to place a hold on this book because it provides one of the most… show more.

It begins with Vern, a Black, Albino teen escaping from Cainland, the cult compound she’s raised in, and giving birth (to twins!) alone in the woods. A refuge for Black American activists in the 1950s, Cainland became a religious stronghold controlled by Reverend Sherman, Vern’s much older husband.

Vern begins to question the anti-queer propaganda, the oppression of girls and women and unearths treachery beneath the compound’s revolutionary surface. Plus her body is changing, growing stronger, monstrous, becoming something altogether new. Hauntings—full-scale hallucinations, or so she thinks—chip away at her sanity and sense of self. Vern is all fight, but must learn to trust, connect, possibly even love or depend on others in order to survive unimaginable hardships, while raising her infants on the land.

A fever dream of alien transformation, as anti-authoritarian as can be imagined, and a truly original queer BIPOC love song, Solomon has written a trippy,… show more.

Although this book is ostensibly set in the future, countercultural enthusiasts of the sixties were quick to claim it for their own, with its references to transcendental enlightenment, out-of-body experiences, communal living, and free sex.

It became a best-selling phenomenon as contemporary young people reacted positively to its iconoclastic attitudes. That's what happened to me, too, when I came across the book shortly before the move to the Bay Area that opened my eyes to the reality of the psychedelic sixties.

I came to this one after watching and loving the television version and found the book even more fulfilling (although very different). It focuses on what happens when millions of people suddenly disappear from the world’s population and it looks not only at how people deal with this massive loss but also how they deal with the mystery of it, the not knowing why. People don’t only lose loved ones in this book but also their own sense of how the world should work, leaving them with a lot to deal with. I loved the characters, the tight focus on one community (and mostly one family within that community), and I loved how Perrotta made such a wild possibility seem entirely plausible.

New York in the 1830s was a modern city on the make, where you could find Irish immigrant neighborhoods, white-collar workers, fire insurance, social reformers...and the bizarre religious cult of the Prophet Matthias.

I find Matthias reactionary and creepy, but I am fascinated by how he sees modern life through a dark mirror. His loathing of the rising middle-class world was so specific! He hated new-fangled cast-iron stoves, "women who do not keep at home," and "men who wear spectacles." Johnson and Wilentz refuse to spell out all the lessons of this book; instead, they dump you into a strange environment where the most unsettling moments are actually the ones when something suddenly feels familiar.

The story follows Jack and Elizabeth who meet when they are young, struggling artists in Chicago and moves into their midlife years where their marriage strains amid parenting, the wellness culture, polyamory, and a yearning for their ‘best lives’.

What I found most intriguing first was the great writing, but also the contrast between pre-digital life and the way our immediate environment shapes our self-perception, and in that, the ways we relate to each other.

As someone who personally knows this author, I can say with absolute certainty that this is one of the best go-to books for anyone interested in cult structure and the dynamics of cult involvement. If you’ve ever been perplexed by how someone could possibly get involved in not just a religion-based cult, but also a politics-based cult, then this is the volume for you. It’s intriguing, as well as informative.