Here are 100 books that Slonim Woods 9 fans have personally recommended if you like
Slonim Woods 9.
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Based on events that have happened over the past decade, I am deeply concerned about large swaths of people in society being strongly influenced by cults and/or disinformation. They can ruin lives, destroy relationships, and even destabilize entire societies. This inspired me to look for and discover the five books on this list, which also shaped the writing of my medical thriller centering on a fictional cult spreading medical disinformation.
After reading this book, I found myself looking at cult mentality as something that can exist in many parts of society, not just groups that fit the classic definition of a cult.
I liked how the book explores examples of non-cult groups that still have cultish thinking and behavior to a lesser degree. For example, can your local health club be cultish because of its members' fanaticism that is cult-like? It's something to think about.
The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power.
What makes "cults" so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we're looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join-and more importantly, stay in-extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell's…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
While I love many novels about individuals, there’s something about weird groups of people—for example, cults—that I’ve always been drawn to. The Book of Fred plays with this dynamic by showing the intersection between a doomsday cult, the Fredians, and the quirky liberal community that foster child Mary Fred Anderson finds herself in. What I find fascinating about cults is how appealing they are, how being part of a group has a seductive quality that can so easily go horribly wrong. I love novels and memoirs that show that seductive side while zeroing in on the complications groups pose to individual identity.
Since watching HBO’s The Vow, I’ve been a total NXIVM geek. Scarred is definitely the best book on the subject, providing an insider’s account of the rise and fall of the Albany “sex-cult” from the point of view of a smart, caring, ethical person caught in the middle of something she can’t control.
Though a memoir, this book has the cadence of a novel. It depicts the cult in ways that illuminate its appeal while building to an inevitably disastrous conclusion. I love the way Sarah Edmondson manages to convey a clear sense of why she was drawn to this weird group of people and how they ultimately failed her.
As seen in the HBO docuseries THE VOW: The shocking and subversive memoir of a 12-year-NXIVM-member-turned-whistleblower, and her inspiring true story of abuse, escape, and redemption.
"Master, would you brand me? It would be an honor."
Scarred
follows actress Sarah Edmondson's account of her recruitment into the
NXIVM cult founded by Keith Raniere and the 12 years she spent within
the organization, during which she enrolled over 2,000 members. This book also chronicles her breaking point and her harrowing fight to get out, help others, and heal.
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Sarah Edmondson is a Canadian actress and playwright who has starred in…
I spent 7 years in a commercial cult. I was indoctrinated into, rose to the top of, and finally escaped from a multilevel marketing company. When I started my exit, I wondered how I had become so brainwashed, which led me to do research into coercive control. I started to understand that different types of authoritarian control; behavior, information, thought, and emotional, drove me further into the cult and away from my outside friends and family. I read as many cult books and watched as many documentaries as I could find, and became fascinated with uncovering why people find themselves in the same situation I was in.
Admittedly, I didn't know much about the Amish culture religion prior to reading this book, other than what I saw in Pennsylvania when I lived there, but I was always curious. After reading this book, I started to question the idea of ‘religious freedom’ in our country, that can so shield people who are abusing their freedom by exploiting women and children.
Religion in its worst manifestation can be so damaging, which is so well explained in this book.
Surviving Severe Child Abuse, Sexual Assault and Leaving the Amish Church
In May 2022 Misty Griffin released #invisible, a petition calling on congress to take action and help abused children in religious communities. It is currently gaining momentum and national media attention.
Watch Sins of the Amish on Peacock #1 Best Seller in Cults & Demonism, Parenting & Relationships, Notable People, Religious, Survival, Sexual Assault, and Biographies & Memoirs
A gripping story that takes you on the journey of a child abuse and sexual assault survivor turned activist. (Photo gallery included).
True story of child abuse. When Misty Griffin was…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I spent 7 years in a commercial cult. I was indoctrinated into, rose to the top of, and finally escaped from a multilevel marketing company. When I started my exit, I wondered how I had become so brainwashed, which led me to do research into coercive control. I started to understand that different types of authoritarian control; behavior, information, thought, and emotional, drove me further into the cult and away from my outside friends and family. I read as many cult books and watched as many documentaries as I could find, and became fascinated with uncovering why people find themselves in the same situation I was in.
I went into this book knowing that scientology was a glorified criminal organization, and that belief was confirmed!
This book is an incredible tale of redemption. Mike Rinder doesn’t downplay his own role in Scientology, as he acknowledges that he spread the word for years and influenced many. But when you understand how far Scientologists will go to silence their critics, you begin to understand why people don’t leave, or go missing!
Rinder was the man who “silenced” people, and I can’t imagine a better person to explain the inner workings of the organization that someone who lived it. Couldn’t put it down.
One of the highest-ranking defectors from Scientology exposes the secret inner workings of the powerful organization in this remarkable memoir. __________
'A flamethrower of a read' JOHN SWEENEY
'Candid and deeply felt' LAWRENCE WRIGHT
'Gripping and harrowing' LEAH REMINI
'Extraordinarily powerful' ALEX GIBNEY __________
Mike Rinder's parents began taking him to their local Scientology centre when he was five years old. After high school, he signed a billion-year contract and was admitted into Scientology's elite inner circle, the Sea Organization. Brought to founder L. Ron Hubbard's yacht and promised training in Hubbard's most advanced techniques, Mike was instead put to…
People sometimes say that the purpose of anthropology is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I think the same about history. As these books demonstrate, apparently normal early Americans have complex and unique inner lives, while those who seem bizarre, remote, or august, in fact, have wholly relatable human experiences. I usually write about complicated systems, like insurance and law. But I cherish these books about outcasts, oddballs, and one-of-a-kinds. They remind me that our society comprises individuals whose life experiences, worldviews, and decisions are unique—and ultimately unpredictable. Whenever I write, I try to remember that.
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.
Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz brilliantly recapture the forgotten story of Matthias the Prophet, imbuing their richly researched account with the dramatic force of a novel. In the hands of Johnson and Wilentz, the strange tale of Matthias opens a fascinating window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening--movements that swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of the God of the Jews. His hypnotic personality drew…
I've never been anything but a writer, despite growing up and spending my first 50 years in Alaska. Alaska has been my major topic—what else could it be in that overwhelmingly powerful place?—but it has also been my frustration, because Alaska is a real place that exists in most readers’ minds only as a romantic vision, and they resist any other version. Like the real Eskimos in my book, whose world is melting from climate change as they pump millions of barrels of crude oil from their homeland. The writers I chose are all Alaskans, like me, who tell those stories about the magical, terrifying place that lies behind the Disney version you already know.
Kizzia’s prose and reporting are unequaled, but this dark, Gothic tale is hard to read because of the real-life horror it exposes. The Pilgrim family came to Alaska in 2002, wrapping themselves in fundamentalist Christianity and fighting with the federal government like true pioneers in the wilderness—they became a cause for the right because of how they seemed to fulfill Alaska’s frontier myth. But it turned out the patriarch of the family had created a weird prison of rape and abuse for his uneducated children, which Kizzia was able to get inside with vividly told scenes. And that truth tells us even more about Alaska, which has the worst rate of rape in the nation and a shocking level of child abuse.
Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness—and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch.
When Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family's proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Pilgrim's dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico.…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
For me, history is always about individuals; what they think and believe and how those ideas motivate their actions. By relegating our past to official histories or staid academic tellings we deprive ourselves of the humanity of our shared experiences. As a “popular historian” I use food to tell all the many ways we attempt to “be” American. History is for everyone, and my self-appointed mission is to bring more stories to readers! These recommendations are a few stand-out titles from the hundreds of books that inform my current work on how food and religion converge in America. You’ll have to wait for Holy Food to find out what I’ve discovered.
Writer Adam Morris picks up the mantle of Gilbert Seldes and revisits the exploits and lasting impact of early American New Religious Movements noted in The Stammering Century with more detail and new 20th Century “messiahs.” Morris, unencumbered by academic constraints, allows his active mind to make connections and see what makes men (mostly men) claim the mantle of divine inspiration.
Beautifully written and laser-focused, Morris traces the growth of rogue religionists with an unsparing assessment of the impact they’ve had on American culture.
Mania surrounding messianic prophets has defined the national consciousness since the American Revolution. From Civil War veteran and virulent anticapitalist Cyrus Teed, to the dapper and overlooked civil rights pioneer Father Divine, to even the megalomaniacal Jim Jones, these figures have routinely been dismissed as dangerous and hysterical outliers.
After years of studying these emblematic figures, Adam Morris demonstrates that messiahs are not just a classic trope of our national culture; their visions are essential for understanding American history. As Morris demonstrates, these charismatic, if flawed, would-be prophets sought to expose and ameliorate deep social ills-such as income inequality, gender…
I’ve been reading and writing horror for more than forty years and am prolific in both aspects. Show me a book with a tentacle and I’ll show you my newest purchase.
Release the Kraken! While the tentacles might be more subtle on newer editions of this fine book, the title alone is enough to get it added to my list. This is a classic and the twists and turns in it are stupendous. What hooked me from the beginning was the characters and the story arc, although the plot, setting, and everything else make this a book you cannot miss. A must-read.
Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Kraken is a darkly comic, wildly absurd adventure by author of Perdido Street Station, China Mieville.
Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?
For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature…
I began reading about religion, cults, and “high demand” groups to help me understand the group I was writing about in The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune. In my book, the central question was how could so many smart, highly educated people allow their lives to be taken over by a group of psychotherapists. As a result, it was crucial for me to understand what draws people into new religions and holds them in groups that others may consider extreme or bizarre.
For a theoretical and psychological understanding of the workings of cults, I would strongly recommend the work of Robert Jay Lifton, in particular, his most recent book Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealoutry, which brings together many of his writings over the years on the subject of cults and what he called “totalizing” groups, ones which demand absolute commitment.
Lifton, who wrote about “Nazi Doctors," the Chinese cultural revolution, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which carried out a deadly sarin attack on a Tokyo subway in 1987, grasped that the mechanism of belief and allegiance that bind both political and religious movements are essentially the same.
Lifton worked out eight criteria for thought control that groups commonly used that went from “Milieu Control,” (isolating members and control the information they are exposed to) and “Demand for Purity” (in which the good…
Robert Jay Lifton, the National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual, proposes a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. Exploring the most extreme manifestations of human zealotry, Lifton highlights an array of leaders - from Mao to Hitler to the Japanese apocalyptic cult leader Shoko Asahara to Donald Trump - who have sought the control of human minds and the ownership of reality.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
Locked room thrillers are what I like to read and write best. Out of my four published novels, two include locked rooms. Gatedtakes place in a community with an apocalyptic bunker and Flight 171 takes place on a plane. The characters must face their antagonists head-on because there is no escape. I love that these settings challenge me to dig deep into character and plot inventively. Exposing my characters’ darkest secrets as they face their foes becomes part of the fun. The books I chose for this list all have excellent “locked rooms” and speak to the girl in me who gobbled up Murder on the Orient Expressand became instantly obsessed.
Anyone who knows me well or has read my first two books knows I’m a sucker for a thriller about a cult.Blood and Salt by Kim Liggett is my young adult Midsommardream novel. The main character, Ash Larkin, goes looking for the commune her mother escaped only to find herself physically trapped there by the cornfield (and cult) from hell. As a child I used to play hide and seek in cornfields. This book brought me back to those moments spent listening for my friends, worrying that they wouldn’t find me. Kim’s writing is beautiful and lyrical. I will literally read anything she writes. Besides, she has the coolest author bio ever. She spent the eighties singing backup for rock bands.
Determined to find her mother when she disappears, Ash follows her to Quivara, Kansas, the spiritual commune she escaped long ago. But something sinister and ancient waits among the rustling cornstalks of this village lost to time.
Her mother is nowhere to be found, but Ash is plagued by memories of her ancestor, Katia, which harken back to the town's history of unrequited love, murder, alchemy, and immortality. Charming traditions give way to a string of deaths. And Ash feels herself drawn to Dane, a mysterious, forbidden boy with secrets of his own.
