Rites of Passage |
An Christian cult oriented urban fantasy intrigued me from today’s reading. I wish I understood more, but I’d keep reading to find out what I don’t yet know.
(from Before We Go Blog)
133. MD Presley, Rites of Passage
A teen makes his escape from a cult compound, but not without conflict.
The circumstantial details of this 1st person narrative are what lead for me. It isn’t heavy on voice or characterization (at least not in its opening chapter), but the glimpsed environment of this mysterious compound feels like a character unto itself.
There’s separated boys and girls dorms, guards prowling the compound, watch lights, a Temple, a big dog kennel where our messianic cult leader will make people sleep as punishment.
These are things our narrator MC considers as he makes his way out, and it all seems interesting. Something is happening, and it’s happening in a situation that feels very tense.
But I wonder: what lead our MC to decide to leave? What changed things for him? How did he get here? I know this environment is all bad, but does he? Has he always known? How long has he been here? What’s his story.
I don’t see any of these questions being answered. The story begins in medias res, and it stays there without further character context. Our youth is leaving and an FBI car is waiting to meet him. Why? We don’t get to know yet.
I think this opening has missed a trick in excluding me from this important motivational context. We don’t even get some kind of tantalizing “or so I thought until everything changed” tease. Other than what we are shown, we know almost nothing about our characters.
Our MC has friends of some kind, but we neither meet them nor learn anything about them other than their names and that one of them was supposed to flee with him. She doesn’t show. We don’t know why yet, but hopefully that’s something that comes back.
What we do know, or at least what is alluded to, is that our cult leader is in communion with some kind of angel (so he claims). And it seems like, maybe, just maybe, our MC is sensitive enough to actually sense that this entity is real.
It’s thin, but there are hints that this might be the case. We don’t hear about the entity actually doing anything, and so our MCs moment of terror about its approach feels somewhat incongruous with the what we do learn.
I’m intrigued tho. This isn’t dragging its feet, even if we learn very little of substance beyond the immediate circumstances of chapter 1. The prose is clear and concise.
Our MC runs in a hail of gunfire, and he’s out. What now? The lurking weirdness has me intrigued, as does the psychology of mass abuse. The next chapter starts months later. Where’s this going? I’m in.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209152188-rites-of-passage
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Tom Mock 
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