Karen’s Killer Book Bench #Historical #Horror #Thriller: DARK MESSIAH, A Novel by Sara Z. Carson

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DARK MESSIAH
Historical Horror Thriller
BY SARA Z. CARSON

Blurb

In 1975 San Francisco, 15-year-old Nell’s world has been ripped apart by her younger sister’s sudden, tragic death and her parents’ subsequent divorce. As her mother desperately reaches out for solace from any quarter—new hobbies, new philosophies, new relationships—a boyfriend leads her into the cult of a charismatic man known as Father. His message of peace and healing proves irresistible, and soon Nell and her mother join his mysterious Church of the People.

As they are drawn increasingly into the vortex of the Church, the community comes to consume their lives, and Nell’s concerns begin to build. She becomes enrolled in the school they operate, is intimidated into adopting their ways of dressing and acting, and is removed from her home.

At the same time, the dangers lurking in the cult’s shadows emerge: threats, physical abuse, and the sudden disappearances of members to Father’s new “utopian” community deep in the jungles of South America. When Nell is secreted there alongside their fellow followers, they come under Father’s power as never before—with horrific and devastating consequences.

By turns sensitive and shocking, powerful and poignant, Dark Messiah is a story of a girl becoming a woman as her life is stolen from her—and a mesmerizing debut from a new voice in contemporary fiction.

DARK MESSIAH
Historical Horror Thriller
BY SARA Z. CARSON

Excerpt

I want to tell you about Dad.

Dad never got sick as a child.

Dad first heard the voice of God when he was seven years old, and immediately started preaching at the Black churches on the other side of town.

Dad was immediately recognized as a prophet among men. Dad’s IQ would be tested at 165, and he taught himself to read, write, and play the piano, divinely inspired by the Lord.

Dad’s ancestors were Geronimo and Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Sitting Bull, making him a leader and a warrior, a violent ruler and a man of peace, capable of all things.

Dad healed sick people, they followed him wherever he went.

They left everything behind to become his disciples.

Dad only needed three hours of sleep every night.

Dad and Mother had a miracle son, who doctors said was never meant to be.

Dad saved a man from being hit by a car on his voyage west. He threw his body over this man and the car somehow passed through them.

Dad believed confronting our weaknesses together was the only way to break ourselves from those weaknesses.

Dad believed the ends justify the means. Dad abided.

In photos, Dad glowed with the presence of the glory of the Lord.

Dad had to wear sunglasses to protect us from the light of God inside of him. He said it was too beautiful for us to see.

Dad tested our faith.

Dad could cure your diseases.

Dad knew why you were weak, and he knew how to free you from weakness.

Dad loved women. All of them, in all ways. Dad loved men. The same way.

Dad loved children. The same way. Dad loved amphetamines.

Dad loved to see the wicked punished. It was righteous. Dad saw the future.

Dad warned us what would happen if we abandoned him. He knew people who left the Temple would die. And they did.

I need you to understand who he was.

I need you to understand why I believed him, and why I gave him everything.

June 1976, San Francisco

Why did you fall for it?

The inevitable first question.

I’ve never found a satisfying answer. Why do any of us fall for anything?

An otherwise normal Sunday in mid-June, and we were up too early at the urging of my mother’s latest boyfriend. David was a lightweight weekend newscaster on KCSF 8, who focused on human interest stories, but Faye was easily charmed.

He was also a lightweight person, desperate to be taken seriously, whose strongest media sources worked at the aquarium and the art museum. Faye was, jarringly, the serious one in the relationship.

Faye’s discontent—born at the wrong time, too late to be settled into herself as the world changed, too soon to be able to embrace any real sense of independence—made the demand that I no longer call her Mom. It was aging and unfashionable.

Early in his relationship with Faye, his almost-fake blue eyes glowing with the fervor of a man who had found the truth, David told her about the Temple of God’s Love Everlasting and Dad, the man we all needed to meet. Dad could help her. He could help me. David had been dispatched to the Temple by 8 Action News Weekend to cover one of his typical treacly tales reserved for the last five minutes of its broadcast, stories meant to assure viewers that, while there were Symbionese Liberators threatening to steal your child around every corner, and some drug-fueled rainbow-colored crew of disaffected ex-SDS members might detonate your office as an act of political terror, and your leaders could be assassinated at random, San Francisco was actually a wonderful place. There were people who rescued cats out of trees, who paid for strangers’ lunches, who willed their fortunes to homeless shelters.

David had gone to the Temple to cover their recently-opened soup kitchen that fed three hundred people a day. He left in an apostolic fervor, talking about this man of heroic compassion, one who spoke the true Gospel.

Dad’s entire existence was an affront to every kind of Christian faith practiced by the establishment—and by almost every evangelical church.

Faye had started attending with David. A few weeks back, Dad laid his hands on her, a gesture which filled her with more than she had lost.

Faye described this as “self-actualizing,” but it wasn’t a good description; the term came from her earlier dalliance with Erhard Seminars Training.

We’d eventually embrace the word “rescued.”

We had stopped going to a Catholic church a year or so before. We used to go every weekend, but the reception cooled not long after a long-haired waiter with rock star aspirations became known for spending the night at our house. Faye was denied the Eucharist and we stopped going.

I guess, to the Church, my unrepentant whore mother was too dirty and sinful to participate in the miracle of the sacrament.

It was a most genteel stoning.

I don’t know when she had started going to the Temple, exactly. When I was home from school on weekends, Faye would leave me with Winnie, our housekeeper, for hours.

I saw Faye begin to take on the glowing eyes, the fervor, the assured placidity of being carried by Dad and the Lord.

Today, it was my turn.

I have tried not to hold Faye responsible for what happened after she was bewitched by Dad, after she brought me to him. If she had any idea what would happen to us, I’m certain she never would have brought us there.

About Author Sara Z. Carson…