Cult: A Novel of Brainwashing and Death

Cult is the Warren Adler novel that almost everyone overlooks because he is so closely identified with The War of the Roses. It came out in 1986, when the cult-panic books were everywhere, and Adler's contribution is a domestic thriller built around a Manhattan couple whose adult daughter has joined a religious group called The Servants of God. The mother hires a deprogrammer. The plot unspools from there.

What Adler does better than most of his contemporaries is treat the daughter as a person rather than a symbol of national anxiety. The cult chapters, in which she finds genuine meaning before things curdle, are the strongest in the book. The deprogramming sequence is harder to read now than it was probably intended, knowing what the deprogramming industry actually got up to.

The novel is uneven (some of the secondary characters are thin) but the central premise has been kept honest. Three stars. Recommended to readers interested in 80s domestic thrillers as a sociology of their decade.