Fleeing extremist cult no easy feat in thriller

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This article was published 06/05/2023 (1227 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In her second novel, American-born, Ontario-based writer Blair Hurley offers a creepy page-turner that looks at extremist religious cults in America and the roles of women within them.

The story follows Nora, a hospice nurse living in Chicago who escaped life in a cult in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula about a decade earlier.

As a child, her parents moved her and her twin brother, Henry, away from Chicago to live off the grid as they plan for the impending apocalypse in 2009. As an adult, Nora makes friends with other nurses while taking pride in her work caring for people at their most vulnerable.

She’s open with her friends about her past, which they view as a curiosity and a challenge to help her normalize.

She tries to live what she imagines a “normal life” would be, and even begins dating. Although she can’t relate to many others, she makes a connection with a man named Alder in an online chat room for former cult members.

But eventually Nora’s past catches up to her, and she realizes she’s being watched by unseen cult members.

Hurley alternates chapters between Nora’s new life and her past, cleverly revealing the girl’s secrets as she goes.

The novel begins, chillingly enough, with eight-year-old Nora’s father taking her out hunting to kill and skin her first deer. By this point they had been trained for years how to use a gun. “She needs to know how it’s done,” her father says to her reluctant mother.

In the commune, Nora plays a special role. Her father is the group’s charismatic leader and she has the ability to speak in tongues and prophesize, so she is encouraged to recruit newcomers to their faith.

She one day confesses to her brother that a lot of what she does when prophesizing is “just making it up” — but years later she begins to question if perhaps it was real, as she slowly finds herself being pulled back toward her former life.

Like many cults, there is a backbone of misogyny that runs through her father’s actions. As a child, Nora is rewarded for her theatrical abilities as a voice of God — something her brother was unable to do. But as she has a sexual awakening, she soon finds herself shunned and forced to choose whether to flee or stay for the apocalypse.

Hurley’s previous novel The Devoted also dealt with the struggle to leave religion behind, in this case both Buddhism and Irish Catholicism, so there appears to be a theme running through her work.

Overall, Minor Prophets is a compelling story with an interesting, if not necessarily relatable, protagonist.

Alan MacKenzie is a Winnipeg-based writer. He is usually fascinated by real and fictional stories about cults.