Minor Prophets

March 20, 2023
Hurley (The Devoted) delivers a harrowing story of extremist Christian survivalists in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Eight-year-old Nora Delaney and her twin brother are abused and exploited by their father, Francis, leader of a militant cult, in the early 2000s. After Nora begins speaking in tongues, Francis uses her to recruit newcomers, and her alleged prophecies during nighttime “spell circles”encourage a false sense of love and community among the followers. These sessions also camouflage Nora’s fear, rage, and loneliness, the reasons for which are revealed later. By 19, having been abandoned by their mother, Nora escapes to Chicago where she works as a hospice nurse and makes friends who introduce her to a sense of joy and happiness that she never knew existed. All of that is threatened with the arrival of an anonymous letter warning her to “PREPARE YOURSELF” for Pentecost 2017, which triggers visions of the apocalypse. The story is told through long sequences of flashbacks rendered in convincing biblical intonation, culminating in a major twist that reveals what happened on the day Nora defected, as well as the depth of the manipulation she endured in her childhood. Readers will have a tough time turning away from this chilling dive into fanaticism.

April 1, 2023
Hurley probes the complexities of religious extremism, fraught family relationships, and the legacies of abuse in her subtle but engrossing second novel. Nora is a hospice nurse struggling to come to terms with life outside the apocalyptic Christian cult in which she was raised. The cult leader, Nora's father, teaches that "once the sin is in you, it only ever goes deeper," and the relationship between faith and fear is arguably the core of the novel, which Hurley explores with deep empathy. The combination of a declining economy and increasingly volatile political milieu leads a group of disaffected people to come together to search for a better life. Hurley writes that the "plagues" of the contemporary U.S. are "amorphous and baffling: job losses, opioids, deaths of despair"--and shows how these systemic failures can be used to manipulate desperate people. Nora speaks in tongues to the growing cult, foreseeing the end of the world and promising that by following her father, they'll be led to salvation. When the group relocates to the remote wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Hurley captures the area's harsh natural beauty in glorious prose, providing the reader some respite in a novel with very few points of light. The visceral descriptions of the cult's survival techniques--hunting, boiling pine needles for protein, making herbal treatments for beaten women--draw the reader into the dark, insular world hidden among the trees. Hurley's writing is beguiling, working analogously to the rhetoric of the cult. Even as the reader witnesses the manipulations, lies, and performances, it's clear how familiarity, family, and isolation work to draw lost souls in. Nora's eventual escape, her life in Chicago, and battle to stay away from the remaining cult members speak to the ways trauma haunts people. By paying specific attention to the misogyny Nora experiences during and after her time in the cult, Hurley exposes the violence done to women as ubiquitous--and categorically not limited to secular society. This is a deeply intimate novel, capturing what is in essence a survivor's tale. A remarkable exploration of what it is to believe, to lose, and to start again.

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