Synopsis:
David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live all with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious cult’s horrific last days at Red Peak, an isolated mountain in California.
Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind them.
When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief.
Why did their families go down such a dark road?
What really happened on that final night?
The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.
Those who can’t outrun the past are doomed to fight it.
Review:
The story is set in 2020 and California is on fire again. Wildfires are raging across the state, and David Young is headed south on Interstate 5, on his way to the funeral of his childhood friend, Emily. She wrote him a note before she took her own life: “I couldn’t fight it anymore.” David has never told his wife, Claire, about his past. He adores their children, Alyssa and Dexter, and has established a rewarding, successful career as an exit counselor. While deprogrammers are usually retained by family members and their goal is to re-train cult members and convince them to abandon their belief systems, exit counseling is voluntary and the interventions David stages are more akin to addiction interventions. His sister, Angela, is a police detective whose anger about the past fuels her.
Whatever drove Emily to suicide possibly was inside them, waiting like a time bomb.
At Emily’s funeral, David is reunited with Deacon Price, a rock musician with dyed black hair and numerous tattoos. And Beth Harris, the only one of the survivors who graduated from college, earning a doctorate in clinical psychology, but she has never married. She’s a successful psychologist, with a practice in Santa Barbara, who is “dedicated to a life of mental surgery to fix her scars.” When they were growing up together, she was in love with Deacon and still may be. He seems interested in rekindling their attraction, but she is unsure if it is a good idea.
The fifteenth anniversary is quickly approaching of the horrific event that David, Deacon, Beth, Emily, and Angela survived. They were the only survivors, and with Emily gone, only the four of them remain.
In 2002, eleven months after 9/11, David’s mother was convinced a war that would kill millions was coming. And they needed to be ready to meet Jesus. So she loaded all of their belongings into a U-Haul trailer and moved with nine-year-old David and Angela from Idaho to the Cummings Valley, near Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield, to join the Family of the Living Spirit, led by the Reverend Jeremiah Peale. She tells her children, “They live a pure life there, simple and close to God. We’re going to live off the land.”
Indeed, the Family of the Living Spirit existed in the wilderness where members erected a cluster of white buildings, one of which was their church. In a narrative commencing in 2002, DiLouie describes David’s arrival and assimilation into the Family. He and Angela meet the other children, and gradually become accustomed to the lifestyle, playing in the vast open spaces, attending the school and church services, and adapting to the rules imposed by Jeremiah, their charismatic and caring leader.
But as time passes, Jeremiah changes. He goes off on pilgrimages by himself and when he returns, delivers new edicts, claiming that he has received messages about how the Family should function. In 2005, he leaves Shepherd Wright in charge while he is away to “investigate an important spiritual matter” and is not pleased when he returns and discovers that “new ordinances” have been enacted. He reports that he went to Red Peak, the Mountain of the Great Spirit on the western side of Death Valley, where God told him, “Deliver your tribe unto me!” So the Family migrates to Red Peak where living conditions are much worse, and Jeremiah leads them into hard labor, starvation, trance states that facilitate mind control, and unspeakable acts culminating with one horrific tragedy that destroyed the Family of the Living Spirit — with the exception of five traumatized children.
In the present-day, DiLouie compassionately explores the pain-wracked lives of David, Deacon, Beth, and Emily. They were rescued from Red Peak and provided treatment. But they carry with them the atrocities they witnessed as Jeremiah descended further into madness and his flock obeyed his crazed directives. Each of them suffers from survivor’s guilt, questioning why they did not meet the same fate as the other members of the Family, and struggles to make sense of their history and present circumstances. To develop each character, DiLouie says he defined their individual personality traits and then worked to “show how their dominant childhood trait is now taken to the limit as a crutch in adulthood. This trait and their response to what happened to them form their character arc, their professions, and the choice they make at the end of the novel when the mystery is revealed.” For example, “David was easily scared as a child and so he’d often hide from what scared him; as an adult, he’s now a cult exit counselor — he helps people escape — and he emotionally shuts down when confronted by stress, which costs him meaningful relationships and may cost him his marriage.”
Something supernatural, defying scientific explanation, took place at Red Peak on that unforgettable day. Deacon believes that wholeheartedly, David copes by living in a state of busyness and denial, and Beth chalks it up to a “glitch of mental perception.” As the anniversary approaches, Beth proposes that they return to Red Peak to see if any memories resurface. “Confront the source of our trauma, clarify our memory in safety, and put it behind us forever.” She is convinced that no matter what happens at Red Peak, she will “come home a new woman, strong and complete and wanting nothing.” Deacon immediately agrees, but David is hesitant, noting that when Emily committed suicide he experienced the first panic attack he’d suffered in many years. But he is convinced when Beth explains that exposure therapy is an effective way to treat post-traumatic stress disorder — returning to a place that is frightening under conditions that permit the patient to safely confront his/her fears. Angela had already returned to Red Peak numerous times in search of clues and in a quest for justice, convinced that the Family was duped.
DiLouie illustrates the quartet’s pilgrimage to Red Peak in search of answers and relief from years of torment. Emily had been investigating, and learned that events similar to the one in 2005 had happened before. Could it happen again? Each of them has a theory, but they are determined to find answers . . . and peace. DiLouie proves himself a master of suspense, horror, and science fiction as the story races toward its shocking and explosive conclusion.
The Children of Red Peak is both an insightful, tender exploration of the psyches of five damaged people who, after experiencing unimaginable events, strive to carry on and make meaningful lives for themselves. It is also an inventive, clever study in horror and the powers of the supernatural. DiLouie says his inspiration for the story was a reading of Genesis and the story of Abraham. God commands Abraham to offer his only son, Isaac, as an offering but stops him from killing Isaac at the last second. DiLouie observes that many “people view this story as a wonderful testament about faith and obedience. Me, I wondered: What would the story sound like if it was told from Isaac’s point of view?” Cults are, of course, fascinating from psychological and sociological perspectives, but DiLouie wanted to tell a story “through the lens of a religious group that is insular but relatively content, and how it logically slides into horror after its leader comes back from a trip and basically says, ‘I talked to God, he’s waiting for us at a mountain, we’re going to Heaven, and we’ll be tested when we get there’ They’re of course going to go, and if the tests are horrifying, they can’t be bad if they are from God.”
DiLouie says his goal was to create a story readers would find “emotional and captivating.” He has succeeded. The Children of Red Peak is heart-wrenching and nightmare-inducingly terrifying. Parts of the story are extremely upsetting and difficult to read, but it is also fascinating, thought-provoking, and a powerful exploration of the meaning and limits of faith, how we respond to and overcome trauma, and the resilience of the human spirit.
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