{"id":5528,"date":"2026-08-20T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T01:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5528"},"modified":"2026-09-03T13:56:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T13:56:34","slug":"dark-messiah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5528","title":{"rendered":"Dark Messiah"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><strong>Book of the Week August 20, 2026<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>How smart people can allow themselves to be lured into a cult and the evils that charismatic men can convince followers to accept are laid bare on the pages of Carson\u2019s psychedelically violent debut, set in the mid 1970s. Faye Sterling is embarrassed to come from big-time money, and when a religious leader known as Dad to his followers offers her the chance at authenticity by joining his group, she jumps at it. Her neglect and fervor force her teenage daughter, Nell, our narrator, from San Francisco to a supposed utopian compound in South America. The Jim Jones parallels are obvious and all too accurate. Dad, \u201ca combination of Revered King, Angela Davis, and Albert Einstein,\u201d just cares so much that he violently abuses his followers, even children, so that they can improve their behavior. Behind closed doors, his sex with Nell and other young women \u201chelps them to detach from the shame that they feel in their bodies.\u201d These abuses, and verbal viciousness including Dad\u2019s repeated use of the n-word, are very much on the page, creating a feeling of hurtling toward disaster. Outside forces loom large in the end\u2014some real, such as Nell\u2019s actual father\u2019s desperation to get her out, some exaggerated by Dad, including his news about the scary, threatening outside world. <strong>An absorbing, shocking first from Carson.<\/strong><em>\u2014Henrietta Thornton<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book of the Week August 20, 2026 How smart people can allow themselves to be lured into a cult and the evils that charismatic men can convince followers to accept&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5527,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[163,180,54,52,51],"class_list":["post-5528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-book-of-the-week","tag-debut","tag-historical","tag-psychological","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Dark-400x400.jpeg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Dark.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}