The Follower
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Twin Peaks meets Welcome to Night Vale in this surreal, supernatural thriller by a Costa-shortlisted author
"Gripping, compelling and otherworldly"
- DAVID QUANTICK
When her twin brother goes missing in Northern California, Vivian Owens follows his trail to the town of Mount Hookey, home to the followers of Telos: a mountain-worshipping cult that offers spiritual fulfilment to those who seek it.
While trying to navigate the town's bizarre inhabitants and the seductive preaching of the initiates of Telos, Vivian will have to confront questions about herself, her family, and everything she thinks she knows about the world. She quickly realises that her search is about far more than her missing brother – it is a quest for the secret of happiness itself.
To that end, there is only one question she needs to answer: what is really at the top of Mount Hookey?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Londoner Vivian Owens, the protagonist of this mildly chilling thriller from Bowling (Song of the Far Isles), travels to Mount Hookey, Calif., to search for her twin, Jesse, who's been missing for a month and a half. Three years earlier, when the troubled Jesse turned 22, he signed up for online seminars offered by the House of Telos, "a school of spiritual education that promised to purge the Western capitalist mind of its ills and bring it within touching distance of the One Cosmic Spirit." Jesse's significant payments to that institution yielded an invitation to study in-person at its center in Mount Hookey, which he accepted. In Mount Hookey, Vivian encounters creepy and eccentric characters who only provide cryptic comments that Jesse's energy means that "the mountain" won't let him go. Vivian persists, even as she's unsure whether Telos is a massive scam or a genuine source of meaning for its adherents. The characterizations and prose are nothing special, and the familiar plot builds to a predictable ending. Others have handled this overused story line better.
