cahn | Revelator (Gregory)

4/5 - A lush, gorgeously written folk-horror book written in two time periods (in alternating chapters) which follow Stella, the main character. The first time period is the 1930's, where Stella is a child being left with her grandmother Motty, and she gradually becomes more and more immersed in her family's cult of the God of the Mountain. The second time period is Stella in the 50's or 60's, as a grown woman who has left her family behind, after what appear to be some traumatic experiences, and is now a successful professional bootlegger.

This is one of those books where I feel like I don't want to say any more about it for fear of ruining the book. It is a horror book, so be warned that there's some rather disturbing imagery, but in the end I felt it all came across less as horrific than as elegiac, perhaps, or tragic. I also thought Gregory did a masterful job of pushing through just enough information that I was able to see about half the plot coming (the half that he intended me to see), and had no idea about the other half, which I just really really admire. And the number of things that didn't quite make sense that made sense after I read the whole book was... really neat.

I also really adored Gregory's construction of the cult of the God of the Mountain, the way that the additional "scriptures" are understood, and how the members of it blithely consider everything they do as totally consistent with mainstream Christianity (it is... not really consistent with mainstream Christianity).

scioscribe made a comment on

rachelmanija's post (scroll down the tag, I wanted to give it to you without spoilers) about how it was sort of an amendment/addition to Christianity, and I realized that a lot of what felt so real to me is that it rang very true to my experience with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (Members of my church will insist to you until the cows come home that they are absolutely Christians, which is true in the sense that we believe in Christ and the Bible [as far as it is translated correctly], but there's um a lot... more there, and a lot of assertions that it all makes total sense and is all totally Biblically/religiously justified, with a similar feel to Gregory's characters' assertions.) I was utterly unsurprised, looking up Gregory's bio, that he had lived in SLC for a while.

The ending is ambiguous, but could be read as hopeful depending on your viewpoint. (I read it as hopeful). But I really want to know what happens next now!!

Gosh, this was such a good book!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rachelmanija

Ahh, thanks for the lovely writeup. This book is so great!

I also read the ending as hopeful. But I want to know what happens next!

From:

cahn

I really loved this book, thank you for posting about it and also poking me to read it! :D (Sometimes it takes several nudges!)

From:

snickfic

That comparison between the cult and the LDS is such a great point! I was really fascinated by the cult and how, like you say, they considered it entirely compatible with Christianity. I would have liked the book to go into more detail than it did about the religious psychology of that.

And I'm interested that you found the ending hopeful. It felt to me like a classic horror stinger moment, the DUH DUH DUH revelation.

I came away most of all wanting to know a lot more about Motty. I felt like her characterization got richer and more complex with each reveal. No wonder she had such a complicated relationship with Stella!

From:

cahn

Haha, it's kind of funny -- because I kinda grew up like that (and also had enough exposure to mainstream Christianity that I knew what that was like as well) I was all "yup, makes total sense," and i didn't really need it to go into any more detail -- but I could see someone who didn't live it needing more detail!

It was definitely a DUH DUH DUH revelation! But I loved the bit where they say they forgive Stella -- I realize one could take it in a really creepy way but I feel like given all of Stella's extremely conflicting feelings about everything, that was something she needed to hear.

Yessss gosh what was it like to be Motty!!

From:

cenozoicsynapsid

I loved this book and would never have found it on my own, so thanks! It reminded me a bit of the John the Balladeer stories, but other than that, I rarely see well-handled Appalachian settings in genre fiction. I'd love to see more of that (but I couldn't write it myself...).

The book actually made the same comparison you did (Rayburn tells Stella that she sounds "like Joseph Smith, but prettier"), and I was wondering what you thought of that angle before coming back here to reread what you wrote.

From:

cahn

I am so glad you liked this! Same here, I adored this book and I would never have found it if it weren't for

rachelmanija! And yes, I feel like this book came out of a deep well for him particularly in terms of the setting, and one could tell.

Have you read Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries? Not genre fiction (mystery stories, published 1918), so it's not what you were asking for (I can't think of another example in genre fiction), and it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't know how it holds up, but it came to mind when reading your comment :)

The book actually made the same comparison you did (Rayburn tells Stella that she sounds "like Joseph Smith, but prettier"), and I was wondering what you thought of that angle

Yes! I registered that "like Joseph Smith, but prettier" comparison and then forgot about it until reading the comment noted in the post, and I'm glad it reminded me. I feel like we're enough of a minority as a religion that whenever there's a reference to something from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints in a book (and as opposed to e.g. Study in Scarlet where the whole plot is based on it), even if it's just a glancing reference, it's meant to signal the reader that there's authorial familiarity there (and might therefore be themes). (I'm thinking right now of the throwaway detail of Ender's mother being a Mormon in Ender's Game.)

From:

cenozoicsynapsid

I read a few of the Uncle Abner stories this afternoon, and I can't say they remind me much of Revelator, or of John the Balladeer, either. One difference is that the stories have a smugness about them that reminds me of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, if you've read those. Another is that I think Uncle Abner comes from the Piedmont country, not up in the hills...

I think Appalachian Gothic (Frazier's Nightwoods, say) is quite different from Southern Gothic. Uncle Abner comes from rich planting land with big plantations worked by Black slaves; he's one of the local aristocrats, which is why he feels entitled to try to solve everyone's problems. Southern Gothic tends to take its cue from Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor in approaching these fearsome, bloody-handed Puritan patriarchs with an attitude of contrition and humility. There's always an awareness that the Uncle Abners of the country owned, traded and raped other human beings, that this act of colossal arrogance destroyed them along with all the good they did, and that their descendants have to deal with the fallout. The hill country was always poor, hardscrabble and independent. There was never much real prosperity--- I think it was pretty much a smooth transition between subsistence farming and low-paying labor in the mines.

I didn't even realize that Ender's mother was a Mormon. I read Ender's Game as a teenager, before I'd known very many LDS people, and these details must have sailed right over my head, as dog-whistles are meant to. (Heck, I read most of Children of Earth without realizing it was a Book of Mormon retelling, which is roughly like reading Narnia and not getting the Christian subtext. But I don't think I read Nephi till I was in college.)

From:

cahn

Ha -- I reread a few of them also, to remind myself of what they were like, and thought, "wooooow,

cenozoicsynapid may never trust my recs again, and additionally is going to wonder why I was comparing these to Revelator at all..." And also I think I mixed up the John the Balladeer stories with something else I can't place right now -- I found one online to read, and I don't think I've actually read them before! Sadly, used copies seem to be going for quite a premium right now. The Uncle Abner stories did remind me of Father Brown in this read-through, yes. I will say that I like both the Uncle Abner and Father Brown stories, but the liking is based largely on them belonging to another period of my life where I was both a much less critical reader and more fascinated by Christian apologetics -- Father Brown was, unsurprisingly, my gateway drug to Chesterton's apologetics. Anyway! Apologies, and next time I feel tempted to rec something I last read in the 90's, I'll reread whatever-it-is first before saying anything...

Yeah, Ender's mother being a Mormon was the kind of thing that I think only LDS people noticed. And speaking of the 90's, I don't suppose most people at the time, before the internet was really so much a thing, knew that the Homecoming series was Book of Mormon SPACE! AU, although it was definitely something all Card's LDS readers knew; as you know now, it was not subtle if you knew the story! (I got laughed at for not twigging until halfway through the first book, because all my LDS friends who read it knew from almost the beginning.) ngl, I still love that he made the Holy Ghost a sentient computer :) And the Alvin Maker series started out as a magic!AU of Joseph Smith, which it took me even longer to figure out, only it has gotten more and more bizarrely AU in later books. Stopping the Homecoming series at five books was a good decision.

Oh, that's interesting that you read Nephi! how did you come to do that? (I should certainly never have read it had it not been religiously mandated! And now I try to read the Book of Mormon as little as possible, though that has more now to do with complex faith issues than anything else.)

From:

cenozoicsynapsid

Haha, no worries about the Abner stories. They're short and an interesting read in some ways, even if they're not actually all that good.

I never had the John the Balladeer stories in a bound book. https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Manly%20Wade_Wellman.html has a whole lot of them. If you've never read one, try "Nine Yards of Other Cloth", which has a twist ending I think you'll enjoy.

I've always been interested in religion, and I think I had a Mark Twain phase as well--- Twain tears into the Book of Mormon terribly in "Roughing It", which might have made me wonder if it was the way he said it was. ("The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.") Nowadays, I know some current and some former LDS people quite well and have learned a bit more about church doctrines and folklore than I ever thought I would know. One thing is that I was pronouncing all the names wrong. Knowing some Hebrew and some Latin, I had some natural guesses about the stress and vowel sounds. I think I sat down and laughed for five minutes straight the first time I heard a Mormon say "Urim and Thummim" out loud.

From:

cahn

Ahhhh thank you, I will look at that!

Hmm, perhaps I shouldn't ask you if you agree with Twain ;)

One thing is that I was pronouncing all the names wrong. Knowing some Hebrew and some Latin, I had some natural guesses about the stress and vowel sounds. I think I sat down and laughed for five minutes straight the first time I heard a Mormon say "Urim and Thummim" out loud.

*blinks*
On the other side of this, it had never occurred to me before today that of course there is another way to pronounce "Urim and Thummim," since it was a term taken from the Hebrew Bible! Oh wow. I know something about (choir) Latin pronunciation but only a very very little about Hebrew pronunciation, but even that was enough that I had a pretty good guess, even before I looked it up on google, why you were laughing so hard.