Paul Brooke
Bio: Paul Brooke holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is a professor of English at Grand View University. He is the author of six books including Light and Matter, Meditations on Egrets, Sirens and Seriemas, Arm Wrestling at the Iowa State Fair, Jaguars of the Northern Pantanal and The Skáld and the Drukkin Tröllaukin. Brooke was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, won the Iowa Prize for Poetry, was awarded three residencies (one in Iceland) and received an Iowa Artist Fellowship. His writing has been published in The North American Review, The Antioch Review, Scientific American, among many others.
Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult by Kyle McCord
Reviewed by Paul Brooke
Kyle McCord’s debut novel, Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult, hints at Lawrence Buell’s work in Writing for an Endangered World, then of Joan Anderson Ashford’s Ecocritical Theology. But McCord’s work was neither neopastoral nor was the theology metaphorically tied to ecocriticism (like Silko in Almanac of the Dead), instead the narrative was an allegory of the wanton destruction of the natural world with a main character, Tom Duncan, who served as both protagonist and antagonist.
Tom Duncan (aka Ohio) was both follower and leader, victim and controller. After a Netflix documentary, Tom was blamed for the suicide of 137 followers. His daughter decided that he was no longer allowed to see his granddaughter, Terra, because of the public outcry. Of course, Terra’s name, the meaning for “Earth,” was essential to unraveling the ecocritical allegory as his actions have left Tom’s daughter no choice in making this decision as she feared for her own safety and her daughter’s. “Look at all you lost by letting yourselves drift from the gravity of this planet, from me” (139).
While in the cult, all of the members were given new names, based on rivers: Tom Duncan was Ohio, Lisa Duncan was Allegheny, Elise Hernandez was Rio Grande, etc. Leonard Fairbanks’ name, Rain, was the only one not associated with rivers, but it filled the rivers as he was the spiritual leader. And even Rain knew the impending doom of the planet: “Plastic in our waterways…increasing CO2, and spiritual decay and deadness in our churches” (107).
The cult followed the Pure Hydrology principle that supposedly kept members safe from diseases from the outside world. Despite following this principle, Rain gave direction to taint the Good Weather water supply with a variety of drugs, which eventually led to death of many of his followers via sharpened bean hooks (thus symbolizing the destruction of the earth based on farming).
Most cult members disassociated and blindly followed their leader into oblivion, into death. In the Netflix documentary, the place where they killed is compared to the bleak landscape of Chernobyl (114). The cult members were aware of the impending doom of the planet, including Alle (Tom’s wife, Lisa Duncan), who said, “You see, our planet is facing unprecedented level of pollution, both spiritual and physical” (69).
To escape this nihilism, there only seemed one answer: death.
By the end of the novel, however, there was recovery and a reclamation of self for many of the survivors. Thames recognized that: “Don’t you see that these are all signs? The black-eyed susans, the thunderstorm. I can go home now” (149). Don Burlington, the director of Netflix series on the cult, realized that “Nature is reclaiming Shine or Rain [place of the suicide] in a hundred different ways” (139). Tom (no longer Ohio) recognized that there was some healing for him in the form of letters left behind by the cult members who died. It gave him solace and a tangible handhold for recovery.
The allegory of the novel was an abject lesson about abandoning our responsibilities to the earth and following a leader to our own deaths. It extends naturally to our current political climate and the delegitimatizing of science and the rise of fanaticism amongst some religious groups. We must think for ourselves and ground ourselves in the natural world, not allow ourselves to be bullied or manipulated into the wrong way of thinking or being.
McCord deftly handled the world of the cult and created a memorable allegory that refocused our attention on the plight of the planet through characters starting to see reality for themselves. The reader is left breathless by the end of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult wondering will the rest of humanity wake up to the pending ecological collapse, our own ritual suicide.
Tom Duncan (aka Ohio) was both follower and leader, victim and controller. After a Netflix documentary, Tom was blamed for the suicide of 137 followers. His daughter decided that he was no longer allowed to see his granddaughter, Terra, because of the public outcry. Of course, Terra’s name, the meaning for “Earth,” was essential to unraveling the ecocritical allegory as his actions have left Tom’s daughter no choice in making this decision as she feared for her own safety and her daughter’s. “Look at all you lost by letting yourselves drift from the gravity of this planet, from me” (139).
While in the cult, all of the members were given new names, based on rivers: Tom Duncan was Ohio, Lisa Duncan was Allegheny, Elise Hernandez was Rio Grande, etc. Leonard Fairbanks’ name, Rain, was the only one not associated with rivers, but it filled the rivers as he was the spiritual leader. And even Rain knew the impending doom of the planet: “Plastic in our waterways…increasing CO2, and spiritual decay and deadness in our churches” (107).
The cult followed the Pure Hydrology principle that supposedly kept members safe from diseases from the outside world. Despite following this principle, Rain gave direction to taint the Good Weather water supply with a variety of drugs, which eventually led to death of many of his followers via sharpened bean hooks (thus symbolizing the destruction of the earth based on farming).
Most cult members disassociated and blindly followed their leader into oblivion, into death. In the Netflix documentary, the place where they killed is compared to the bleak landscape of Chernobyl (114). The cult members were aware of the impending doom of the planet, including Alle (Tom’s wife, Lisa Duncan), who said, “You see, our planet is facing unprecedented level of pollution, both spiritual and physical” (69).
To escape this nihilism, there only seemed one answer: death.
By the end of the novel, however, there was recovery and a reclamation of self for many of the survivors. Thames recognized that: “Don’t you see that these are all signs? The black-eyed susans, the thunderstorm. I can go home now” (149). Don Burlington, the director of Netflix series on the cult, realized that “Nature is reclaiming Shine or Rain [place of the suicide] in a hundred different ways” (139). Tom (no longer Ohio) recognized that there was some healing for him in the form of letters left behind by the cult members who died. It gave him solace and a tangible handhold for recovery.
The allegory of the novel was an abject lesson about abandoning our responsibilities to the earth and following a leader to our own deaths. It extends naturally to our current political climate and the delegitimatizing of science and the rise of fanaticism amongst some religious groups. We must think for ourselves and ground ourselves in the natural world, not allow ourselves to be bullied or manipulated into the wrong way of thinking or being.
McCord deftly handled the world of the cult and created a memorable allegory that refocused our attention on the plight of the planet through characters starting to see reality for themselves. The reader is left breathless by the end of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult wondering will the rest of humanity wake up to the pending ecological collapse, our own ritual suicide.
