The Children of the Children

McMillion’s novel chronicles a disturbing cult and the members caught up in its corruption.

As the Iron Curtain begins to fall, opening Eastern Europe to the West, a ragged teenager named Geoffrey “David” Calvert comes to the American embassy in Prague, hoping to gain entry to the United States. David explains that he has lived his entire life in Europe as part of The Fishermen, a well-known Christian cult. After a childhood of abuse and darkness, David hopes to escape to something better. The narrative then shifts to 1969 Austin, Texas, where David’s father, Danny, is a student on the verge of flunking out and getting into some serious trouble for selling pot. By chance—or perhaps divine intervention, as his new friends, The Fishermen, will insist—Danny winds up in San Francisco, learning the teachings of the charismatic Father Joseph. At first, his small group simply distributes Father Joseph’s letters around Haight Ashbury, trying to convert lonely hippies into new cult members. As their numbers grow and their philosophies and hierarchies evolve, The Fishermen move east to avoid scrutiny, eventually branching out all over Western Europe. Father Joseph begins bending rules of sexual conduct to fit his own personal (and abominable) desires and increase revenue via sex work. Danny finds himself in a love triangle with his wife, Martha (the eventual mother of David), and Deborah, a woman growing uncomfortable with the Fishermen’s increasingly disturbing sexual practices. But breaking out of Father Joseph’s psychic clutches is a tall order. As David comes of age and becomes a victim of physical and sexual abuse himself, he sets off on the path that will eventually lead him to Prague as he starts to question Father Joseph as well: “His instinct told him it was wrong, as his faith told him it was not.”

McMillion’s subject and setting are fascinating, and the parallels between the protest energy of the late 1960s and the allure of a cult cut off from mainstream society lend a sharp and smart context to the novel. There are several scary and perfectly succinct explanations of how someone like Danny could get drawn into Father Joseph’s web. (“If deception is the art of convincing someone that what one knows to be false is true, then conversion is convincing him of what neither party can prove one way or the other,” the author writes in a truly standout moment.) However, the novel’s ambitious scope—the narrative spans two decades, a dozen complicated households, and too many countries to even list—overshadows the smaller, more disquieting moments. McMillion tries to pack in as much detail as possible, but this results in large chunks of writing that feel like nonfiction reportage rather than advancements of the engrossing emotional arcs already in place. This is felt most acutely in the various depictions of sexual abuse: Incidents conveyed from the point of view of characters such as Deborah or David are harrowing, while other scenes simply give cold factual accounts of Father Joseph’s horrendous proclivities. After the cult’s complicated history is filled in little by little, readers finally arrive back at the opening framing scene for an emotionally resonant conclusion that nevertheless feels too little and too late following such a dense history lesson.

An intriguing premise gets lost in this novel’s ambitious scope.