Review: Don't Follow Its Lead
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 6, 2014
With a lot of trimming and some judicious rewriting, Dale Roberts' "The Following" could make an excellent article about the psychology that cults employ to gain followers. Unfortunately, the book isn't a treatise on cults but a thriller novel, and large portions of the remainder of the book are either ridiculously convoluted or just plain ridiculous.Tyson Palmer, the hero of "The Following," is a relatively inexperienced reporter who seems to have stumbled upon a major story. A cult called Pathlight has been operating successfully in Palmer's relatively small Florida hometown, and any relatives of cult members who try to poke their noses into the cult's business wind up dying in "accidental" fires. The police won't even consider the possibility of foul play, so Palmer takes it upon himself to investigate Pathlight by pretending to join.The middle third of the relatively short book details Roberts' indoctrination by the cult. This section is both grippingly realistic as a description of cult activities (Roberts has obviously done his homework regarding how cults operate) and completely unrealistic as a portrayal of the behavior of a supposedly intelligent reporter. Of course, Pathlight doesn't advertise itself as a cult. Instead, it runs advertisements in the local newspaper inviting people who are troubled by the direction in which their life is going to help "find their path." To go undercover, Palmer shows up at a cult orientation session held at a local hotel and relates a fictional story of his life to date and why he is dissatisfied.One would think that an intelligent reporter who attends a session such as this, knowing that Pathlight is a cult trying to indoctrinate him and having been warned by an earlier victim of the tactics Pathlight employs, would do some research before attending an orientation meeting to get a better feel for the cult's tactics and would, in any event, be less susceptible to the tactics the cult employs than those attending the meeting in the actual hope of finding their path. One would be wrong. Palmer falls for Pathlight's blandishments hook, line, and sinker, and after only three evenings of orientation is ready to chuck his entire life away to join them.Even at this point, I might have been able to go along with this unlikely plot development if the book had followed through on that premise. A book about a man under the grip of psychological manipulation trying to come to his senses could be a good thriller. Sadly, Roberts apparently didn't think such a story was thrilling enough. Instead, the last third of "The Following" completely disintegrates in a rapid sequence of plot twists and new developments. From one chapter to the next, and sometimes from one paragraph to the next, characters' loyalties and motivations seem to change, so that Palmer (along with most of the readers of the book) has no idea who is actually a good guy and who is a dangerous killer. Roberts' writing quickly becomes confused and muddled and much of this section seems to have been made up by the author as he went along. To make matters even worse, not only does Roberts completely befuddle much of his readership, but he winds up boring them as well by continually manipulating the characters to make them seem more mysterious.As a novel, specifically a thriller, "The Following" is pretty much of a mess that gets less believable and more confusing the farther it goes. It's actually the worst type of mess, a book that has a good idea for a plot, some solid research, and a description of cult psychology that's easily understandable and rather scary to believe. Despite this, Roberts soon squanders all the book has going for it, losing readers even before he gets finished with his description of the cult, and completely befuddling them well before the book is over. The end result is a book that readers will be considerably better off not following.