Book Review: "Those Who Prey" by Jennifer Moffett
“Those Who Prey” by Jennifer Moffett
Synopsis: College life isn’t what Emily expected.
She expected to spend freshman year strolling through the ivy-covered campus with new friends, finally feeling like she belonged. Instead, she walks the campus alone, still not having found her place or her people so far away from home.
But then the Kingdom finds her.
The Kingdom, an exclusive on-campus group, offers everything Emily expected out of college and more: acceptance, friends, a potential boyfriend, and a chance to spend the summer on a mission trip to Italy. But the trip is not what she thought it would be. Emily and the others are stripped of their passports and money. They’re cut off from their families back home. The Kingdom’s practices become increasingly manipulative and dangerous…
And someone ends up dead.
Rating: 4.25
Trigger Warnings: cults, fundamental Christianity, family death, suicide
Review: I had this book on a “Most Anticipated” list last fall, and I finally picked it up yesterday - I can honestly say that I was totally wrong about what to expect with this read, and I’m so glad I was mistaken. Here’s what I wrote then: A psychological thriller about a lost college student who joins a cult and then fights to get out? I am absolutely in. You know I love a good secret society story, and it’s made even better when it’s almost too good to be true, which seems to be the case for poor Emily — and whoever ends up dead.
I think I was expecting something more like “Ninth House” (also a fave around here!), but wow, was I mistaken. This was a nuanced look at how cults recruit and turn their members, told through the perfect candidate: Emily. Emily’s a lonely college freshman living 1000 miles away from her family; her roommate left at mid-year, she’s had familial loss, and she’s…just…all alone. That is, until a cute boy sits down next to her at a coffee shop — next thing you know, she’s in a cult in Italy with no money, no passport, and no way to get home.
Honestly, my heart hurt for Emily, and I really felt like, but for luck and better support systems, we could all be here. Who hasn’t felt lost and vulnerable — and somehow taken advantage of? To be fair, it normally doesn’t result in the death of a friend or an incredibly disturbing cult, but it’s just taking those very normal feelings of growing up a little bit to the extreme. When Josh and Heather “stumble” upon here, she’s uniquely positioned to be taken advantage of by these tactics: she’s alone, she’s feeling lost and shunned by her peer group, and she’s having a bit of a crisis of faith.
A crisis fully exploited by “The Kingdom” — a group that presents itself as an evangelical megachurch with cool sermons and preachers, but is actually the cover for a fundamentalist Christian cult with a tendency to the dark and dangerous. When Emily accepts an invite to church one Sunday, she doesn’t realize that she’ll soon end up in a “guided study” with her recruiter, that turns into a confessional sin list and baptism, and then trapped in a deadly mission trip. We, as the reader, are in Emily’s head, so we’re along for the ride with her - we don’t realize quite how bad it is until it’s too late, and honestly, I too felt a little gaslit by Will and Ben. I knew it wasn’t going to end well (just from the book jacket), but I still really wanted to believe it wasn’t going to escalate the way it did.
Ultimately, this books isn’t what I expected — I was thinking it’d be another cliquey book about accidental teen murder (basically a genre in it’s own right), but instead I got a thoughtful and nuanced look at being lost and found again after personal trauma.
TL;DR: A look about how easy it is to end up in a cult and how hard it is to get out — told through an incredibly sympathetic character, Emily, who I guarantee you’ll just want to give her a giant hug.
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