'When her twin brother goes missing in Northern California, Vivian Owens follows his trail to the town of Mount Hookey, home to the followers of Telos: a mountain-worshipping cult that offers spiritual fulfilment to those who seek it.
'While trying to navigate the town’s bizarre inhabitants and the seductive preaching of the initiates of Telos, Vivian will have to confront questions about herself, her family, and everything she thinks she knows about the world. She quickly realises that her search is about far more than her missing brother – it is a quest for the secret of happiness itself.
'To that end, there is only one question she needs to answer: what is really at the top of Mount Hookey?'
The Follower is billed as Welcome to Night Vale meets Twin Peaks, a bizarre tale of a young woman from the UK who travels to the strange little town of Mount Hookey in California to try and find her missing twin brother, who joined one of the odd cults that seem to run the town.
The story follows Vivian, a woman in her early twenties who's travelled to the other side of the world searching for her flaky twin, Jesse. The family had recently faced some personal tragedy when their father died, and as their mother seems to barely have a grasp on reality it's up to Vivian to go searching when her brother disappears after joining the followers of Telos.
Things begin with Vivian arriving in Mount Hookey after being assaulted in a nearby town, where she was knocked unconscious and left with to black eyes. Left without any money, credit cards, her phone, or her passport Vivian has very few options open to her, but chooses to keep on searching for her brother. She discovers that rather than there being one unified Telos cult in the town there are several different factions, who are often at odds with each other, and that Jesse could have been connected to any of them.
Trying to find answers, Vivian gets the cryptic clue that her brother 'went up the mountain', searching for the crystal city of Telos. Travelling up after him she ends up receiving another head injury, and in her muddled haze sees a strange glowing figure. When she manages to return to town she learns that there might be an even bigger mystery going on when she's approached by another family searching for their own missing relative.
The Follower sounded like a book that should have been perfect for me. The creepy and weird franchises it was being compared to are the kind of thing that I really like; and I've always found that a good cult story tends to be a lot of fun for writers to come up with some seriously odd ideas. But despite being compared to some very weird stories The Follower felt pretty mundane for the most part. Perhaps this was my own fault, that I was hoping for something really weird where you're left wondering what the hell it is you've just read; but the book read much more like your standard missing person thriller for the majority of it.
Most of the book focuses on Vivian as she searches around the town, speaking to various members of the Telosians, occasionally chatting to people who're nothing to do with the religion. She hangs up missing posters, and generally looks down at the inhabitants of Mount Hookey as she judges them for their odd beliefs. For the most part this seems to be Vivian's only character trait, and despite following her for the entirety of the narrative I felt that I never really got to know her. There was little to her character other than wanting to find her brother, and we never got to know anything about her; about her personal life, friends, partners, hopes for the future. If anything she seemed like an empty vessel just moving the plot forwards.
The book is written from the third person, and as such we rarely got a glimpse into Vivian's thought and feelings. This lead to me feeling pretty detached from her; which didn't help when she made what I thought were some odd decisions. For example, she begins the book having just been mugged and has none of her money or important personal items with her. She literally has the clothes on her back and a stack of fliers. Instead of getting in contact with her bank of her embassy she just carries on; even though she has no money for food. It's also odd that she's putting up posters with her contact detail on it when her phone's been stolen.
Perhaps some of this is down to the number of head injuries she sustains over the course of the book, being hit in the head or knocked out at least half a dozen times over just a few days. Once of twice would have been one thing, but by the end of the book it was becoming something of a running gag. Sadly, it also leads to what I felt was a pretty disappointing moment when all seems lost, when she's fighting to save her brother and she gets knocked out, only to wake up being told not to worry about it as other people sorted it all out no bother. I ended up feeling a little disappointed that the tension was undermined so quickly afterwards, and Vivian made to seem to helpless.
Like I mentioned earlier, the book was billed on being weird, but never really lived up to this. There are moments as the story progresses when it looks like there is going to be something unusual happening, and there's definitely something otherworldly or explainable that takes place. But the book never tries to explain this, and it becomes a background element that seems unimportant after a short while, despite it being the thing that instigated the entire plot. The characters and the author seem happy enough to walk away from the mystery, from the most exciting part of the narrative, without any real worry; and this led to me feeling incredibly disappointed by the ending.
I'm sorry that this isn't my usual kind of review, that I'm not singing the praises of the book like I normally like to, but I just couldn't connect to the story or the characters. I'll admit that this is probably a me thing, and that other people could find a lot to like in this book. It has some interesting ideas, and whilst the book didn't set my world on fire others might really like it. So if there is anything in what I've said about this book that you think sounds a little interesting, or that you might like you should definitely give it a read to see for yourself. This is, after all, just my opinion, and this could be a book that you absolutely adore.
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