Pete Hautman, author of Eden West, will read Sunday at the Loft.
One thing Pete Hautman remembers well is the way some schools and libraries balked at putting his 2004 YA novel, 'Godless', on their shelves. The book is about a boy who is raised Catholic but decides he wants to leave the church and start his own religion. That religion, it turns out, involves worshiping the town water tower.
"It's based on a true story," says Hautman, "because I based it on my own experience when I was fifteen." Although there isn't much he'd change if he could write that book over, Hautman does say that he would probably change the name, admitting that even winning the National Book Award didn't quell everyone's concerns over the novel's blasphemous title.
Not one to worry about future backlash, though, he's finished another book in which the story's primary focus is on religion. This time, Eden West follows the life of a boy raised in a doomsday cult. The protagonist has lived most of his life within a remote, fenced off area of Montana, but he begins to question his beliefs when he meets other young people from outside.
Hautman created a fictional religion for the novel, mixing Christian and Mormon beliefs with some of the more bizarre stories of the Aprocrypha. In doing so, he avoided targeting any real world beliefs.
"I didn't want this to be an anti-cult book," says Hautman, noting the high profiles of cults like Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians and the Peoples Temple. "These are the cults we hear about, but there are cults and cult-like groups all over the place and a lot of them are very functional, and some of them have gotten so big we just don't think of them as cults anymore."
"What I wanted to write about was just how a cult mindset interacts with the rest of the world," he adds. His original vision for the cult in Eden West was of a happy, functional cult. He wasn't aiming for a dark story, "but the more time I spent with it, the more it veered away from a happy cult. Things go wrong."
Hautman will read from Eden West along with Bryan Bliss, who will read from his book 'No Parking at the End Times' on Sunday, as part of the Second Story reading series at the Loft.
