My idea for a Jonestown novel was born in 2004, when my son Isaiah was four years old. Twenty years later – with my son a graduate of Stanford and abroad for graduate study in Paris – Paradise Undone celebrates its first anniversary of publication.
There have been other changes too, things I never imagined doing when this journey began. Despite my aversion to social media and much of the public presence demanded by the business side of being an author, I have become my own PR agent, attending book signings, visiting libraries, participating on podcasts, submitting myself to the mercy of reviewers.
I had finished Paradise Undone in time for the 30-year anniversary of the Jonestown massacre in 2008, and had an enthusiastic NY agent. Publication did not happen, although we came tantalizingly close on two occasions. He finally returned my manuscript, suggesting I try small and university presses that did not require agents. I did so. In 2018, I added an epilogue for the 40-year anniversary. Still no luck.
My agent had tried to place Paradise Undone with 40 top publishers. In the intervening 15 years, I submitted it to hundreds of places. Seventeen times the book was a finalist – all American presses – but repeatedly, despite reaching the top ten, indicating the quality of the writing reached winner status – no one ever selected it for publication.
Until 2022, when a new British publisher asked to read it. A month later, she told me she wanted to publish it. Interestingly, I came to know Cathy Evans, founder of Inkspot Publishing, because she was an administrator of a UK short story contest. My story, “Kenny, Winking,” about the gun death of a 9-year-old boy by his own child-size rifle, won the Chipping Norton Short Story Competition, selected from several hundred submissions.
Not coincidentally, “Kenny, Winking” – based on events my son and I lived through – had been rejected 115 times by American journals, even though it was a finalist eight times. Again, a narrative about a difficult American subject – in this case, gun violence – managed to make it into the top round multiple times, but no American venue actually dared publish it.
I had always thought of Jonestown as an American story, that no publisher outside the United States would be interested in it. Cathy’s acceptance of the novel showed I was wrong: Jonestown was international. Born in South Africa, Cathy lives in the UK, travels to Idaho for work a few times a year, and founded the press with her Dutch-Surinamese partner. As a world citizen, she thinks internationally, so the story of the Peoples Temple was, to her, unbound by geography.
Jonestown is not a unique tale of cults and mass suicide/murder. In the 1990s, in Canada and Switzerland, 53 people were murdered and/or committed suicide under the auspices of the Order of the Solar Temple. In 2023, a few hundred bodies were unearthed in the Shakahola region of eastern Kenya, all members of the Good News International Church. Their charismatic preacher, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, ordered his followers to starve to death to hasten their meeting Jesus. He is now being prosecuted for murder. As in Jonestown, the bodies indicated signs of violence, so the suicide label does not apply to the more than 400 bodies that have been recovered so far.
Interestingly, Mackenzie and Jim Jones were both influenced by American doomsday preacher William Branham, who died in the early 1960s, but whose ideas still circulate in the New Order of the Latter Rain movement. Jones’ relationship with Branham has been documented by John Collins, who has written numerous articles for this site.
Like American gun death tolls, Jonestown fits into a shameful American present and history. In the UK, Jonestown and American gun deaths belong to a foreign country’s backstory. National shame does not apply.
The 45-year anniversary publication date of my book in London coincided with Isaiah’s time in Paris. His sharing the launch of Paradise Undone, after living his whole conscious life under the shadow of this novel, was the best part of its multi-year trajectory. During those two decades, when friends asked about his writer/mother’s current book, he ended up needing to educate his peers about Jonestown, most of whom, born in 1999, had never heard of it. He witnessed me enduring the ordeal of constant rejection but never giving up, and together we celebrated at Owl Books in North London with my publisher amidst a crowd of readers, including an older Guyanese woman who’d walked in off the street, wanting to learn more about her country of origin, which she’d left as an infant.
Later, I came to understand that having a newly founded tiny UK indie press to launch the book meant zero PR in the USA: no pre-publication books sent to American newspapers and journals for review. No reaching out to American literary organizations. The UK newspapers who received Paradise Undone didn’t bite due to the newness of the press.
Once a book arrives, it ages. Shelf-life is maybe a month, if that. Identifying reviewers and lobbying them to take a look at my work, a process I’ve been engaged in since November 2023, is tough. I’ve had about a dozen so far, mostly positive. And I keep finding new podcasts, mostly related to cult education and awareness, which agree to feature me talking about Peoples Temple.
Despite the relative paucity of press, my book is doing comparatively well. In one recent month, it made the top of the Inkspot Publishing list, with eight copies sold!
Yet I’m in it for the long haul, as is my publisher. And yesterday I figured out my next book: a collection of linking short stories about other Jonestown characters, those I couldn’t fit into Paradise Undone. I hope to publish these stories in 2028, on the 50-year anniversary. Maybe this go-round it will actually be a four-year project – I might not survive another twenty years – but I am very excited to be writing again.