{"id":139051,"date":"2026-10-23T15:17:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T22:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=139051"},"modified":"2026-11-05T17:05:53","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T01:05:53","slug":"peoples-temple-as-subtext-a-review-of-dark-messiah-a-novel","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=139051","title":{"rendered":"Peoples Temple as Subtext: A Review of Dark Messiah<\/em>, a Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u201cSurvival is messy, unconscionable to anyone who wants a simple explanation of why it happened,\u201d writes Nell, protagonist of Dark Messiah<\/em>, the debut novel by Sara Z. Carson released in November 2026.<\/p>\n

The character of teenaged Nell was inspired by Judy Houston, whose family\u2019s involvement with Peoples Temple led to Congressman Leo Ryan\u2019s decision to visit Jonestown in November 1978. The principal difference between the two young women is that Judy died on the day of the massacre, whereas Nell survives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a lot of information about Judy\u2014about what she hoped for and dreamed of, what she wanted to be, who and what she loved,\u201d Carson writes. \u201cI wanted to give that to her through Nell, my own teenaged protagonist in Dark Messiah<\/em>.\u201d Her essay <\/em>describing how she came to the subject of her first book and her approach to difficult material appears on the crimereads.com<\/a> website.<\/p>\n

Carson \u201crecognizes that Judy Houston and her family did not fit the traditional profile of the rank-and-file members of Peoples Temple. They were white, and they had enough privilege to draw the attention of leadership and media when others could not. Nell inherits that same unearned visibility. I gave her privilege on the page because Judy had a version of it in life, whether either of them asked for it or not.\u201d The writer states she doesn\u2019t want to write about Jim Jones but rather about those who surrounded him, and her Nell, while fictional, is adjacent to the white female, dark-haired and skinny members of the inner circle, though a minor.<\/p>\n

\u201cNell\u2019s privilege gives her access to leadership, to the preferential treatment that some members receive, and she becomes aware, as time passes, of the role that privilege plays in her own experiences and ability to survive,\u201d writes Carson of her protagonist.<\/p>\n

I read Carson\u2019s essay in crimereads.com before I read the novel, and Nell did not remind me in any way of Judy Houston. Rather, she seemed a full fictional character that did not resemble any one individual with whom I was familiar. A fully conceived young woman inhabiting her own bildungsroman is an admirable achievement for a first book.<\/p>\n

Nell is a rich 15-year-old San Francisco teenager when the story begins, mourning the recent death of her only sibling and the subsequent end of her parents\u2019 marriage. Her mother, Faye, is careless and distracted by new boyfriends, leaving Nell to fend for herself in a world of private schools and indifferent relatives. Faye enters the Peoples Temple orbit as a wealthy donor who doesn\u2019t immediately lose her independence and personality to groupthink. But she is happy to allow her remaining daughter to osmose into that world, and Nell ends up living with a couple of insiders and their children \u2013 a family clearly based on Elmer and Deanna Mertle \u2013 who would later defect and become a key component of the Concerned Relatives opposition group. As with the Mertles in real life, Nell\u2019s second family would be killed under mysterious circumstances, with no one ever blamed for their deaths.<\/p>\n

The use of real people, with or without their real names, is part and parcel of the historical fiction writer\u2019s trade. \u201cNell is, of course, fiction. So is the cult she joins, the people she meets, and \u2018Dad,\u2019 the man at the center of it all. Recent years have given me plenty of monstrously behaved men from whom to draw inspiration, from politicians to actors to executives,\u201d Carson wryly adds. In other words, the reader knows Jim Jones and Peoples Temple is always subtext, even if the plot of Dark Messiah<\/em> is not bound by the historical details of Jonestown.<\/p>\n

Readers who have studied the history of Peoples Temple and Jonestown will find much to object to in her portrayal of the characters and events of Jonestown. \u201cThat\u2019s not accurate!\u201d became a familiar refrain in my brain when personalities and actions did not conform to what is known about that period. Still, the long novel compelled me throughout to keep turning pages, the urgency of what I knew would follow tempered by Carson\u2019s choices regarding shaping the material for fictional purposes.<\/p>\n

The author also offers a few insights worth noting, ones that speak to more than observations about cults. \u201cHorror becomes banal once you settle into it,\u201d Nell concludes in the days following a particularly brutal discipline session. And near the book\u2019s end, retrospectively considering her feelings about \u201cDad,\u201d she remarks to herself, \u201cTime has made him too meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n

A final note<\/strong>: An author may or may not be involved with designing her cover. I found the graphic of a crazed young girl whose eyes don\u2019t function properly to be supremely off-putting. The old dictum about not judging a book by its cover is 100% appropriate here.<\/p>\n

[An English professor and director of creative writing for 15 years at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Annie Dawid<\/strong> left full-time teaching for full-time writing in her home in Colorado. <\/em>Her full collection of writings for this site is here<\/a>. She can be reached at annie@anniedawid.com<\/a>. Her website is http:\/\/www.anniedawid.com\/<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u201cSurvival is messy, unconscionable to anyone who wants a simple explanation of why it happened,\u201d writes Nell, protagonist of Dark Messiah, the debut novel by Sara Z. Carson released in November 2026. The character of teenaged Nell was inspired by Judy Houston, whose family\u2019s involvement with Peoples Temple led to Congressman Leo Ryan\u2019s decision to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":138814,"menu_order":28,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-139051","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/139051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139051"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/139051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139232,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/139051\/revisions\/139232"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/138814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}