Alexandria Faulkenbury’s Somewhere Past the End alternates narration between Alice and her mother Teresa, two women struggling with their understanding of identity, family, and community in a closed religious commune. Teresa and her husband, Tom, were among the first members of the “Collective,” a Christian cult that feels midway between Scientology and the Amish, founded by the charismatic and controlling Brother Richmond. The novel opens with Alice narrating the day Brother Richmond claims the “Homegoing” (rapture) will happen, this, his second Homegoing prediction. Even though Alice is married and in her final trimester of pregnancy, she’s planning to escape the Farm—the grounds where Collective members live. The easiest time to sneak away is while a crowd, including Alice’s parents and husband, waits in a meadow for Brother Richmond to usher them to heaven. She never expects that everyone there will vanish in a flash of light.
After the disappearance, the outside world swarms the Farm. Everyone wants to know where the missing went Everyone except the remaining members of the Collective; some of them believe the Homegoing happened, others don’t know – but all of them accept the mystery with the same lamb-like passivity. Alice’s oldest childhood friend, Edwin, delivers a message from Brother Richmond: A second Homegoing will occur in two months and Edwinand Alice “are to lead the group into the meadow this time.” Alice, conflicted by her faith, rejects this responsibility. More intriguing is why she doesn’t investigate her parents and husband’s disappearance. Alice is able to sever these ties to the Farm, but she still finds new bonds tying her in place, no matter how much she wants to leave.
Like Alice, Teresa’s story also begins as a pregnant teenager. While she and Tom manage to leave behind her Sunday-deacon, weekday-patriarch of a father, they quickly land in financial straits, which makes them easy targets for Rich (not yet Brother Richmond). He finds them in a laundromat without enough money to dry their clothes. So, he hands them, and everyone else there, rolls of quarters. He later wins Teresa and Tom over when explaining that the foundation of his religious belief is in a generous God who wants people to improve each other’s lives.
Rich’s eyes lit up when he spoke. His voice was strong and sure and full of possibility. Listening to him talk made everything else seem dull in comparison. I could tell Tom felt it too, and we leaned in, eager to know more and hoping against hope that maybe we could be a part of that better life as well.
Generosity is easy for Rich, who—in a lovely example of nominative determinism—is rich. That he turns into a manipulative authoritarian once he consolidates his influence is no surprise. Helping the vulnerable in exchange for ever increasing fealty is a classic recruitment technique for religions. By the time Alice is a teenager he offers his followers homes, work, food, and community; in exchange, he controls their movements and punishes disobedience with creative forms of abuse. Naturally nobody raises an objection to Brother Richmond’s will.
His power over the people at the Farm is much more psychological than physical. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch. Why can’t they just walk away? The answer is a great human mystery: Faith. Everyone wants to believe in something. Religion is always there with inspirational stories and sets of rules to live by. Sure, these rules can be warped into exploitative power structures, but this isn’t the first and won’t be the last story (fictional or real) of people acting against their own interests in the name of religious faith. So, the question arises, after sacrificing dignity, ethics, and compassion to support a charismatic leader turned abusive autocrat, what becomes of the faithful who ground their beliefs in love for one another? How much trauma can their belief survive? How much can they survive?
This is Teresa and Alice’s struggle. Teresa’s narrative explores how faith’s influence lingers even after belief has faded. But Alice has to deal with the question in reverse. What happens if faith has dissipated, but then you witness a prophecy seemingly half-fulfilled in miraculous fashion? A new force now confines her to the Farm.
I’m not sure what I’m planning to do now. For months, years, if I’m being honest, I’ve thought of nothing besides leaving this place. Getting away from Brother Richmond […] And now? Brother Richmond is gone. I’m free to do as I like. But I feel as tethered to this place as I’ve ever been. This isn’t what I pictured. I can still leave, but my feet don’t seem to know that.
What’s holding her there is no longer embodied in Brother Richmond, it’s in her mind. To be free, Alice must confront her lost faith and understand what rejecting it means before she can move on. It sounds simple, but this is a psychologically Herculean task.
Teresa and Alice’s stories, while separate, are interwoven tightly and skillfully. Faulkenbury’s stylistic choices support this interconnectivity. For example, because both women narrate their sections, the continuity of the first person “I” telling the stories makes parallels between their struggles more pronounced. But while Alice’s chapters are in the present tense, Teresa’s are in the past. This serves two purposes. The first is practical. Teresa’s story spans decades, while Alice’s is confined to a couple months. Past tense narration can make giant leaps in time easier than the present tense, which brings readers closer to the action, thus making large shifts in time feel unnatural. Present tense narration also makes the protagonist’s future feel uncertain. So while Alice guides us into tomorrow, her mother ruminates on the past. Finally, the alternating narrative tenses support the enigma of the mass disappearance. While Alice is forging ahead into an unknown future, we begin to wonder where Teresa is narrating her story from. Is she speaking from heaven? From a hidden bunker? And who is she speaking to? Alice? A prophet? Anyone who will listen? Wrapped up in the simple past are so many not so simple mysteries.
In Somewhere Past the End we see a mother and daughter who want the best for themselves, their family, and their community. They don’t always succeed. Sometimes they fail horribly. But they keep trying to help others and be true to themselves. Faulkenbury’s clean, graceful prose fills their story with an incredible power and beauty. It’s hard to believe that this is her debut novel. Heaven help us if she ever uses her extraordinary writing skills to the same ends as Brother Richmond. She’ll have us all in her cult before the decade is out!
Reviewed by David Lewis
David Lewis’s reviews and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Barrelhouse, Strange Horizons, The Weird Fiction Review, Ancillary Review of Books, 21st Century Ghost Stories Volume II, The Fish Anthology, Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9, The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, Paris Lit Up and others. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog.