Trigger warning for murder and mass suicide.
Tom Duncan is not supposed to be alive. He was supposed to die along with his co-religionists in the Good Weather cult two years before Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult, by Kyle McCord. And because he’s alive when he shouldn’t be, almost everyone he meets has suspicions about how Tom managed to survive. This novel is a heart-wrenching story of survivor’s guilt and a mystery centered on the day when 137 people, drugged out of their minds on hallucinogens, killed each other.
When we meet Tom, we find him as he’s struggling to live some kind of life with his daughter and granddaughter. After an incident at a local park, Tom’s daughter tells him that he’s too dangerous to be around—not because of what he might do but because of hostility from anyone who saw the documentary on Good Weather and its terrifying end. Tom has nowhere else to go. He has no job. He has no other family. But he does have an invitation to a reunion with two former members of Good Weather and the son of a man who died with the cult in the town near where the cult had its camp/farm.
The plot of Reunion really starts to get going when Tom meets up with his fellow cult members. The two former members are an interesting study in opposites. Rio was kicked out because she couldn’t follow the dictates of an increasingly dangerous leader. Thames was a true believer; she still is. She was sent away after admitting feelings for the cult leader. Tom falls somewhere between the two. He’s not a true believer but he isn’t ready to throw away the good parts of Good Weather: the camaraderie, the self-sufficiency, the harmony with nature, and especially the memory of his wife. The two days Tom spends with Rio, Thames, and Bryce (whose father was one of the 137) lead to the revelation of long-held secrets and catharsis.
I struggled with this book but not because of its content. I struggled because there are occasional jarring word choices (a character “flags off” blame instead of waving it off) that annoyed me. I strongly dislike when someone uses the wrong word. I also thought that the dialogue was unnatural. Very few of the characters talked like ordinary people do. They were weirdly eloquent, with allusions and vocabularies I would expect of humanities faculty. I also thought that the mystery elements steered the book too far away from a very interesting premise about the power of faith and survivor’s guilt. Reunion isn’t a bad book; it just stumbles here and there.