12th-house - reviewed on 5/27/2010 + 11 more book reviews

The phenomenon of satanic ritual is an unfortunate truth that is so widespread, yet so beyond what most of us are willing to consider as possible, that our minds shut down at the mere idea of it. Yet it is something that we must be open to understanding and comprehending. Thousands of children go missing every year. These practices often involve the torture and sacrifice of children and occur in hundreds of towns across the U.S. and elsewhere.

This is a well-written book that attempts to understand the psychology of a small-town satanic cult leader via his day-to-day thoughts and actions, across the decades of his reign. The reader is drawn into the unfortunate routine of this man, and his obligation to provide regular gruesome and perversely stimulating spectacle for his cult members, who themselves routinely offer their own children for sacrificial torture and murder; children who have been cultivated into a dissociative mental state through years of studied mental, physical, and sexual torture techniques since infancy.

His position as leader of these horrific cult activities is portrayed as a simple matter of course, predicated on his own victimization as a child, and his legacy as son of the previous leader of the cult. Hidden by the sheer mundaneness of his outer life and personality, such an apparently 'normal,' even bland, middle-America outer representation of himself and his family is one reason this type of phenomena is so hidden from our awareness.

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