This post was originally published on Audible.com.
Hi, I'm Kat, and if there’s a cult documentary out there, I’ve probably seen it. Over the past few years, we've seen a shift in true stories about cults—not only from the journalists and authors who investigate them but also in the many first-person accounts and memoirs from survivors who (barely) escaped them. If you think you’re too smart or well-adjusted to ever be sucked into one yourself, the hard-won insights and warnings revealed in these stories just might surprise you. This selection of memoirs and nonfiction includes everything from famous cults and textbook red flags (charismatic leaders✔️ doomsday prophecies✔️ cutting followers off from family and friends✔️) to cult-adjacent fringe religions and even brands inspiring cultish devotion. Here are 20 of the best cult stories to hear now.
What makes cults so intriguing? Are the people who join them somehow easier to brainwash than the rest of us, or could more of us be at risk than we think? And what exactly is a cult, anyway? We tend to throw the word around willy-nilly, whether we're talking about Heaven's Gate or a viral beauty product, and Cultish explains how they're connected: language. In this revealing and riveting audiobook, bestselling author and Sounds Like a Cult cohost Amanda Montell argues that cults are more of a spectrum than you think and analyzes how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power.
Still Learning is India Oxenberg’s intimate first-person account of how she was lured into and, seven years later, escaped from the NXIVM cult, DOS. As the secret sorority within NXIVM's vast Ponzi network, DOS was created by Keith Raniere and his acolytes to serve as a source of "slaves" to Keith and the other “masters.” Read by the author, Still Learning goes beyond the sordid headlines to reveal a more familiar conundrum—a young adult trying to discover who she is, going dangerously off track but, ultimately, surviving.
Musician and Airborne Toxic Event front man Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults, the Church of Synanon, and subjected to a childhood marked by poverty, addiction, emotional abuse, and trauma. Yet, as recounted in his searing self-read memoir, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice, punctuated by original music, that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer and artist.
Jeff Guinn's The Road to Jonestown is hailed as the definitive book on self-styled preacher Jim Jones, his Peoples Temple following, and eventually the Jonestown Massacre, the largest murder-suicide in American history. Drawing on thousands of pages of FBI files on the case and original interviews with key sources and survivors, this fascinating listen is narrated by veteran performer George Newbern.
In her Audie-nominated memoir, Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige, tells her story in her own words and voice. Raised as a Scientologist, Miscavige Hill eventually left the controversial religion in 2005 and is now a prominent critic of Scientology who helps others break free of its grip. In Beyond Belief, she shares her experience of life inside the sect's upper ranks and "Sea Org" ministry as well as her ultimate escape. Candid and clear-eyed, Miscavige Hill's memoir is a fascinating listen for anyone interested in the beliefs and rituals of the secretive group that has captured the fascination of millions.
The basis for the acclaimed Paramount Network miniseries starring Michael Shannon and Taylor Kitsch, Waco is a stirring first-person account of the siege by David Thibodeau, one of only four Branch Davidians to survive the infamous 1993 FBI raid on the compound and not wind up in jail. Thibodeau was a drummer in a local rock band when he first met the man who called himself David Koresh. Detailing his journey from staunch non-believer to devout follower, Thibodeau explores why so many people came to believe Koresh was divinely inspired, introduces the men, women, and children of Mt. Carmel, and gives a brutally honest assessment of a cataclysmic event in American history.
Jerry Walker's lively memoir details growing up with blind African American parents in a segregated doomsday cult. The central tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames. While terrifying to Jerry, the promises of the church reassured his parents, who took comfort in the afterlife—even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and sending tithes that contributed to more than $80 million in annual revenue at the church's height. When Armstrong's prophecies failed to materialize, Walker begins to imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.
This moving self-narrated memoir tells of the author's experience growing up in a fundamentalist, separatist Christian cult, a branch of the Exclusive Brethren. Rebecca Stott both adored and feared her father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking minister in the Brighton, England-based sect. A man of contradictions, he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, which was ruled by Satan, yet kept a radio in the trunk of his car and read Shakespeare and Yeats. In the Days of Rain is Rebecca's attempt to make sense of her father and tumultuous childhood and to eventually find a kind of peace.
Another deeply affecting author-read memoir, The Story of Gravel is the story of Ruth Wariner, who grew up as one of 42 children in a community in rural Mexico. In a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity, Wariner learned at church that God would punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only reach heaven by entering polygamous marriages and having as many children as possible. When her father, the colony's founding prophet, is murdered, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth between Mexico and the United States, where she begins to doubt her family's beliefs and struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to forge a better life for herself.
Journalist Tom O'Neill's Chaos is one of the best and battiest cult investigations I've ever heard. Like many people, O'Neill got interested in the Manson murders, in which seven people in Los Angeles (including then-pregnant actress Sharon Tate) were brutally killed by the young followers of a trippy ex-con named Charles Manson. Unlike most people, O'Neill remained transfixed for more than two decades by the story of the Manson Family, whose tentacles seemed to creep toward ever-more explosive revelations in American history. Chaos follows O'Neill's obsessive research into the case's many alternate theories, and with Kevin Stillwell's riveting narration, you'll willingly fall down every last rabbit hole, no matter how dark and deep.
Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised by high-ranking members of The Children of God, a religious cult also known as The Family. Beholden to its strict rules, Daniella suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and was forbidden from getting a traditional education. At 15, she made a bold escape to Texas, enrolling herself in high school and later becoming valedictorian of her college class. But when she joins the military as an intelligence officer, she soon learns that her new world—surrounded by men on the sands of Afghanistan—looks chillingly similar to the one she desperately tried to leave behind. Told and read in her own voice, Uncultured is a testament to how women often contort themselves to survive.
This riveting first-person account of a secret Manhattan society simply called School was written by a former member, Spencer Schneider. Recruited into the group in the '80s, Schneider stayed for more than 23 years as his life disintegrated and he and his fellow members lined the pockets of sociopathic leader Sharon Gans. Narrated by Austin Rising, Schneider's story of how hundreds of well-educated and prosperous New Yorkers became fervent followers of a demented cult leader is a cautionary tale, and its insights into group psychology and radicalization are all too relevant in today's atmosphere of conspiracy and disinformation.
The basis of an acclaimed FX limited series, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism from Jon Krakauer takes listeners inside America’s polygamous Mormon Fundamentalist communities. Narrated by its bestselling author, Under the Banner of Heaven begins with a chilling account of a double murder that rocked a 1980s Mormon community in Salt Lake City. Perpetrated by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who said they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl, the crime sets off a riveting investigation of messianic delusion and unyielding faith. Along the way, Krakauer uncovers a shadowy offshoot of a fast-growing religion and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
Pulitzer Prize winner Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr penned this terrifying portrait of life inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, a secretive evangelical cult founded in 1979 by a fiery preacher named Jane Whaley. Based on hundreds of interviews, secretly recorded conversations, and thousands of pages of documents, Broken Faith explores how Whaley's charismatic style enabled her to wield absolute control over her followers and chronicles the harrowing account of one family who finally escaped after two decades in the cult's clutches.
La Luz del Mundo has been called the world’s largest cult that no one has ever heard of. Sochil Martin grew up inside it. As a girl, she was taught that the world beyond La Luz del Mundo was dangerous and hell bound, and that serving the cult’s divine leader, the “Apostle,” was the only path to eternal salvation. As Sochil got older, “serving” the Apostle got darker and darker, and when against all odds she found love with an outsider, she resolved to seek justice for the “Apostle’s” alleged crimes. The Darkness of the World is the incredible true story of surviving La Luz del Mundo and blowing the whistle on its criminal “Apostle.”
