Spiraling Toward Armageddon

J. Todd Scott, The Flock: A Thriller

One snowy late-fall morning in rural Colorado, three armed intruders invade Sarah Brannen’s home, shoot her husband, and kidnap her daughter. But Sarah Brannen isn’t Sarah Brannen; she’s really Sybilla “Billie” Laure, the only survivor of a Branch Davidian-style cult mass suicide. And the intruders are True Believers, convinced Billie and her daughter are the Messiah. Now Billie must travel across the country before desperate cultists literally crucify her daughter.

Former federal agent J. Todd Scott’s fifth novel reminds me of Neal Stephenson, particularly his star-making novel, Snow Crash. Like Stephenson, Scott brings together an unusual number of threads in a baroque symphony of near-future paranoia. Like Stephenson, Scott’s book runs over 400 pages of tightly paced twists and revelations. And like Stephenson, Scott cannot possibly resolve every thread he’s introduced, ensuring readers are both thrilled and ultimately confused.

Born amid an atmosphere of cultist paranoia, Billie has spent her life preparing for Apocalyptic confrontations; now her preparation pays off. She collects old debts to get the tools and weapons she needs to chase her daughter’s kidnappers. Meanwhile, small-town police chief Elise Blue, unprepared for multiple murders on her patch, draws the wrong conclusions and begins chasing Billie herself, walking straight into a trap ten years in the making.

In flashbacks, we reconstruct Billie’s childhood at the Ark of Lazarus, a cult that channels the worst of the Branch Davidians, NXIVM, and Heaven’s Gate. These similarities aren’t incidental, as Scott name-checks most of them. But a decade after the Ark died in a literal firestorm of True Belief and bureaucratic incompetence, it’s been resurrected online, accumulating new followers on Chan boards. Like QAnon, the New Lazarians are willing to die for their beliefs.

Scott’s many expository flashbacks might make this novel somewhat tough sledding for casual readers. We rediscover the Ark’s history not in sequence, but in the nonlinear form that matters most to Scott’s increasingly large ensemble. More important, the “facts” we discover in retrospect aren’t always reliable, because then and now, these characters lie. Even with a child’s life in jeopardy, they continue lying to protect their fragile self-images.

J. Todd Scott

While Billie’s front-burner narrative boils, subplots simmer in the background. Scott’s story unfolds against a background of economic stagnation, public health crisis, and environmental devastation. No wonder, Scott implies, that paranoid netizens look to the resurrection prophecies of a disgraced doomsday cult for guidance. Because it’s difficult for rational people to face a literally burning, storm-ravaged physical world that increasingly appears to have no future.

But all religion is both global and local. The New Lazarians prophesy a literal resurrection impending when Billie and her daughter are sacrificed. Believers seek a world cleansed of unrighteousness, but they also want meaning in their own lives. They seek escape from modernity irredeemably tainted by environmental rot and human sin. Peeling the onion layers of Billie’s lies, we discover, sometimes painfully, that these prophecies aren’t necessarily wrong.

Again, that’s a lot. Scott’s book, like Stephenson’s, runs over 400 pages, features a cast of thousands, and progresses out of sequence. Casual readers dipping in and out before bedtime might find Scott’s narrative impenetrable. Scott also does something many thriller novelists find distasteful: he spends time ruminating over how his massively convoluted plot traumatizes his characters. Even if his protagonists win, they can’t return to their old lives.

It bears repeating that Scott introduces so many plot elements that he cannot possibly resolve every one. Some plot elements, like a massive invasive plague, get briefly mentioned before they’re forgotten. I understand why Scott introduces so many threads, reflecting his audience’s persistent awareness of economic injustice, constant wildfires and end-of-days hurricanes, and Covid. Because today’s reality is a constant barrage of things that plan to kill you.

Perhaps, in that regard, Scott’s novel is a “thriller” because it reflects the roller coaster we’re all trapped on. Where Tom Clancy or John le Carré wrote thrillers about worst-case scenarios for the Cold War, Scott writes about the directionless world Americans find themselves trapped within today. We aren’t speeding toward nuclear conflagration anymore; like Billie, our world is just spiraling, and nobody appears to be at the controls.

Scott writes with a relentless pace that doesn’t let readers pause for breath. His chapters are short, several under one page, and nearly all end with cliffhangers or revelations so shocking, you can practically hear the soap-opera organ music. But even that feels remarkably familiar. Because under his law enforcement bluster and pacing, Scott is ultimately writing about us.