Review by Max Dunbar
The question The Dark Side of the Sky asks is simple and fascinating. Can an apocalyptic cult ever be right?
The Bastion of Southern Italy is not, on the face of it, a regular cult. As Francesco Dimitri writes in his afterward, ‘cults are endlessly fascinating.’ We know about the big ones: the Manson Family, The Peoples Temple, the Branch Davidians. (The Texan historian Jeff Guinn has written outstanding books on all three.) We know about the new ones from streaming services: Heaven’s Gate, Nxivm, the Sarah Lawrence cult, the Cult of Mother God. There have been a couple of fictional cults in recent novels: the Universal Humanitarian Church of JK Rowling’s The Running Grave, (reviewed by Harriet here), and the Alperton Angels of Janice Hallett’s fabulous mystery novel.
What strikes you first about the Bastion is its chill. Brother and sister team Becca and Ric run a villa in Puglia. Every year they put on wellness festivals featuring music, good food, wine and activities. True, to get to the festival you have to send them your bank statements, and write short essays about your secret fears and desires. But once you’re on site all seems relaxed. There’s a wonderful crumbling old villa, a lush pinewood, a nearby beach, the weather’s beautiful and connections are easily made. It is a world away from the malnutrition and hard labour of Chapman Farm.
Part of the Bastion’s appeal is that they aren’t a cult so much as a cool clique everyone wants to be part of, like the classics students in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Unlike many cults, the Bastion doesn’t take just anyone. They don’t need millions of followers, just fifteen or twenty key people. At the end of the annual festival, they will offer a permanent place to anyone who seems promising.
Should you accept, it’s not a trap, at least not at first. You can leave at any time, go to the village, keep your phone and internet connection. There is dancing around the bonfire. There is more good food and fine wine. There are orgies. There is magic: strange animals caper around amiably, and giant solid bubbles drift through the forest. You will see the loved ones you miss, and people not yet born. Yet the most persuasive thing about the Bastion is its sense of nurturing friendship. There’s a moment when new recruit Lila confesses that ‘I don’t like myself at all.’ When Becca says ‘I do’, you feel it means something.
Lila joined the Bastion in its early days. By the time we meet her she is Becca and Ric’s top acolyte. Despite growing up in comfort and wealth, Lila has never believed herself loved, or happy, until she joined the Bastion. As far as she’s concerned it’s heaven. We see her welcoming this year’s guests, of which two are of interest: Charlie and Zoey. Charlie is a doctor who had booked the trip with her husband Bertrand, shortly before he collapsed and died of a brain aneurysm. Charlie comes alone because she cannot stand her empty flat. Zoey comes to check out the competition – she runs a big wellness festival herself and she comes to the Bastion under a false name. She also had her heart broken by her business partner Janis, with whom Zoey has long been secretly in love. Both women seem cynical, corroded and defeated.
The Dark Side of the Sky is told in short, buzzy chapters with Lila, Charlie and Zoey all sharing their perspective in turn. Despite their scepticism, their backgrounds in the hard worlds of medicine and business, Charlie and Zoey quickly become convinced by the Bastion, their voices taking on the tone of enthusiastic belief that we first see in the longtime cult member Lila. (JK Rowling and Janice Hallett both observed, in the novels I mentioned, that it is the professional rationalists, the stats and podcast bros, who are particularly susceptible to cult beliefs. Such people have too much confidence in their own judgement – if something feels real they conclude it must be real.)
But there is another voice, simply called ‘The Bastion’, and these chapters are eerie to read because it feels like you are hearing the collective voice of the group itself, not Becca or Ric or any one individual. And that communal voice is not always kind. This is particularly unsettling in the section called ‘Our Roots’, where we learn about Becca and Ric’s origin story. The telling of their early lives is punctuated with bracketed comments, either laughable in their sycophancy – ‘Becca has a knack for doing everything at the highest standards, and we are sure that was the case with her writing as well’ – or just plain nasty: ‘He was an idiot. A scumbag. We hope he suffered.’ The Bastion is not content to live happily in the Italian countryside. Like all cult leaders Becca and Ric want a belief system that puts them at the centre of the universe. A conceited, angry mind has begun to shine.
This book keeps us thinking and dreaming for a long time, then becomes very intense. The last fifty or so pages of the novel are as scary and compulsive as the endings of The Beach or Pet Sematary. It is a standout story of collective craziness and the allure of the magical. The copy I got from the publisher has a weird scribbled symbol on the first page, with the added handwritten line: ‘Come play with us!’ I’d like to think somebody human wrote it.
Max can also be found on his blog here, or on X as @MaxDunbar1.
Francesco Dimitri, The Dark Side of the Sky (Titan, 2024). 978-1803362786, 368pp., paperback original.
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