The Follower

May 24, 2021
Londoner Vivian Owens, the protagonist of this mildly chilling thriller from Bowling (Song of the Far Isles), travels to Mount Hookey, Calif., to search for her twin, Jesse, who’s been missing for a month and a half. Three years earlier, when the troubled Jesse turned 22, he signed up for online seminars offered by the House of Telos, “a school of spiritual education that promised to purge the Western capitalist mind of its ills and bring it within touching distance of the One Cosmic Spirit.” Jesse’s significant payments to that institution yielded an invitation to study in-person at its center in Mount Hookey, which he accepted. In Mount Hookey, Vivian encounters creepy and eccentric characters who only provide cryptic comments that Jesse’s energy means that “the mountain” won’t let him go. Vivian persists, even as she’s unsure whether Telos is a massive scam or a genuine source of meaning for its adherents. The characterizations and prose are nothing special, and the familiar plot builds to a predictable ending. Others have handled this overused story line better.