A riveting debut novel telling the story of a teenage girl and her mother caught in the web of a sinister cult leader whose optimistic vision of hope descends into apocalyptic horror in the jungles of South America.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Dark Messiah by Sara Z. Carson, which releases on October 20th 2026.
In 1975 San Francisco, 15-year-old Nell’s world has been ripped apart by her younger sister’s sudden, tragic death and her parents’ subsequent divorce. As her mother desperately reaches out for solace from any quarter—new hobbies, new philosophies, new relationships—a boyfriend leads her into the cult of a charismatic man known as Father. His message of peace and healing proves irresistible, and soon Nell and her mother join his mysterious Church of the People.
As they are drawn increasingly into the vortex of the Church, the community comes to consume their lives, and Nell’s concerns begin to build. She becomes enrolled in the school they operate, is intimidated into adopting their ways of dressing and acting, and is removed from her home.
At the same time, the dangers lurking in the cult’s shadows emerge: threats, physical abuse, and the sudden disappearances of members to Father’s new “utopian” community deep in the jungles of South America. When Nell is secreted there alongside their fellow followers, they come under Father’s power as never before—with horrific and devastating consequences.
By turns sensitive and shocking, powerful and poignant, Dark Messiah is a story of a girl becoming a woman as her life is stolen from her—and a mesmerizing debut from a new voice in contemporary fiction.
EXCERPT
The dinner service started at five o’clock. Hundreds of people streamed in, and we took places behind the warming trays, serving the food. Monica had instructed us to be generous, like the Sermon on the Mount, she said, referencing the loaves and the fishes. “There will always be enough food.”
There were so many small children, so many elderly people. I lost count of how many I served, how many times empty trays were swapped out for full ones.
I was so hungry that, on one of the many trips back to the kitchen, I grabbed an almost-neon-pink cookie off one of the trays; I took two bites before I realized it was chalky and anise-flavored and I threw it out. Even in my hunger, it was inedible and I wouldn’t be able to choke it down.
When everyone had been fed, we started cleaning up. I was distracted by my aching stomach, but I forced myself through as I walked up and down the rows, gathering used plates and cups, quickly filling a garbage bag, and then another, and then another. When everyone had been fed, we started cleaning up. I was distracted by my aching stomach, but I forced myself through as I walked up and down the rows, gathering used plates and cups, quickly filling a garbage bag, and then another, and then another.
People were sweeping, washing dishes, carrying newly cleaned platters and trays back to the buses. Leftovers were laid out in the disposable aluminum trays. We waited for all of the elderly members and younger kids from the Temple to eat before we got in line. My legs were shaking. There wasn’t much left—macaroni and cheese rinds, sliced white bread and scrapings of butter, abandoned green beans in oily water. I took two pieces of bread.
Mercifully, Lucille found me, her face still lit and joyful and betraying none of the exhaustion I felt.
“There’s a place upstairs we can watch from,” she said to me conspiratorially. “It’s quiet.”
She took me up to a balcony where some of the other members were seated in small clutches. Looking down in the darkness, we could see everything: The church was packed, the pews filled, people crowded onto the floors and leaned up against the walls.
A famous politician stood up at the pulpit. The buzzing crowd seemed to know they should silence themselves as he said into the microphone, his voice sonorous, “We’re going to start the show in a moment, so please, if you haven’t, take your seats.” As the room quieted, the political leader took on the role of a hype man.
“Let me present to you a man who, with his church, is changing the world. He is a combination of Reverend King, Angela Davis, and Albert Einstein … and he wants to make all of our lives better. He wants to show you the Lord, our God, and how the Lord operates through each of us from the moment we are born, and all you need to do is let him shine from within you. Because we have the power.”
He paused dramatically.
“I’d like you to show a warm welcome to the membership of the Temple of God’s Love Everlasting, who have already served you a delicious dinner. That’s the kind of meal the Temple offers each of its members, every day, and feeds to the neediest members of the San Francisco community. Please, get on your feet for the blessed man we call Dad.”
There was wild cheering, as there always was when he arrived on a scene. How did they know? I didn’t know that his visit had been hyped by flyers that had been handed out through the neighborhood and in the church over the past few weeks, and that a few attendees had been promised a few dollars for showing up to cheer.
He walked out, Jim McGuigan in front of him, his hand not-at-all-subtly resting over his coat near his waistband, showing he was armed (as he always was) with his Colt .45. Dad was in his usual sunglasses, dressed in an impeccable puce three-piece broad-lapeled suit with a wide, matching tie and a black dress shirt. He looked almost glamorous as he bounded up the altar to the podium, eventually raising his hands in the air to lower the volume of the crowd. But it had the opposite effect. The crowd was already on their feet and their clapping gradually merged into a thrumming unison, their expectations and energy massing as they anticipated his miracles. The Peace Train came out and sat carefully on either side of the broad set of stairs leading to the pulpit, a well-composed rainbow of our best-looking young people, all of them clad in casual, understated clothing. Mother had dictated for years that the youth choir never “put on airs” when doing outreach. They never dressed up fancily if they were visiting a neighborhood where Dad wanted to raise spirits rather than funds. When the event was a fundraiser, however, they would wear polished suits and dresses to warm the hearts of the checkwriters.
Dad continued to hold his hands up, beaming smugly, a smirk more than a smile, as he waited until the crowd began to quiet and took their seats. He placed his hands on either side of the podium, his charisma at a controlled intensity, poised for a nuclear reaction.
Everyone was still for a second before Dad started preaching.
“I want to start by talking about the King James Bible. King James wanted you enslaved.”
The crowd was rapt but still. Dad’s anti-Bible openings put him on a shaky tightrope.
“I want you to know about what is in your Bibles. We’ll leave with you this little booklet—” he held up a copy of a tract, “The Great Truth,” which he claimed to have written while unable to sleep after an assassination attempt while he was on a return visit to Indiana in October of 1968—“You can read for yourself. While we ask for a nominal fee to cover the cost of the mimeograph, we’ll give it to you for free. King James sent for the first of our people”—here was Dad showing how he identified with the almost entirely Black audience—“here. King James owned slaves. He killed slaves. He even murdered his own family. He was a drunk and he was a child molester. The king of England made himself a Bible to suit him, rather than following the true word of God.”
He hadn’t lost them. A few scattered, tentative amens came up from the crowd.
“In fact, it sounds an awful lot like something our leaders now would do—write themselves a set of rules, pretending it was the word of God, and saying, ‘This is what I follow.’ Think about old Ronnie Ray-gun demanding the blood of young protesters. Or Richard Nixon and Bob McNamara, somehow able to sleep at night after sending our children, our communities, to fight in their treasonous wars. You know how they sleep at night? They just choose the rules they like and think of themselves as holy men.”
This invited more sounds of agreement.
“Life would be simpler if we could simply trust and believe all of our leaders—whether it’s your minister or your president. But if I don’t tell you, then you’ll be lost. I want to tell you the story of one of our congregants. He didn’t know the truth, back in 1942, when they came”—here he knocked on the podium— “rappin’ on his mother’s door one night and yanked his mother out of her home. You know where he was? He was fighting for freedom in the war. His mother was a precious woman minding her own business, and they took her out. They put her in a truck and sent her to the desert of Colorado, where she spit her stomach out piece by piece with cancer, and they wouldn’t even give her an aspirin, claiming she was a spy. Her son was given a Purple Heart for his valor during the war, while his mother was imprisoned by our government.
“The government took away her land. She died before her son could see her again. Her son came to us broken, alcoholic, angry. We were able to have her body moved from Colorado to San Francisco, so now he can visit her grave. Now, he’s a proud member of our community.” He paused here. Utter silence. He had their attention. I wondered who he was talking about. I couldn’t remember seeing anyone Asian at our services, but the room was big. “If you don’t like the truth, that’s your problem. I am in the truth business. Your government will not protect you when times get tough; they will take from you, they will destroy you. The government is filled with King Jameses, with Ed Davises—”
The mention of the LAPD Chief of Police drew jeers and boos, a few people standing as they did so. “They will turn on you when you become inconvenient. And I am inconvenient, and that is why I am here.”
Now the anger turned into applause. “I am a reverend, I am a father, not just in the service of the Lord but to all of my congregants … what I am not is a fraud who preaches on Sunday and takes your money on Monday. Those of you who’ve gone to church your whole lives, have you ever asked, where is the money? Where is Black people’s money? It’s in these churches, it’s in your poisoned water, it’s in the shabby housing the government puts you into, it’s in the pockets of leaders who do not care about you.”
There was murmuring acceptance.
“That’s right! They’re gonna use the Bible against you on the last day, when they take you for your final ride, when they round you up …”
He took a deliberate long pause here.
“… because they said, ‘The book says obey those who rule.’ Now you know that’s not right. My white friends in the government back in San Francisco”—he laughed here, and everyone else did, too— “They say to me, ‘I saw Roots. I must apologize’—but they still expect obedience, for you to forgive them their trespasses without being angry.” He lowered his voice. “I am here to tell you these messages of silence, of obeying, of enduring cruelty—these messages must be reconsidered.”
It was uncanny how these strangers listened to him, hypnotized. How we all listened to him. I believed everything he was saying, too, this strange mix of unvarnished and reconsidered American history, of the wrongness of the Bible—even if he’d likely heard it from someone else rather than discovered it through his own divinity.
The amens during his pauses grew more confident but were not full-throated—he couldn’t yet be entirely trusted.
“The apostle Paul said anybody who prays to an unknown God is blasphemous. The God of King James is a God of hypocrisy who demands you endure evil blindly. You say, ‘Well, this is what we must learn to live with.’ But you don’t have to. You can find the true kingdom of God, you can find more than simply enduring the pain and the abuse, here on earth, amongst men. And we—all of us in the room—we can see it. We can touch it. It’s right here with us.”
Another pause.
“At least, that’s what Jesus had to say about it. But then again, he was just the Son.”
There was laughter.
“Jesus told us to build the kingdom of heaven on earth—on earth as it is in heaven, we say. Revelation tells us of a heaven on earth. Jesus said heaven is within you. Heaven is nigh. Where the spirit of God is, there’s liberty. When the spirit of God comes, he says, you will feed the hungry and clothe the naked and take in the stranger and release the prisoners. That is how God will judge us. Not whether you spoke in tongues or belonged to the Baptist Church or the Methodist Church or the Church of God. None of it means anything, my friends. You have to follow the spirit of God.”
He waited for the amens to die down. I realized I was clutching the railing so tightly my hands were cramped.
I wanted to hear more.
“I’d like to give you a sense of how the spirit of God, of Jesus, works through our younger members. They’re going to sing a few songs for you.”
The choir stood in unison, recognizing their cue. A stripped-down version of the band—drums, bass guitar, lead guitar—accompanied the Peace Train as they sang Sly and the Family Stone, then a tear-jerking rendition of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” I watched in amazement. They were so gifted.
Dad stepped down from the lectern while they performed. Now he was standing closer to the crowd, on the floor, with a microphone. “How touched by God are these children?” he asked, leading another round of applause. “We find Christ in them. And we must find Christ in ourselves. There’s no God in the sky; there’s no Christ in the sky. Those white men in charge, driving those big Cadillacs, exploiting every one of us with their unsafe workplaces, empowering the establishment pigs to chase us and hunt us and shoot at us—they do all of this to suppress this country’s uncomfortable truth, which is: All these men care about is money. They don’t care about people. They don’t care about the future. They don’t care about you, or these children.”
He looked out into the crowd.
“Is Glenn Stanley’s mother here?”
There was murmuring before a tiny woman, wearing a black sheath and cat-eyeglasses—she looked impossibly frail in that moment, old in a way I’d never seen—stood tentatively.
“Give me your hands, Mrs. Stanley.”
The aisle found room for her to move to him. He took her hands, and then took her into his arms, in a long hug. The room transformed with sounds of crying.
“Ma’am,” he said, pulling back so he could hold the microphone to his mouth. “I am sorry for your loss. And I am sorry for what those men did to your son. And I want to apologize for their bad actions. Your son did not deserve to die.”
We were swallowed by the applause, the joy, the relief. Dad’s hug with her lasted a long moment, before Mother took over the embrace. Dad returned to the front of the church.
I had never seen anything like it.
“Here is my offer to every one of you: If you want to go to freedom, we’ll get you home to true freedom, with us, tonight. I don’t care if you haven’t got a dime to your name, we’ll put you on the bus. We’ll put clothes on your back. We’ll take you home with us. We do in every city we visit.”
I now understood what the empty bus was for. “We just … we just take people? Now?”
Lucille put her finger to her lips to shush me, and nodded. Jennifer had now joined us and grinned a little.
“We can promise you a better life, a more meaningful life. We’re the healthiest people and the freest people. Maybe tonight you’ve heard a little bit from my family about the land we’re calling Concordia, in the heart of one of the most beautiful countries you’ve ever seen, where, if you are lucky enough to go, you will be surrounded by the spirit of God. I got seniors down there building sidewalks. They’ve got a new life. We have to hold them down!”
Dad laughed loudly at this and so did everyone else. He’d told us a lot of things about Concordia, but none involved centenarians building sidewalks.
“I have men living great lives in our community who have been veritably raised from the dead, whose lives were in ruin. Henry, one of our older members, is a Black man who was arrested at the age of sixty because he was helping poor people. His Baptist church wouldn’t get him out of jail. But we got him out. I said, I’ll get him out in twenty minutes, because he is a good man. I got him out. And when I got him out he was healed, raised from the dead, from a life of vice. Had a broken leg. Now he walks freely.”
This was complete fiction, but I knew it didn’t matter. Henry could only walk with a cane on his best days, which were rare.
“Henry is so powerful. He lifts me clear up off the ground and hugs me, holds me in midair. And he’s nowhere near ready to stop. Henry’s only eighty now, so he’s practically a kid.” He laughed again, and his voice dropped to a more intimate tone.
“You may be asking yourself, ‘I’m not good-looking, I’m not bright, I have nothing to offer. What should I do?’ I’ll tell you what we do, how it makes us stronger together: We share. Our seniors can travel all over the United States in the buses we own. Any church could do what we do, but they don’t, because there’s too much money being siphoned off for the preachers.”
He nodded at the choir to start singing again, quietly, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. I was frozen. “Before we do anything, though, we’ve got to do some healing. I need to show you faith in action, the way our human faith, our togetherness at the Temple, has created moments of transcendence. How we have been able to rise above our mortality, accomplish things we could never do apart or alone. He took another step toward the audience, almost setting himself in the middle of the aisle between the front pews. “Just put your hand on your neighbor’s. And I’m telling you, you can have life. I can say a lot of things here tonight, but you come out and see how I live; you’ll see I practice what I preach. We’ll hold up the bus long enough for you to go home and get your little bit of things.”
The crowd stirred, as if there was deliberation.
“We need you to build our heaven on earth. And I want you to look, because you’ll go out and see a little bit of heaven. How much? Four hundred acres of community. Big, beautiful homes. A great big dining room. Two hundred different crops. Mineral streams. No impure air. Never gets too cold. Never gets too hot. I am talking about heaven on earth.”
He scanned the crowd, as if he was waiting for inspiration.
“As our hands are joined, may the spirit of revelation move each of you. If you don’t get your mind healed, all the healing in your body won’t do an ounce of good.”
He backed up suddenly.
“There’s no embarrassment, nothing to be ashamed of in the presence of God. I’m beginning to hear a revelation now.”
He looked at the children in the choir; they were gently swaying. “Please, keep on singing, my children.”
He pressed his right hand to his temple.
“Is there a Katherine Sawyer here? I am looking for Katherine Sawyer.”
A surprised-sounding woman called out, “Me?” She said it as if it were a question.
Dad stepped down the aisle and found her outstretched hand and guided her to step over two people blocking her exit from the pew.
“Did you have a doctor tell you there’s something wrong with your gut?” He stuck the microphone in her face.
She was barely audible, her whispered “yes” echoing over the audience.
Katherine’s cheeks were bright, and she wore a neat, shiny bobbed wig. Her figure was misshapen, making it uncomfortable to look at her, with ankles thicker than her calves, her wrists emerging in small swells from the cuffs of her dark blue blouse. She had a brilliant smile but sad eyes. Her desperate hope overwhelmed the room, choking us with anxiety.
“Ma’am, your radiance is hiding terrible pain. Is it not?”
She nodded, pressing herself into Dad as he put his arm around her, pulling her close.
“Tell me about your pain. It’s ulcers, no?” “Yes, sir.”
She looked uncomfortable as she stared around the room, the center of attention.
Dad motioned across the room with a broad wave of his arm. “Can we, brothers and sisters, my children, all raise our hands, and our voices, and our prayers in this moment on behalf of our sister Katheine and what she has endured, and ask the Lord to cast this pain out?”
Amens, applause, noise burst out around the room. It went on for a few moments until Dad suddenly roared into the microphone.
“Let the good Lord hear you!”
The noise crescendoed with foot stomping that shook the room.
Dad passed the microphone and its snaking cord to Jim, who was suddenly at his side. Dad raised both of his hands up and brought them down on Katherine’s head. It didn’t seem like he struck her, but he was intentional and forceful. Katherine crumpled to the ground.
I gasped. Everyone cheered. Dad took the microphone back. Jim locked his arms around her and pulled her up, her legs wavering as she regained her footing. “When you stand on your own again, your pain will be gone. Your ulcers will be healed.”
Katherine looked dazed, wavering, but suddenly threw her hands in the air, joyously yelling, “It’s gone! I’m saved! It’s gone!”
As the cheering continued, I curled into myself, uncomfortable. None of it made any sense but it was happening.
Later, Dr. Linc—Dick Lincoln, the church’s doctor—stepped in as Dad was laying hands on a familiar-looking woman with a grown-out, dishwater-blonde shag and a large mole on her cheek. I had met her. She said her name was Sally.
“Sally Jenkins … you have a darkness eating at you, correct?” “I do, I have a tumor in my lungs.”
She was so much shorter than Dad, she looked up at him with a hopeful smile.
Dad put his hands on her face, then on her throat, until she began coughing heavily, the noise increasingly repulsive as Dad moved the microphone closer to her mouth. The noise was almost unbearable as she produced something Dad caught in his hands. He held aloft in triumph a wad of purplish gore, which he wrapped in a handkerchief and handed to Dr. Linc, who looked at it carefully.
“Dr. Linc, is it a tumor?” Dad’s voice was garrulous.
“I’d have to look at it under a microscope, but it seems so,” he replied, a bit of mirth in his voice.
“Sister Sally Jenkins … you are cured!”
The audience went wild again, stomping and clapping away any questions about faith, at least for this evening.
Dad had won over another audience on this night with his folksy preaching about the hypocrisy of every other church and the most gregarious Temple members cajoling everyone.
At midnight, we got back on the buses, but we didn’t move. “When are we leaving?” I asked Jennifer, unable to suppress a yawn. “We all wait until everyone who is coming with us is here. We don’t want to leave anyone behind.”
Our buses sat in that lot, the refractory haze making total darkness impossible, until all of the carefully, lovingly dispatched members returned with total strangers carrying a few necessities—prescriptions; toothbrushes; photo albums; pilled, crocheted blankets; reading glasses; social security cards; and birth certificates. These strangers were now family.
It took less than two hours.
