The Cult of Pain

Halcyon - Rio Youers

You’re such a pain… playing through the pain… what a pain in the neck… no pain, no gain… Pain, it seems, is an integral part of everyone’s existence. For Valerie Kemp (aka Mother Moon), pain is her pathway, a bridge of sorts to the… place? dimension? existence? she calls Glam Moon. Kemp’s mantra is, “The end of pleasure is pain.” Halcyon, the tiny colony Kemp has founded on a remote Lake Ontario island, is supposed to become one end of her “bridge.” The only qualification for joining the population of Halcyon is that a candidate must have suffered immeasurable pain in his or her life.

Martin Lovegrove knows about pain. His daughters Edith and Shirley know about it, too: the fourth Lovegrove, wife and mother Lauren, died in a hail of bullets; yet another victim of a school shooting. Sixteen-year-old Shirley has descended into teenage angst complete with dyed-black hair, slamming doors, and curfew-busting nights. As for Edith, she’s retreated into her world… You see, Edith has a “condition.”  Some might call it a gift, but would you really want a gift that – for lack of a better analogy – lets her sense “disturbances in the force”? a condition that allowed her to watch her mother die from miles away, before it even happened? No, that’s no gift: it’s a condition.

When Martin and the girls arrive on Halcyon, Mother Moon senses that her long and arduous quest for the final piece of the puzzle, her bridge to Glam Moon, lies within her grasp. All she needs is another great burst of psychic pain; a burst like the ones she has already caused…and Edith and Shirley are the key pieces of her puzzle.

Martin Lovegrove has come to Halcyon ignorant of the dark evil that wreathes the island, unaware of the secrets Valerie Kemp keeps concealed from her followers. On the other hand, Valerie Kemp has not counted on the strength of love.

It’s been a while since I read a book that held my interest like Rio Youers’ Halcyon has. It’s the British/Canadian author’s fifth standalone novel, following 2017’s The Forgotten Girl – a novel I immediately sought out and placed in the to-be-read stack. Yeah: this was that good…

There’s no other way to say it: Youers’ premise in Halcyon is fascinating. Oh, the characters aren’t all that unusual – we’ve seen a lot of these people before. Edith might as well be Charlie from Stephen King’s Firestarter. Mother Moon is any silver-tongued cult leader from Jim Jones to Marshall Applewhite¹. The Lovegrove marriage is the stuff of golden-age sitcoms (before every sitcom featured a fat husband with a foxy wife). Heck, even the horrors of mass murder are no longer unfamiliar to American readers.


It’s not the pieces-parts that make this novel, though, it’s the way that Youers assembled those parts. It’s the dark secret of the colony called Halcyon and the back-story of its charismatic leader he plays out over many chapters that will bring chills to your spine. When you've finished, you will understand, and you will believe: the end of pleasure is pain...

Highly recommended.

¹ Jonestown (1978) to Heaven’s Gate (1997) 
Confidential to RY: it’s highly unlikely that there’s granite on an island in Lake Ontario west of Oswego. Maybe limestone?

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