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This release is doing the rounds of the English-language review circuit right now and I was intrigued enough to download the audiobook narrated by Brian Nishii. But a couple of warnings: It's 17 hours or so of listening, or 512 pages of reading. Which of course would be fine if the book warranted so much of the reader or listener's time. I'm not sure it does. On the negative side, great chunks of it are devoted to sermons by one of two cult leaders (that there were two cults didn't become clear to me until later) that, while quite believable, are just that: long, tedious sermons by nut jobs, and while I suppose they illuminate how nutty (or not? Discuss in 2,000 words or more) they are, they also left me wishing the author would just get on with the story. Then there were a couple of sex scenes in which s new (male) convert has his way with nubile (female) followers, which were graphic but pretty gratuitous (and have you ever listened to a male actor pretending to be a woman in the throes of an orgasm? It was enough to curdle the milk in my Royal Milk Tea), and then a deeply disturbing episode in which the cult leader describes in even more graphic detail his rape and surgical dismemberment of a 15-year-old victim. Yuck. Were we supposed to be repulsed or turned on by this? The attention to detail here made me wonder, before hitting the fast-forward button. The good bits were about watching the evil cult's nefarious plans at world domination coming to fruition and the attempts by cult members to realize they were being duped, but oh Lord, it was a long, tedious and at times repulsive journey there. Not for the squeamish, or time-sensitive.

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