The Great Days chronicles the life of August Russ who is being groomed for leadership in a cult compound in the Arizona desert. After a series of traumatic events shake August’s faith, he flees in horror to face the hostility of the outside world. A guilty conscience and the unsolved mystery of those events eventually lead August back to the compound where he rises to power in lieu of an increasingly ill founder. Disturbed by his own authority, August struggles to redeem the movement and understand himself before the ramifications of his choices undermine him completely.

What we call cults are as old as culture. They are not traps out there in the wilderness, but cul-de-sacs of our own behavior. Betrayal is the center of a cult experience. Not that we have been taken advantage of by a messiah, but that we have been taken advantage of by a person who has no special powers, a person who is just like us. I wanted to look unflinchingly at the complicity of these betrayals, the relationship between power taken and power granted, and the ingenious methods we have for abdicating our own agency. The Great Days is an examination of the windows of vulnerability we all share.

Most of the important questions about cults have been answered — the mysteries that held us in morbid fascination explained. Whereas we once asked, “What kind of people are they?” now we know that ‘they’ are no different from ‘us.’

We once asked, “How can they believe such outrageous things?” but it turns out that we are all familiar with mind control. It has been demonstrated that the tools of manipulative persuasion can be diluted with lemon scent and used in soap commercials. Brain washing is the extreme version of the mass manipulation we experience daily. To keep a population from rebelling one need only: restrict information, create a “with us or against us” atmosphere, discourage dissent, replace dialogue with sound-bites and slogans, and fabricate a sinister enemy to inspire vigilance. This allows an authority to convince a population to shave their heads, kill themselves, or wage specious wars against weaker nations. August’s naiveté is our own.

Some questions, however, do not yet have satisfactory answers. How do benevolent intentions become destructive? How does a group of kind people, marching toward paradise, arrive in hell? Where does the corruption begin? These questions haunted me and saturate The Great Days.

Cults earn their title through behaviors which are uncannily homogeneous, creating the illusion of complete unanimity. But underneath the illusion every member has secret doubts, longings and urges. I wanted to explode the myth of the collective mind. In order to reveal an individual experience I had to follow August closely, so closely that a reader may feel claustrophobic. His prison is emotional and to tell the truth of this story I asked the reader to join him in his disorientation.

The Great Days is a dark trip; we follow August through his dizzying loss of faith, through temptation and suffering. We watch him nearly destroyed so often that ‘nearly-destroyed’ seems his natural state. If he undergoes enlightenment it is only through a rough disillusionment. He moves from follower to leader to pariah, but he is above all, a survivor.

Thank you for reading,

 Eli Brown