Walkley Award-winning journalist Erina Reddan explores power, cults, and the need to belong in her new novel Deep in the Forest.
Erina Reddan thought she’d had a pretty ordinary childhood, but when she started writing about a woman who discovers terrible secrets about The Sanctuary, a neighbouring closed community, she realised that she too had grown up in a kind of cult. She lived on an isolated farm in a Catholic community with rules about what you ate, and when, and she never met or interacted with anybody who wasn’t Catholic. It wasn’t until decades later when the Royal Commission revealed that her nearby town was one of the hot spots for paedophilia in Victoria that she saw just how harmful giving a priest the authority of God was.
Erina started her latest book Deep in the Forest thinking that only vulnerable people were easy prey for cults but then realised that nobody actually joins a cult by choice. People are looking for a better life by being part of a like-minded community, looking for a sense of belonging and acceptance.
Can you give a brief summary of your book for those who haven’t read it?
Deep in the Forest is all about secrets, lies and cults.
Charli is an ostracised young woman, desperate to get out of Stone Lake, an imagined town in the Victorian highlands, but before she can leave she gets a cryptic message from somebody who lives behind the locked gates of The Sanctuary, the local closed religious community nestled in the forest.
The town’s people love The Sanctuary because its organic produce and artisanal furniture bring a lot of tourists into the town when so many rural towns are dying. The Sanctuary also runs a successful drug rehab program, which makes it a darling of the politicians, and puts the town of Stone Lake on the map.
But the message leads to Charli making a grisly discovery. Being an outsider, Charli’s an easy target to frame so she has to do her own investigation into what has really happened, uncovering dark and terrible secrets. She ends up not only having to prove her innocence but running from a fate worse than death.
What kind of research about cults did you undertake to create The Sanctuary?
I did a deep dive into all sorts of cults. I was especially interested in modern cults. The ones that weren’t religious but bought together people who want a better life. There are all sorts of unexpected cults; running cults, martial arts cults, environmental ones. I was really fascinated by the Australian Ideal Human Environment run by James Salerno. Journalist after journalist visited and reported positively. Andrew Burrell won a WA media award for this weekend feature on IHR. Renowned documentary filmmaker David Bradbury spent several weeks there and described the Salerno family as “highly motivated and well-educated”. Even Prince Harry spent time there. And yet under the surface there was the steady beat of power abuse. When James Salerno was finally convicted of sexual abuse with a teenage member of his community in 2019, it came out that he wanted to be known as “Taipan” and convinced his followers that he was a god. He made them wear white for purity and insisted his followers salute him using the greeting from the film, The Gladiator.
When I was developing the basis of The Sanctuary, I wanted it to have that same veneer of legitimacy. I wanted it to appear as if it was doing good things and in some ways it was. I didn’t want it to be a black and white evil community. Very few are. I wanted to show the complex forces that lead people to agree with things that aren’t in their own interests. I want all of us to question the silences in our own lives.
Where there is silence, where there is unquestioned power, we must always beware.
Were any aspects of it based off personal experience?
Such an interesting question because I would have answered no, that it wasn’t based on personal experience in the beginning of writing Deep. But towards the end I knew what that I was writing about a romantic relationship I’d had at 17 with a 21-year old guy. He’d been highly manipulative and it took me three months to see through all the veils of his coercive power patterns. So the one-on-one relationship in the book is highly charged with my own experience with that guy.
And on the cult front:
Again it was only when I’d done so much research that I realised that I may not have joined a cult but I might have grown up in one. The particular brand of Catholicism I grew up in operated as a closed system of information with a single point of power, as well as quite a lot of odd beliefs and strange rules.
I went to Catholic school, Mass on Sunday, and socialised with other Catholics. I did know one or two non-Catholics and while they were nice, they weren’t going to heaven. I believed in a number of things which were very normal to us such a Virgin birth, drinking Christ’s blood each Sunday and going to hell if you sinned. There were also strict rules about what and when you ate and of course the power of the god-like Parish Priest. It turns out that my parish was a centre of paedophilia activity. So a lot of bad things happen when authority goes unquestioned. As a child and young adult I didn’t question anything. Of course, that particular brand of Catholicism doesn’t exist anymore, because now people have access to the internet for wider ideas and there are so many more lay people with positions of authority these days.
But I think that experience meant that I understood how easily you can come to accept a number of ‘truths’ as normal and can come to accept a system of authority which does not serve your own interest. I understood the mechanics of coercive power from the inside.
What inspired you to make Charli a social pariah from the outset rather than your typical protagonist?
When you are writing a story you want to make it as rich as possible so your protagonist is up against so much it seems impossible that she’ll find a way out. So when she does you feel like you are with her. But the way she finds a way out also gives a lot of scope for building her character. It gives her a path of transformation.
Charli being a social pariah also makes her situation so much more complex. She has her own internal demons she has to fight but then she also has to fight the false opinion of all around her. On the plot level it also made her vulnerable, making what happens to her in the end of the book plausible. She was alone. Who would miss her?
The book grapples a lot with abuse of power and control by authorities figures both within The Sanctuary and the police force – what made you decide to write this into the novel?
It’s one of the things that most interests me. One of the defining ways we organise ourselves in our western society is that men are naturally given more power than women and over women. But we have come a long way so in many ways people can argue that it’s no longer happening. But when you apply pressure to key points, such as self-interest and self-preservation, you can see how false this is. I’m keen on exploring these pressure points to show that there is still so much work to be done.
In Deep, I was exploring coercive power in all its guises in the context of a small town; a one-on-one relationship between Charli and Zac, the power of men in authority over a young girl, and the coercive power in a group or cult setting.
How did your writing process for this book differ from that of The Serpent’s Skin?
Great question. I was doing a PhD at university and they had a mentorship program. I was matched with a Film Director and he took me through a film story telling process, where you start with a log line describing your project and you plan your way through the whole plot, step by step. It was a revelation. I learnt so much about how to tell a story. For The Serpents Skin I had applied some of the principles but really at the end. Mostly I wrote that by the seat of my pants so to speak, wondering what the next page would bring. In writing terms you are generally a ‘pantser’ making stuff up as you hit each blank page, or a ‘plotter’ where you make a plan before you start.
So I had very different processes for each book.
Are there any real-life cults or examples of coercive control that really inspired this novel?
Deep in the Forest was inspired by a local religious community in the Macedon Ranges. I was really interested in how they can live both in the community and yet keep to themselves, immune from outside influences. Also it has a lot of political power because it donates to political party and yet its members don’t vote. I was fascinated that wealth can buy you political power and protect some very dodgy appearing practices like women having to wear modest clothing and serving the men in the community.
That began this deep dive into all sorts of modern cults. I started out thinking that only vulnerable people would fall prey to cults, but now know that nobody ever joins a cult. They start out wanting to make themselves happier, or the world a better place, and then realise, or don’t, that things aren’t what they seem.
And as I said earlier, I gave The Sanctuary aspects of both a religious cult and a modern-day do-good cult to give it more complexity, and provide apparently legitimate reasons for why it is a closed community.
If you were in Charli’s shoe’s after making such a discovery, would you have acted in the same way?
Charli made her decisions based on a number of elements in a unique storm. She not only had the visible conflicts such as knowing the police sergeant would want to make sure she didn’t ‘get away with it’ this time, but she had her own secrets and guilt which meant it makes sense of her reluctance to act. Also she’s still basically a kid, having lost her mother so shockingly, she felt she had no wise adult to turn to. She had to make it up as she went. And her first instinct was to hide.
Published by Pantera Press | 28 November 2023 | RRP $32.99
Available at all good bookshops or online.
https://www.booktopia.com.au/deep-in-the-forest-erina-reddan/book/9780648677086.html