Book Review - Andrew Sugar - The Cult Breaker

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1979 - Manor Books I sometimes quite enjoy books that are utter rubbish as much as the great classics and this certainly qualifies as entertaining crap. As someone who escaped from a cult I do read lots of books about them, but this shows so little knowledge of cults and religion that the mind biggles. Even the cover art and blurb told me this is straight out of the US Survivalist genre, where a Chuck Norris-like hero solves every problem with a gun and martial arts. Sure enough, that is what the book delivers. Johnny Baron is a mercenary, smuggler, art thief, bounty hunter, and drug dealer (Matuana, not heroin). When he is busted when an artifact smuggling mission goes wrong, he realizes it us not the cops but a private detective who has him, with intent to force him to infiltrate a new religious cult, rescue three abducted women from its clutches and find out why the leader is building missile silos. Baron knows the cult’s second in command, a rival mercenary who has learned a tribal torture involving tearting a man’s whole face off while he is alive and awake. Getting into the cult is easy - Baron can fly any plane and the cult needs a pilot as Baron has seen to it that the already hired pilot gets crippled. Once in, he meets the cult leader, called Uncle Bill, a cross between L Ron Hybbard and Rev Moon of the Moonies. Bill insists his followers drink milk, which Baron drinks despite being lactose intolerant just to impress his way in. Baron faces a few dangers but kills the villains ridiculously easy and survives multiple bullet wounds himself. As the cult turns suicidal, Jim Jones style (in a book that came out just a year after they Jonestown Giyana tragedy), Baron learns that The cult has its own doomsday weapon nuclear bomb, but diffuses it with the aid of a crude drawing, and a few defectors from the cult who don’t even turn up until the last twenty pages. Interestingly, Baron doesn’t win the heart of the leading lady, nor are the three women he set out to rescue in the first place seen as important after about half way through the book. Baron is just too smart, and smug to be remotely credible. Ludicrously entertaining. Arthur Chappell