Author Sarah Strohmeyer On Her Favourite Cults
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Guest post written by A Mother Always Knows author Sarah Strohmeyer
Sarah Strohmeyer is a bestselling and award-winning novelist whose books include We Love to Entertain, Do I Know You?, The Secrets of Lily Graves, How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True, Smart Girls Get What They Want, The Cinderella Pact (the basis of the Lifetime Original Movie Lying to Be Perfect), The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives, Sweet Love, and the Bubbles mystery series (Bubbles Unbound won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery). A former newspaper reporter, her writing has appeared the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Boston Globe among other outlets. She lives with her family in Vermont where she is the elected town clerk of the small town of Middlesex.
About A Mother Always Knows (out July 1st 2025): The beloved, award-winning author of Do I Know You? and We Love To Entertain returns with an electrifying novel of psychological suspense that explores the way our pasts shape our futures in so many unexpected ways.
Thanks to a plethora of podcasts, books (both fiction and non-fiction) and addictive documentaries, cults have become modern society’s freak shows – grotesque, disturbing and weirdly entertaining. It’s tempting to imagine ourselves buying into a movement with such passion that we’d abandon our families and jobs to, say, massage the feet of a bearded leader who demands vodka smoothies and midnight basketball tournaments. (Some of that I made up; some of that I didn’t.) Could we fall prey to the right message, succumb to the right leader?
My own obsession with cults began as a newspaper reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer when I covered the horror story of a family who’d been murdered after a spaghetti dinner and buried in the floor of a garage in Kirtland, Ohio, by an offshoot group of fundamentalist Mormons. What at the time (1989) seemed impossible became the unfathomable. Two-bit cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren had persuaded his few delusional followers to murder Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their children. I drew on this experience decades later when I wrote A Mother Always Knows – which begins when a mother is murdered fleeing a Vermont “spiritual dowsing” cult with her young daughter.
Most cults share common themes – a charismatic leader, a prophecy, dietary restrictions and sacrifices required of its followers. None of that sounds appealing and, yet, there are hundreds of cults currently operating in the United States. That is, depending on how you define cult. Here are a few well known and lesser known I find most interesting:
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