SocProf reviewed When the Moon Turns to Blood by Leah Sottile
When the fringes become the center
5 stars
The book takes as its starting point the arrests of Lori Vallow ("doomsday mom" as the media and social media started calling her) and her accomplice Chad Daybell, and follows the thread of Apocalypse-obsessed fringe LDS groups. Both are currently awaiting trial and facing the death penalty for a bunch of murders that include two of Lori's children, her ex-husband, and Chad's wife. What makes this book especially interesting is that it's not just a true crime reporting but it incorporates the context of what makes these weird "the end is nigh" offshoots of LDS actually not so much bizarre deviations but logical extensions. In other words, the fringe is not so much the fringe as slightly off-center. In addition, these cultish LDS groups overlap quite a bit with other similarly cultish groups: anti-government / anti-tax sovereign citizen-types, Q (of course), and white nationalists. As the author notes, "At the …
The book takes as its starting point the arrests of Lori Vallow ("doomsday mom" as the media and social media started calling her) and her accomplice Chad Daybell, and follows the thread of Apocalypse-obsessed fringe LDS groups. Both are currently awaiting trial and facing the death penalty for a bunch of murders that include two of Lori's children, her ex-husband, and Chad's wife. What makes this book especially interesting is that it's not just a true crime reporting but it incorporates the context of what makes these weird "the end is nigh" offshoots of LDS actually not so much bizarre deviations but logical extensions. In other words, the fringe is not so much the fringe as slightly off-center. In addition, these cultish LDS groups overlap quite a bit with other similarly cultish groups: anti-government / anti-tax sovereign citizen-types, Q (of course), and white nationalists. As the author notes, "At the heart of what happened is an ecosystem of extremism: extreme preppers arming up for the end of the world, extreme Mormons who focus only on the “latter-day” part of their church’s name." So this cannot be dismissed as the doings of deranged individuals.
