God's lunatics : lost souls, false prophets, martyred saints, murderous cults, demonic nuns, and other victims of man's eternal search for the divine

I picked this up thinking it would be an easy-a for I Read Odd Books. But had to stop reading it when I reached the Cs in this compendium of religious oddness. In the section called "Cults, Copycats" I knew this was not worth my time.

With all apologies to The New Bohemians, though I'm not aware of too many things, I know what I know. Know what I mean? I know cults and I know the West Memphis Three. And this book screwed up both.

Largo has murder victims of the Jeffrey Lundgren Mormon offshoot cult digging their own graves before they were killed. Never happened. The graves were dug by other cult members in a barn before the family was lured out to the farm. The family was taken to the barn one by one and shot. I guess this isn't that show more important but it was a signal of things to come.

But as odd as the above was, the part about the "West Memphis Cult" was just outright insane. According to Largo, the "West Memphis Cult" was influenced by the "Kentucky Occult Teen Killers," who killed a family in 1998. Let me quote it.

Inspired by newspaper accounts of the Kentucky Cult, three bored Tennessee teenagers, dubbed "the West Memphis Cult," killed three children in a botched satanic ritual. They stripped, beat and mutilated their victims in the woods, and all cult members are now serving life terms.

Okay, at first glance, this sounds like a really shitty recount of the accusations against the West Memphis Three, one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in modern times in the USA. The West Memphis Three struck a deal to be released last year on an Alford plea, because it was the only way to get Damien Echols off death row.

While the WM3 were accused of killing three boys in the woods, Jessie Misskelley was not sentenced to life and Echols was sentence to death. So they don't fit the description of life sentences. And the WM3 crimes took place in 1993 so they clearly were not copy-cat crimes from something that happened in 1998. And they took place in Arkansas, not Tennessee. But then again, there is no West Memphis, TN, so who the hell knows what Largo was talking about in that regard.

So given all of those discrepancies, perhaps he was not discussing the West Memphis Three. Perhaps there was a "West Memphis Cult" from 1998 that committed virtually identical crimes to the crimes the WM3 were accused of and received life sentences and somehow I managed to overlook that the WM3 travesty had somehow spawned its own copy-cat crimes.

Except if you Google "West Memphis Cult" you come up with nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. NOTHING. There is no "West Memphis Cult." Actually, if you do Google, you get six results. Five entries that refer to the WM3 and one result that refers to this book. There is only the "West Memphis Three" - there is no "West Memphis Cult."

Clearly Largo managed to get complete wrong details of one of the most notorious crimes in the last two decades, a ridiculous miscarriage of justice that at the time this book was published had spawned three books, two documentaries, and benefit concerts. I mean, even if he didn't want to research it, just a quick perusal of Wiki would have cleared up the dates, the location and the actual sentences handed out.

So I know what I know, if you know what I mean, and Largo has shown he doesn't know what I know. And I'm not even the one writing a book about what I know.

And this leads me to the realization that if he can't get right the things that I do know, how can I trust that he got anything else right? I can't. So I stopped reading and wrote this. show less

Could have been excellent and fascinating, but as others have pointed out, it is very sloppy. I am the last person to notice spelling errors and grammar, and even I noticed. And I also audibly gasped at the section on the West Memphis 3. The "facts" are anything but in that section alone, so what else in this book is poorly researched? It might as well have been fiction. Very disappointing.

My least favourite of his encyclopaedias but still really interesting. Found a few too many typos and some of the images were not the best quality, but a good resource for those interested in the subject.