BRIGHT OBJECTSslotsdreamer, by Ruby Todd
HBO’s Covid hit series “The Vow” unleashed what has become an almost insatiable appetite for cult documentaries — the more extreme, the more addictive. By now we are all but inured to the wild things people do to belong: drinking colloidal silver, getting branded, stalking their supposed “twin flame.”
Because Ruby Todd’s debut novel, “Bright Objects,” is loosely based on the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members, with the help of phenobarbital, imagined they could hitch a ride on the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997, you might expect some of the same emotional pyrotechnics and bizarre antics you found in 2023’s hottest cult documentary series, “Love Has Won” and “Escaping Twin Flames.” Instead, Todd has chosen a quieter and more unusual route toward understanding the extremity of belief.
It’s 1997 in the small Australian town of Jericho. A newly discovered comet, St. John, is approaching Earth — its impending arrival summoning fevered responses from the town’s residents, most of whom are searching for outsize meaning in the sky. One of these searchers is Sylvia Knight, whose husband, Christopher, was killed by a hit-and-run driver two years earlier. Tortured by the fact that the killer remains at large and unwilling to live without Christopher, Sylvia has set a date for her own death.
Before she can carry out her plan, she finds herself torn between a surprising new lover, Theo St. John, the astronomer who discovered the comet, and Joseph Evans, a local mystic with increasingly fatalistic notions about the comet’s approach.
At the outset Sylvia tells us that she has died twice within two years — the first time after the car crash that killed her husband. The second, well, those of you familiar with Heaven’s Gate will be able to guess what’s in store for those in Joseph’s orbit.
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