Quirky characters, an unlikely road trip and a doomsday cult are the disparate threads that bind “Hallelujah City.” The journey from Aurora to the Hallelujah City compound in Minnesota takes more than a few odd and amusing turns, and author Tom LaMarr has fun with the trip while capturing the essence of a father trying to rescue his daughter.
Scott Chambers could not have been more surprised to find his daughter Mary at his door. He’d tried, several times, to break her free from the grasp of the religious sect holding her captive. That she would show up now, on the evening she believed the world would end, was beyond explanation.
Mary tells him that her religious leader, Daniel Hawker, has sent her on a mission. In the few hours that remain, she is to try to convert her father. But when the deadline for the Rapture comes and passes without event, she’s left to face reality. And, at least as she sees things, the failure is her fault.
Guilt over the belief she has corrupted Daniel sends her back to Hallelujah City, but she’s not traveling alone. Her father found the wrapper from the home pregnancy test kit in the trash; he invites himself along. She wants to do penance for her sins. He merely wants to kill the man responsible for them.
Sitting in a cheap motel room outside Hallelujah City is freelance journalist Adrian Hummel. He has bet his livelihood, and the last two years of his life, on being in place to write the definitive story of Daniel Hawker and his cult. He knows Mary, and wants her to help him get a face-to-face interview with Daniel. But time is running out. When the end of time deadline passes, all hell is going to break loose on the compound. He doesn’t want anything untoward, like a mass suicide, taking place before he’s gotten his story.
The story revolves around Daniel and his cult, but the major players are Scott, Mary and Adrian. Mary’s parents divorced when she was a toddler, and she came to live with her father after her mother’s death. She was estranged from him long before she left home. Hawker gave her something she needed. The same age as her father, she saw him as a man of two worlds, “the physical and the spiritual.”
Scott loves his daughter, desperately and helplessly. “When nine-year-old Mary came back to live with him, she yanked Scott from a familiar, if hardly cozy, rut. But she did this by plopping him into a new one he fully loved, and this entailed risk. For the next four years Scott P. Chambers looked forward to coming home each evening to a trusting child and willing pupil.”
Scott is hoping that their trip back to Minnesota will give him a foothold to regaining the relationship they’ve lost.
LaMarr’s sense of timing and setting are good, but what is most enjoyable are his lost-soul characters who are seeking nothing so much as redemption. And they find it, not in encountering the end of the world, but in encountering each other.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Fiction
Hallelujah City
by Tom LaMarr, $24.95
