Best Fantasy Book About Leaving a Cult?

Based on what I can recollect of fantasy novels I’ve read, the majority are about the main characters joining a secret society or a special organization or an honored clique or somehow “proving” themselves to win acceptance in a group. Some stories are about being kicked out of such rarefied airs and how the character recovers. Fewer stories I’ve read are about leaving, though I understand now that might have also been selection bias at play: as someone raised in a high-control religion, I may have been drawn more to stories about “joining” a tight-knit, privileged in-group rather than stories about leaving such an in-group.

I genuinely would like to know: what are the best fantasy books you have read where the main character leaves a cult?

For me, the answer is clear: Leah Cypess’s YA fantasy, Death Sworn.

I read it over a decade ago and barely remember any plot details. However, I remember powerfully identifying with the main character, Ileni. I suspect it had something to do with where I was in my own journey untangling what the Unification Church taught, but I remember being struck with the thought: Is Ileni in a cult? Is Ileni me? Is her journey my journey?

It is YA, so if I were to read it now, I would probably find the presentation of the sorcerers’ society and worldview overly simplistic and exaggerated. But the thing with cults is… when you’re in it, the simplicity and over-exaggeration feels like a source of unquestionable clarity.

Though I love reading fantasy and I know authors are exhorted to make their characters relatable, it’s genuinely difficult to feel relatable to a magic-wielding “chosen one” no matter how “flawed” the author makes them. But Ileni is up there in the top three of characters that I related to (the other two are Tess from Rachel Hartman’s Tess of the Road, and Tress from Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea). Probably because the all-consuming, all-controlling nature of the sorcerers’ society was similar to what I was confronting in my real life.

As I’ve already mentioned, there must be many more fantasy novels about leaving “cults” in their many variations (as a recovering academic, I would even put academia up there as a cult, with its “high priest” gatekeepers, esoteric in-group language, exploitation of labor, and toxic veneration of narrowly defined virtues) than I am aware of. As I am writing this blog, more examples come to mind: Matthias Hevlar in Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows and Hrathen in Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris.

However, another pattern that emerges across these cult-leaving characters is that they are extremely difficult to read at first. It is not even that they are difficult to like per se, but that their view of the world is so simplistic that even as an “outsider,” you, the reader can sense that something more is going on. And to see a POV character struggle page after page to fit their “cult”-view onto the world they are dealing with… it is challenging. It can also be one of the most satisfying type of character arcs, but you have to stick it out until the end.

It is a big reason why The Acolyte’s Heresy became a dual POV novel. I love Serena. However, in order to tell the story I wanted to tell, she had to start with a very specific, very narrow, very black-and-white view of the world – a view that would make many sophisticated readers roll their eyes perhaps. It is, I believe, well worth seeing where the journey takes Serena, but I added Kara as a POV character as a counterpoint. Kara was always going to be part of the novel because of the role she played in Serena’s transformation, but writing from Kara’s perspective every other chapter would give readers a break, while still keeping them engaged long enough to see Serena change. At least that’s the hope.

Please leave your recommendation for a cult-leaving fantasy novel in the comments! I’ll definitely add them to my to-read list.