"The Shelter Cycle"

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is The Shelter Cycle, which concerns the end of the world in Montana in 1990, among other things.  His previous novel, My Abandonment, has won an Alex Award, the Utah Book Award, and been published in Germany, Turkey and France. He is also the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This Is the Place, and Carnival Wolves, and a story collection, The Unsettling.

Rock applied the Page 69 Test to The Shelter Cycle and reported the following:

I actually like this page; it gives a person a decent sense of what is afoot. It’s a piece of a document written by one of the characters, Francine, recounting her childhood in the Church Universal and Triumphant, an (actual and historical) extreme church in Montana that believed the world might end in 1990. In this page, the Messenger, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, makes a sudden appearance in the children’s classroom. The Messenger was the one person alive who could communicate with the Ascended Masters; she “dictated” their wisdom that came to her at a frequency so powerful that it would blow a regular person’s body apart.

From page 69:

[The Messenger] traveled in the higher planes…energy radiated from her, a vibration that wasn’t hot or cold, just a shiver in your blood circling in you with more electricity, the power growing…. The Messenger told us that her heart was great enough to burn up all the darknesses in our hearts.

This page ends with the Messenger’s assertion about two of the children, my book’s protagonists: “She told us that our paths were all intertwined. The two of you, she said. All intertwined. You must help each other in every way you can.”

Learn more about the book and author at Peter Rock's website.

The Page 69 Test: My Abandonment.

--Marshal Zeringue