actress, screenwriter, and director before turning to penning novels. When she's not writing, she can be found hiking or on the beach with a good book. St. John currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and two daughters.
She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Vicious Circle, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Katherine St. John's website.“What?” Lucas asks. As he leans past me to see what I’m looking at, I catch the scent of something faintly woodsy and masculine.The Vicious Circle deals with the very human need to belong and how it can be abused by leaders with bad intentions. We follow Sveta as she travels to Mexico to pay her respects to her long-lost uncle Paul, who has just died and unexpectedly left her his entire estate, including his retreat center, Xanadu, which stands at the edge of a river deep in the Mexican jungle. The longer Sveta is at Xanadu, the more she begins to believe that the group living at the retreat center is not simply a commune, but a cult devoted to Kali, her uncle’s common-law wife, who has been running Xanadu in the two years since Paul fell ill.
“No doors,” I say, quickly stepping away from him.
Lucas rolls his eyes. “Communes. Everybody’s gotta overshare.” Responding to my quizzical look, he continues, “I lived in one when I was a teenager.”
“You did?” I ask, surprised. I’m sure he’d never mentioned that when we first met. “With your parents?”
“My mom.” I notice that the corner of his mouth turns down slightly at the mention of her. He ambles into the spacious marble and gold bath- room, which fortunately does have a door, and washes his hands in the sink, looking at me through the mirror as I do the same at the matching sink. “She and my dad got divorced when I was twelve, and she took me and my sister to live with a bunch of hippies in the foothills of the Sierras.”
“Why?”
“Good question,” he answers dryly. “I don’t know. She was always more religious than my dad, but after they divorced, she kinda went off the deep end with it, wanted to devote her life to God, live more ‘naturally.’ She sold candles she made at the farmers market outside of Oakland and met the leader of the group there—before I knew it I was living in a bunk room with fifty other kids.”
“Where was your dad?” I ask.
“In Argentina taking care of his dying mother. Had a hell of a time finding us when he got back.”
“Wow.” I dry my hands and lean against the counter facing the jacuzzi and gold-rimmed shower as Lucas splashes his face with water. I’m annoyed he’s here, but in two days’ time I’ll never see him again, and never having met anyone that grew up in an actual commune, I am curious. “What was that like, living in a commune?”
“I mean, I was a kid, so at first I thought it was awesome.”
This passage takes place just after Sveta has arrived at Xanadu with Lucas, the executor of her uncle’s will, who Sveta had a brief but memorable fling with a dozen years ago, and hasn’t spoken to since. There’s a lingering attraction between them that Sveta doesn’t want to acknowledge because she’s engaged––and also because Lucas ghosted her all those years ago.
With the discovery that the bedrooms of the villa have no doors, Sveta begins to realize that there may be more to Xanadu than meets the eye. In this scene, she learns Lucas spent time in a commune when he was younger, and he doesn’t have a favorable opinion of the lifestyle. This is something that will come up again later in the book, as Sveta and Lucas’s relationship evolves.
Even though our villain, cult leader Kali, isn’t mentioned here, I feel like the Page 69 Test really works here because this is the first time we get the sense something may be off with Xanadu, and learn that Lucas has experience with a live-in spiritual group. We also see a hint of the attraction between Lucas and Sveta that will develop over the course of the book.
Q&A with Katherine St. John.
--Marshal Zeringue
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