Scarred (Never After Series)

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I’m so glad that Sarah had the courage to go public about her experience with NXIVM, since she is a huge part of the cult’s downfall and the arrests made on their leader and other “higher ups”. But when we saw these colours and heard these sounds again parts of ourselves we’d locked away behind adult worries and adult sex and adult booze were free once more. There was a strong Gothic element to British TV output as well, with annual Ghost stories for Christmas (usually an MR James adaptation) and such downright strange shows as Dead of Night, The Stone Tape and Sapphire and Steel. If you know anything about the cult from the headlines then there is nothing new at all here, and everything is told in such a detached way.

Grange Hill could be brutal, and although it's most hard hitting stories were in the 80's when I could watch it, even in the 70's it took an unflinching look at racism, bullying and abuse that many kids could sadly relate to.I didn't really feel she ever really acknowledged the harm she caused by being a hugely successful recruiter for the organization for over a decade. The prose has the conversational feel of the (very entertaining) Twitter account that gave birth to the project, and has something of the internet forum and the saloon bar get-together about it. I spent a lot of time looking at these old PIF's (most are available online) and they are brilliant, but some, like the ones warning about paedophiles, or showing child death by electrocution or child death are pretty harrowing. I was also kind of amazed that for someone so involved with the organization and branded as part of the secret group, DOS, she was clueless to a lot of things that were going on behind the scenes.

The Feathered Serpent' sounds more like an Aztec 'Game of Thrones', '4 Idle Hands' sounds like 'The Likely Lads' for kids and is a bridge between the 'Kitchen Sink' drama of the 60's and 'Boys From The Blackstuff' in the 80's.From BookTok sensation Emily McIntire comes a dark and delicious fractured fairy tale reimagining of The Lion King. I listened to the book on audio and thought Sarah Edmondson did an excellent job narrating, with inflection and emotion. More information is available now, including the documentary, "The Vow" (at this point I've only seen the first episode).

The most irritating is that (at least in the edition I bought) somebody appears to have forgotten to complete the page reference numbering: there are far too many instances of the text advising me to “see page XX”, which is not particularly useful. But Scarred For Life has the upper hand on those Channel 4 and Channel 5 ‘weren’t the seventies aaaaawwwful? The boom in 1970s nostalgia which hangs like smog over all of us who were ‘lucky’ enough to have been children then isn’t without its problematic side. Oh and also the trippier side of Marvel Comics who, under the editorship of Roy Thomas, produced some very strange stories indeed. It’s a book to dip into rather than plough through in one sitting, which is why it’s taken me about 18 months to finish.

I suppose it's important to note that the authors are a little bit older than me, but much of what they cover was still doing the rounds in the early 80's when I was a little boy. But most importantly her determination to expose, dismantle and bringing justice against this heinous organization not only for herself but for all the women abused by Keith and other leaders.