Scarred (Never After Series)

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The rest of the book covers other aspects of pop culture that fed the minds of the nation and put the fear of god (or whatever monster) up them. From Public Information films (“Sensible children! I have no power over them!”); Toys and games; Movies, where we get essays about such things as English Folk Horror, those big American horror films that they were too young to watch (The Exorcist and it’s ilk); dystopian science fiction and dark, downbeat pop movies like Stardust and Slade in Flame.

Prince Tristan Faasa was never destined for the throne. That was always his brother, Michael. The same brother responsible for both Tristan's tormented childhood and the scar that mars his face. When their father dies, Michael is set to assume the throne, and Tristan is set to steal it. The leader of a secret rebellion, Tristan will stop at nothing to end his brother's reign. But when Michael's new betrothed, Lady Sara Beatreaux arrives, Tristan finds himself in the middle of a new kind of war. The kind that begs the question of what's more important, the crown or the woman about to wear it. The book begins by looking at children’s television dramas, starting with the ITV serial Noah’s Castle, which dealt with food shortages and society breaking down in the face of civil unrest. Though adapted from a 70s novel, this was broadcast in the 80s, as if to mark the idea – at the start of the decade – that the discord in the world was here and not going away. Serials like The Tripods and The Knights of God dealt with young heroes fighting against controlling totalitarian regimes, showing that this has been a theme in young adult fiction for longer than commonly assumed. Then there were comics. Oh yes, there were comics. From Action! To 2000AD and all points inbetween, the authors lovingly recall their favourites and how much they were scared by them. There’s also a very good section on girl’s comics, which if anything were far more strange and disturbing than boys stuff (Misty anyone?). They then move on to books and the cornucopia of goodness that fed the imagination of those kids who were into horror (The Pan Book of Horror Stories); lurid pulp fiction; Dracula (you think vampires are big news now - Dracula was huge in the 70s); even down to the somewhat deranged art in kids comics by the likes of Ken Reid. Oh and also the trippier side of Marvel Comics who, under the editorship of Roy Thomas, produced some very strange stories indeed.This tell-all follows Sarah from the moment she takes her first NXIVM seminar, to the invitation she accepts from her best friend, Lauren Salzman, into DOS, to her journey toward become a key witness in the federal case against its founders This book was not a particularly easy read, in a large part for me due to how it was written. I found the CBC investigative journal program Uncover: Exposing NXIVM to be a much more entertaining dig into Sarah Edmondson's experience and easier to digest. I have yet to read Oxenberg's book on it all, but I am looking forward to eventually doing so. As we get older, the things that scared us originally begin to lose some of their power. Often they get replaced by other, more logical fears as we learn more about how the world works and understand how unlikely it is that Dracula will crawl out from under our bed and exsanguinate us while we're asleep. But the point is, there were dozens, potentially hundreds, of things that scared us, creeped us out, and gave us nightmares. And no matter how mature we think we are, no matter how grown up we get and how many years we put between us and those nightmares, they still linger down there in the depths of our subconscious, waiting to be recalled. Yes, the obvious titles are discussed, but the more under-the-radar things are just as interesting. The ‘Zammo on drugs’ storyline on Grange Hill is mentioned – but also the one about racist bullying. This section also reveals that sometimes the things a child can find the most frightening, or disturbing, are those that seem to come unexpectedly into the narrative, such the appearance of the Groke in The Moomins. You can tell this book was quite the labor of love for the two men. A lot of work went into researching, writing, and in some cases even interviewing people for the finished product. Brotherstone and Lawrence focus as much on historical information and contextualizing as they do on the scary/creepy/weird, and most every section ends with suggestions of where to go to find the particular film, board game, comic, television show, book, or whatnot should you want to experience it for yourself.

One of the things about the 70's was that it was absolutely a decade of boundary pushing. I've reflected on this in terms of cinema before - some of the most challenging, uncomfortable, and downright nasty films in history were made in the era. It's an era of relaxed censorship in media, of changing social attitudes to marginalised people, of social issues pushed to the forefront of popular culture. It's a decade of freedom for creative people, and yet they are experiencing a hangover of the peace and love era. In Britain at least the spectre of World War II is still remembered, and it is a decade of political and economical turmoil. What I think this led to was continual boundary pushing, and the impact of that was, that a lot of wonderful creative media was produced and aired - however, much of that would never get past a savvy media executive today. We live in an era of focus groups, of targeted advertising, of sensitivity. Parents today are hyper-sensitive to the media their children consume compared to in the past (not saying that is a good or bad thing).

The fact that she was responsible for bringing in hundreds of members and hundreds of thousands of dollars makes her seem even less easy to relate to. She knew exactly what she was doing, and somehow thought nothing of taking money from people for unintelligent courses that she questioned the value of. None of it makes any sense. A normal person with thinking skills would have seen the organization's fraud from the start. It was merely a money-making scheme that she benefited from as she work her way up. Like Amway or Mary Kay, only without the products. It certainly wasn’t enough to dampen my enjoyment. For much of the last few weeks my face has been plastered with the same silly grin it wore in the late 80s/early 90s when ‘Sapphire & Steel’ was released on VHS and I was able to revisit one of the best TV shows ever made. And ‘Scarred for Life’ has assured me that I am not alone in that opinion: not for nothing are theirs the first eyes gazing enigmatically from the cover. I didn't know much about NXIVM until I read this book. I was surprised to learn how many men were a part of this cult, because the news coverage described it as a sex cult with famous actresses involved. More information is available now, including the documentary, "The Vow" (at this point I've only seen the first episode). Sarah Edmondson was in the NXIVM cult for 12 years before she paid attention to all the red flags. For much of the book, she's explaining the teachings of the cult...many that actually make sense and sound like self-help learnings. I wonder if writing the book this way is her way to show HOW she fell for the BS. It wasn't until she was branded in a secret, nude, blind-folded, women-only darkened ceremony that she "woke up" and started working to get out.

But other society fears – closer to home – also found their way onto the TV. The fear of unemployment and the increase of poverty are examined, with TV documentaries covering it and dramas and comedies dealing with the people experiencing it. The way that race and disability were covered began to change as well, and the book contains sections on the new wave of drama dealing with these topics; the American concept of the ‘Very Special Episode’ is also explained, where sitcoms dealt with non-funny subject matter. Imagínate que un día tu vida es tan miserable que sientes que no hay nada que llene tu vacío, que sientes que eres un fracaso entonces te encuentras con un grupo de gente que te dice que el problema está en ti y sólo en ti, que debes dejar ciertos patrones que llevas cargando desde pequeño para poder vivir la vida que quieres y entonces ¡boom! crees haber encontrado la respuesta al existo, pero de repente esa misma gente te dice que hay ciertas limitaciones y que debes obedecer a cierto líder, comienza a controlar tu vida y a usar todos tus secretos en tu contra, imagínate que tienes taaan normalizado ese control que terminas marcada por las iniciales de un narcisista psicópata y tú ni siquiera te puedes dar cuenta... Pues eso fue lo que pasó Sarah en nxivm y muchas otras chicas que fueron engañadas y adoctrinadas por una secta que les prometió existo pero lo único que logró fue arruinarles las vida. 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. All of this is recalled in loving detail by the authors along with recommendations of what to watch and how to watch (either DVD or YouTube. Thank god for YouTube!). Pirating from all sorts of existing philosophies including Scientology, The Four Agreements, Dianetics, the martial arts system of growth, and ultimately components of Hinduism and the Klu Klux Klan, Keith Raniere developed a complex university of human potential. Most of the concepts are actually pretty stellar ideas—credit to the people who originally devised them—and had NXIVM continued in a direction for good, it could have done some pretty great things, much like Hitler, but we all know how that story ends. To be a child is to live in a state of fear most of the time. The fear of being lost, of being bullied, of making your parents angry, of being told off, of getting into trouble at school. This sense of dread can be amplified by the media/popular culture around them. There are the things that you know are meant to be scary, the things that are more scary than you thought they would be and the things that are scary that you didn’t think would be.Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.” Don’t Call It A Cult by Sarah Berman (journalist’s reports of various women who have escaped NXIVM and their experiences in the cult) TV takes up nearly half the book, such is the rich vein of brilliance to be mined. Because it wasn’t only kid’s TV that put the willies up the nation, adults were treated to such downbeat fare as Callan, Play For Today, Gangsters and all those peculiarly British dystopias such as Doomwatch, Survivors and Quatermass. No wonder it was a troubled decade. We were basically being told the future was rubbish! But in amongst all this there was some gloriously low budget, but highly imaginative, prime time Sci-Fi to be had as well. UFO, Space 1999 and Blake’s 7 to name but a few. Plus there’s a whole section devoted to Doctor Who (of course!) Captive by Catherine Oxenburg (a mother’s account of rescuing her daughter from sex slavery in NXIVM) I have read about different cults before, always wondering how the hell people managed to allow others to so fully control them that they succombed to brainwashing, abuse, and even death. With NXIVM, I can completely understand how it was able to collect so many followers and for so long under the guise of a personal growth and empowerment groups...because what human isn’t constantly seeking that?

Scarred is Sarah Edmondson's compelling memoir of her recruitment into the NXIVM cult, the 12 years she spent within the organization (during which she enrolled over 2,000 members and entered DOS—NXIVM's "secret sisterhood"), her breaking point, and her harrowing fight to get out, to expose Keith Raniere and the leadership, to help others, and to heal. Complete with personal photographs, Scarred is also an eye-opening story about abuses of power, female trust and friendship, and how sometimes the search to be "better" can override everything else. This confused author makes all sorts of bad life decisions, then blames the people she trusted in. While what those leaders did was eventually deemed illegal, it's also tough to feel sympathy for her because at any point over 12 years she could have walked away. But until she was branded she didn't. Well. What a crazy world this is. I had read some news articles a few years ago about someone supposedly known from TV, an actrice helped this man and they were in a cult. T here’s a terrible habit, when looking at the culture of a decade, to not go into any depth; it’s an easy task to just laugh at the fashions, or assume that referring to a handful of common references will cover it. The 1980s in the UK were a time of unemployment, poverty, social unrest, and political divisions – not just everybody wearing red braces, having fax machines and watching John Hughes movies…Most of the book is deadly dull as she details every step of her naive journey. The final chapters, as she tries to leave the group after she is branded, are the most interesting. But the fact that it took her agreeing to be branded to finally see the light means that there was something seriously wrong with her beyond the Nexium group. And she had many chances to walk away from it--instead she succumbed to more peer pressure and placed herself on the table.