The phone rang; it was our aunt divulging how she had just found her husband dead in their basement. He had used his belt, tied it to the joists, and then hung himself with it.

A year later, a teenager from our neighborhood positioned his hunting rifle below his chin and then bang - his life was over.

After him, a fellow cadet went to the train tracks with a pistol to end his suffering. Others from our town, descended into hard drug use. Several would overdose early in their lives. One such individual was my older brother. A week before he died, we got together and had a long talk about these suicides, the connections between them all. He warned me, if you ever figured out what was really going on, to be careful with whom you talk too.

The first half of this journey begins when a loving father and mother adopted Richard. Sadly, she was a pedophile and an adulteress who became a prostitute and a sexual predator. Just as Richard was about to reach adulthood, his life would take a turn for the worse. Abducted by a secret occult society, he would learn how we are all sheep in the midst of wolves. For most of the people in this cult like collective - there is no escape.

This amazing and intense memoir is impossible to read without coming away profoundly shaken and forever changed.