I loved the premise of this book, but I had a hard time connecting with the writing style so it took me a while before I got really into the story.

Faith is a tricky construct, its very existence resisting any attempt to question its foundation. Once it is gone, the faithless can become even more consumed with what they had, channeling their untethered grief onto new fixations.

R.O. Kwon’s arresting debut novel, “The Incendiaries,” dissects these struggles to fill the void left by the loss of faith or belief — whether related to love, family or God.

Will, a lapsed Christian, finds solace and renewal in his carefree college relationship with Phoebe. But she is weighed down with guilt over the death of her mom and falls under the sway of John Leal, a religious extremist and cult leader who claims to have done time in a North Korean prison. Now Phoebe is gone and may be responsible for a series of bombings at abortion clinics.

Chapter headings alternate from Will to Phoebe to John, but they all spring from the mind of Will as he tries to make sense of his now broken life — or as he puts it, to recapture the thing that he most wants to recapture but which is no longer available. He is talking about Phoebe, but he could also be talking about his faith.

What drives Phoebe — and connects her to John — is both more mysterious and more concrete, choices made and actions taken or not taken.

Kwon’s kinetic writing has an incredibly polished coarseness to it, with an assortment of sentence types and fragments keeping the reader off-balance and propelled forward. Her story seems to exist in a vacuum, almost devoid of branding or cultural signifiers and with little concern for specific detailed environs. And she is so good that you become enmeshed. The only way out is to keep turning the pages.

“The Incendiaries” opens with a chapter in the point of view of Will, an ex-Bible student fresh from apostasy,trying to place Phoebe, the girl she fell in love with, in the aftermaths of a terrorist act by a cult. It is followed by a chapter of the origin story of the cult leader, John Leal. Kidnapped and imprisoned in North Korea, his so-called moment of enlightenment is just plain unsettling: “Some people needed leading. In or out of the gulag, they craved faith. But think if the tyrant had been as upright as his disciples trusted him to be. The heights he’d have achieved, if he loved them.” Then the next chapter jumps to John Leal’s would-be disciple, Phoebe, who is giving her first group confession in the cult circle.

The chapters are brief and follow each other in no distinct timeline. Phoebe’s chapters are not directly in her narration but more like Will’s memory fragments of her as a college party girl seduced into a cult. John Leal’s chapters increasingly becomes sermon-like bursts. His declaration that “faith is not a gift” but a “...hard-won reward, battle spoils he wrested from the heaped debris.”, gives the reader a peek to the psyche of the cult that perpetrates violence in the name of God. The points of view of both Phoebe and John Leal have a measured distance from the reader. The reader is most intmate with Will as the reader follows the story through him. He is obssessed with Phoebe, thereby the reader becomes obssessed with her: “Privation is a lust; isolation, desire. I craved what she withheld. I always wanted to know more about how it felt, being Phoebe.”

There is an undercurrent of love triangle among the three central characters. Will is in love with Phoebe, Phoebe in turn is smitten by John Leal’s assured manner. As a former Christian missionary, Will is confident that he knows the inner workings of faith peddling. He plunges into the cult with Phoebe in the high hopes of exposing John Leal for the charlatan that he is. “The girl I loved was in a cult – and that’s what it is, I thought, a cult. It was a problem, but I'd solve it, because I was intelligent." Phoebe’s seduction to the cult is seen mostly through Will’s male gaze. As a reader, I felt robbed of her emotions and it is as if Will objectified her as a prize to be won over. Will’s arrogance slowly spiral into desperation as John Leal’s grip on Phoebe proved to be a force to reckon with. Like in this scene with shocking and brilliant undertones of cuckolding, Will watched in utter revulsion when Phoebe allowed John to raid her bag: “He dipped his fingers into the bag’s opal slit. The bright satin lining showed. I’d have liked to stop him, but she let it happen.”

“The Incendiaries” is a book that both impressed and perplexed me. I appreciate the lyrical quality of it’s prose and it’s rich imagery. I finished the book in one sitting which is a great testament to how compelling the book is. But overall, the style is too cerebral and complex for my taste. There are so many blankspaces that I needed to fill and figure out — like placing the scenes in a timeline with chapters without date stamps and not arranged chronologically. Up until the end, Phoebe remained a teasing mystery. I’m pretty sure there are metaphors in the book that I did not get or catch. Did the characters feel not human because they are mere embodiments of intangible things like loss, fanaticism and obsession? This begs a re-read and a re-examination but I’d rather pick up the next book on my TBR than to overthink a book that clearly wants to remain under the cloak of ambiguity.

When Will comes to Edwards University at Noxhurst, he has a lot of things to hide from his fellow student: he does not come from a prestigious background, quite the opposite with his mother an addict and his father bullying the family, he is ashamed of his constant lack of money and the fact that he left a Christian college since he lost his faith is also something he’d rather keep for himself. When he meets Phoebe, he immediately falls for the girl of Korean descent. Soon they cannot live one without the other, but they both keep some things for themselves. Phoebe, too, has things to hide but the feeling of having to share them is growing inside her. It is John Leal and his group where she feels confident enough to talk about her past. But the enigmatic leader is not just after the well-being of his disciples and it does not take too long until he comes between Will and Phoebe.

R.O. Kwon’s debut is a rather short read which nevertheless tackles quite a number of very relevant topics: love and loss, faith and cult, abuse and how to deal with it and last but not least abortion. A lot of issues for such a novel and thus, for my liking, some were treated a bit too superficially and I would have preferred less.

In the centre of the novel, we have the two protagonists Phoebe and Will who, at the first glance, couldn’t hardly be more different than they are. But when looking closer at them, it is obvious what brings them together: as children and teenagers, they had a kind of constant in their lives which gave them orientation and lead them. For Phoebe, it was music, for Will, his Christian believe. When they grew older and more independent, they lost that fixed point and now as students they are somehow orbiting around campus searching for their identity and guidance.

Opposing them is the charismatic leader of the Jejah group. The way he precedes is quite easy to see through from the outside, but it also clearly illustrates why he can be that successful nonetheless. He offers to Phoebe exactly what she needs at that moment and thus it is not too complicated to put a spell on her. John always remains a bit mysterious, but there is no need to reveal all about him, that’s just a part of being a strong leader of a cult, keeping some mystery and fog around you.

“The Incendiaries” is one of the most anticipated novels of 2018 and I was also immediately intrigued by the description. I definitely liked Kwon’s style of writing a lot, it is lively and eloquent. Also the development of the plot and her characters are quite convincing. However, I think she could have gone into more depth, especially towards to end.

R. O. Kwon's debut novel is an amazing literary achievement. The prose is confident, lyrical, haunting, and the characters are brilliantly realized. Kwon's story looks at so many things—religion, class, extremism, gender roles—but to me the central theme is the ways in which we form personal narratives, both how we attempt to invent ourselves and how we see (or fail to see) the others in our lives. I found the whole thing just riveting. Kwon is a major talent, and this book heralds a bright future and a career to watch.