Holy Hannah

Dinski (Trying Not to Notice) delivers a trenchant tale about a religious cult, loosely based on the notorious Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple of the late 1970s. At the opening, Hannah is a once-successful tech entrepreneur with OCD issues who is isolating herself from the world. Then she runs out of money and options, and meets Noah, who is fascinated by an app she has developed called Know Me. Noah draws her into the Church of Love and Devotion, a congregation run by the charismatic, ruthless Reverend Carpenter. Hannah falls under Carpenter’s spell and begins sleeping with him. Carpenter eventually secludes the entire congregation on a private island, leading to catastrophe. In the end, Hannah, sadder but wiser, muses on the nature of belief systems, determining that they are mostly subjective—“It’s only true when enough of us believe it to be so”—but they are also, perhaps, necessary: “Someday I’ll need to pick something.” Dinski’s skillful, simple line drawings are bolstered by the clever, meta formatting: the small black volume resembles a pocket bible, complete with a yellow ribbon marker. This vivid, involving parable about the dangers of cult thinking grinds a sharp point toward the foibles of modern-day would-be gurus. [em](Oct.) [/em]