Satan's High Priest

Recounts the story of Joseph Warren, a small-town businessman who led a double life as a satanic cult leader, in a tale based on interviews with his family members and cult survivors. Reprint.

Intended as a hard-hitting exposé of secret cult practices in America, Satan's High Priest attempts to straddle a fine line between fiction and journalism--a line best left to the likes of skilled tightrope walkers such as Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe. The book doesn't really succeed at either, though the story of Joseph Warren's sadistic rise and fall as the "Great One" of a Southern cult is somewhat morbidly fascinating when read as a story that "could happen anywhere."

Warren, in his role as high priest to the unnamed coven, delights in rapes and murders, bestiality and necrophilia, and happily involves his entire circle of acquaintances in the small town of Lathrop (the state remains unidentified) in his "shows." To describe the atrocities of this multigenerational death cult, Judith Spencer places men like Warren and his father, Dexter, in their proper perspectives as outwardly normal, well-respected men of commerce. Warren and his brother, Linc, inherit their father's mortuary and dry-goods businesses, and while many of their customers are fellow cult members, life goes on as normal outside the pentagram; Spencer attempts to depict men who would casually gossip as they buy nails or coffee or a pair of boots, after having raped and ritually sacrificed children the night before. The problem for Spencer is that none of this particularly makes sense. She describes dozens of murders, yet offers no particulars or dates or corroborating evidence. Lathrop and Joseph Warren exist in a sort of deep concealing fog, impossible to pin down. Still, despite any doubts as to the book's veracity, it works as a somewhat elevated example of supermarket-tabloid-variety shock journalism. --Tjames Madison