Book Review: Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz
April 4, 2025
For the most part, memoirs aren’t really my jam, but this one really captured my attention. Maybe it was because my sister and I watched all the way through OTH a couple years ago, or maybe it is because this has so much about her life in a cult, but I gobbled this one up. Plus, if you listen to the audio book, Bethany Joy is reading the book herself, which is such a treat.
We follow the story of young Bethany Joy and her rise to fame. We see her in her early roles and the struggle she faces with being a young woman in Hollywood who desperately wants to find her place and be taken seriously. When she finds a group of likeminded people who are hosting a house church, she jumps on the opportunity to grow in her faith while growing in her career. But what started as an innocent and lovely group of Jesus lovers, creeped into the land of manipulation and control after a new leader joined the group and started changing things. Small things at first, but over time, he grew to control the whole group and their every movement. Bethany ends up in a loveless marriage with a controlling and violent man and her entire savings are depleted to pennies due to the group being in charge of her funds. How can she get away from these people that she has grown to love and trust above everyone else, and does she really want to? Is it truly that bad?
I think this book is so important because it is hard to see from the outside how easy it is to get into a cult and how, like the analogy go the frog in the boiling pot, you really cannot see how terrible things are while you are in the middle of it. It is so easy to get wrapped up in everything these people, who you love and trust and have done so much for you and your faith, are doing. We often forget that it is not, more often than not, already a cult when people join, but something that is built around them through manipulation and control. I would suggest this book, especially if you are wanting to dive into Libby Audiobooks and listen to it from the mouth of the author herself.
