CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, by Benjamin Hale

Benjamin Hale’s “Cave Mountain” begins as many true-crime stories do: with a missing girl. In April 2001, 6-year-old Haley Zega got separated from her family in the Buffalo National River Wilderness in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

Haley’s disappearance led to “the largest search-and-rescue mission in Arkansas history,” as authorities began to fear that she’d been abducted. But Haley was not kidnapped, or killed, or even harmed. She was found two days later, two miles away from where she’d gone missing, having simply gotten lost.

Though not itself a crime story, the incident clearly holds great significance for the author, a fiction writer who teaches at Bard and Columbia, and who is Haley’s cousin. Though he was in high school in Colorado at the time and not involved in the search, for him the memory recalls “the way things were in that brief period of time book-ended by the end of the Cold War … and the constitutional crisis of the 2000 presidential election.” Much of the book is steeped in nostalgia for this “never-such-innocence-again era.”

Haley’s disappearance serves as Hale’s personal way into the account of a horrific crime committed very near the spot where his cousin went missing. In 1978, two members of a small religious cult known as the Church of God in Christ Through the Holy Spirit, Inc. murdered one of their own, a 3-year-old girl whom Hale calls Bethany, because their teenage prophet claimed God had told him that “Bethany was ‘anathema’ and had to die.”

“Anathema” was the cult’s term for anyone who didn’t follow their highly specific interpretation of Christianity. They shot the girl eight times and buried her in a garbage bag stuffed into a bucket.

The author’s connections to this tragedy go beyond the geographical. Bethany’s mother, Lucy, who was a member of the cult and may or may not have been complicit in her killing, would later become friends with Haley’s grandmother Joyce, who’d taken Haley hiking that day in 2001 and was the last person to see her before she disappeared. Despite that case’s positive outcome, Joyce remained racked by guilt — a pain Lucy understood all too well. And Hale himself developed a friendship with Mark Harris, the teen prophet who ended up spending 40 years in prison.

Hale dives into the region’s history, including the Nixon administration’s forced displacement of residents via eminent domain in order to build a reservoir, to establish the “longstanding tensions between local residents of the area and the government, which they see as meddlesome, untrustworthy and incompetent.”

More relevantly, he provides some context about the rise of cults and religious and political extremism in America in the past century; but his version of political insight consists of bad-faith contrasts between the “extremely delicate constant censorious moral paranoia” of his classroom at Bard and the people he meets in Arkansas. “After that suffocating environment,” he writes of his mask-wearing, scarf-knitting, emotional-support-poodle-needing students, “my God was it a relief sometimes to be among the roughs, sounding their barbaric yawp.”

Repetition is inevitable, even necessary, in a work of nonfiction involving multiple story lines, but Hale reiterates some details too often, or too identically. He block-quotes his sources liberally in lengthy excerpts from personal interviews, email and text correspondences, court records, self-published memoirs and news articles, some of whose language he repeats either verbatim or with uncomfortable similarity in his own wording. For example, he reports three different times, once in a quote from a news article and twice in his own paraphrasing, that the police confiscated from Mark Harris’s cult “22 firearms” and around “2,000 rounds of ammunition.”

These repetitions, as well as Hale’s incorporation of so many threads that are irrelevant to the main one, start to feel like the author’s attempts to mask the fact that the cult crime story didn’t quite provide him enough material for a full book. The result is a mess of narratives and ideas, and as the pages turn it becomes clear they won’t gel into a satisfying whole.

CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks | By Benjamin Hale | Harper | 287 pp. | $30