When I finished work on my new book, The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult , I assumed I wouldn’t read anything more about cults for a good long while to come. I’d loved writing about the group in my book, the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, but five years in the weeds with their particular brand of extremism was enough for me, thank you very much. Article continues after advertisement And yet when I read Benjamin Hale’s latest book, Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks , I found my appetite for the subject matter renewed. Cave Mountain is, in part, about a bizarre Missouri cult responsible for the murder of a three-year-old girl in 1978; and as I immersed myself in Ben’s propulsive, vivid writing, I felt the familiar pull of the themes that drew me to The Oracle’s Daughter in the first place. Last week Ben and I exchanged email correspondence about our respective books, and how we approached the shared subject matter.…