Reverend Temple, known colloquially as “Reverend Brother,” is a second-generation nondenominational pastor and something of an access cable television celebrity. He was also (it seems) a lingering (even age-old) source of resentment for Junie and the would-be assassin(s).3
3 The second-generation Reverend Brother (Christian) Temple was the victim of a suicide bomb detonated by someone who stood across the desk from him in his office. The desk itself is likely what saved his life. Forensic testing on human remains recovered from the scene was not entirely conclusive, but there is reason to believe they belonged to one Paul Virgil Rooks. Rooks remains a shadowy figure, given his penchant for adopting aliases and personae, and few facts are known of his life except that he seems to have lived by his wits, largely off the grid of commerce with most other people in the surrounding area. An examination of writings, most ascribed to Rooks and discovered in the dilapidated school bus that served as the Sons’ compound and headquarters, indicates that he probably claimed to possess the gifts of prophecy, conjure, and communication with the dead. In particular, Rooks’s writings suggest a marked preoccupation with the story of a local businessman named Wesley Kaye, who was prominent in the wood pulp and paper industry. Kaye’s own suicide, in 1977, via a bizarre act of self-immolation, roiled the community and still occupies a place at the forefront of the town’s collective psyche. In any event, more study examining connections between the two “oeuvres”—Junie Temple’s “Psalms” and the largely apocalyptic writing attributed to Paul Rooks—is warranted, though it is the opinion of this reviewer that any such examination will only reinforce the notion that Rooks was the most likely sole author of the Sons’ sequence of murder and mayhem, including its capstone act of perceived vengeance against the unfortunate Reverend Temple.
TJ BEITELMAN 