We Burn Daylight: A Novel

by Bret Anthony Johnston

Overview

An epic novel of star-crossed lovers set in a doomsday cult on the Texas prairie that asks: What would you sacrifice for the person you love?

“Symphonic and suspenseful . . . In an epic act of empathy, Bret Anthony Johnston inhabits every point of view, from doomed devotees to perplexed law enforcement.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March

Waco, Texas, 1993. People from all walks of life have arrived to follow the Lamb’s gospel—signing over savings and pensions, selling their homes and shedding marriages. They’ve come here to worship at the feet of a former landscaper turned prophet who is preparing for the End Times with a staggering cache of weapons. Jaye’s mother is one of his newest and most devout followers, though Jaye herself has suspicions about the Lamb’s methods—and his motives.

Roy is the youngest son of the local sheriff, a fourteen-year-old boy with a heart of gold and a nose for trouble who falls for Jaye without knowing of her mother’s attachment to the man who is currently making his father’s life hell. The two teenagers are drawn to each other immediately and completely, but their love may have dire consequences for their families. The Lamb has plans for them all—especially Jaye—and as his preaching and scheming move them closer and closer to unthinkable violence, Roy risks everything to save Jaye.

Based on the true events that unfolded thirty years ago during the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, Bret Anthony Johnston’s We Burn Daylight is an unforgettable love story, a heart-pounding literary page turner, and a profound exploration of faith, family, and what it means to truly be saved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399590122
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/30/2024
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	131,179
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Remember Me Like This and the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation, and The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning and is the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Texas, Johnston is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.

Read an Excerpt

The White Horse

January 1993

Roy

In those raw first weeks of 1993, before my family broke apart and before the March fires, before the world turned its lurid attention our way and before her and before everything else that changed me, I was fourteen years old and learning to pick locks. I could open car doors with wire hangers, school lockers with a pocketknife, and almost anything else with tools my brother had sent me. Mason had been an infantry corporal in the marines, but he’d stayed in Iraq after the war to work as a contractor. He’d just turned twenty-one. We hadn’t seen him in years, and although he was supposed to return home in the fall, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining a future without him. Occasionally, when I struggled with a difficult lock, I’d pretend Mason was trapped on the other side of the door and his safety depended on my opening it in time. Sometimes I saved him, sometimes not.

My parents didn’t know about Mason’s tools or the pillowcase full of locks under my bed or the hours I spent picking when I should have been sleeping or studying. My mother was a hospice nurse then and my father was the high sheriff of McLennan County. Their minds were on graver subjects. At supper, one of us would say grace and then we’d tell a little bit about our days, hers tending to the infirm and his at the sheriff’s office and mine at school. We weren’t a family of bean-spillers or bucket-mouths. We curated our lives, gave each other wide berths. They knew Rosie had dumped me over Christmas vacation, but not that I’d stopped catching the bus from school to avoid seeing her on Isaac Garza’s lap the whole ride. And I knew my parents, who claimed not to smoke, shared cigarettes in the backyard when something rattled them at their jobs or with Mason. But none of this came up at the table. We just listened to the sounds of our forks and knives, our glasses being lifted and put down. We asked each other to pass the fried okra or the jar of tartar sauce. We said how good it would be when Mason came home, speculated on what he’d want to eat and do first. We made plans for the happier times ahead. This was how innocent we were, how gullible. This was Waco.


On the Lamb

Podcast Episode 12

Guest: Sheriff Elias “Eli” Moreland (retired)

Recorded: July 2024

Waco–McLennan County Central Library

Waco, Texas

Thank you for coming on. Ever since starting the podcast, I’ve wanted my listeners to hear your perspective. You were sheriff of McLennan County until 1993. Sammy Gregson was your deputy. Your son was—

Sammy had a bead on what was coming before I did. I’ll give him that. I’ll keep the rest of my opinions to myself.

Understood.

I’ve been away some thirty years. Down in Camp Verde now. Most days it’s still too close.

I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in the library.

If you want to hear what all I have to say, I’m going to smoke. I’m just as pleased to get back on the road and miss the traffic. Your call.

I’ll see if I can scare you up an ashtray.

See if you can scare up a couple.


Roy

We lived on the western edge of town where the Blackland Prairie gave way to wetlands. Acres of scrub brush and bluestem grass stretched between us and our neighbors. Our house was a two-bedroom ranch with a sagging fence. Root-buckled driveway, wood paneling, an avocado-green kitchen counter and matching phone mounted to the wall. My room was in the back corner of the house, north-facing, with matted brown carpet. Mason and I had shared it, but after he enlisted, I just used his bed as a place for my folded clothes because my dresser drawers were stuck shut. I had two windows and a television my parents bought cheap from the Olde Towne Motel when it went under. On my walls were posters of the Houston Oilers and The Terminator and a monster truck doing a backflip; Mason’s wall was covered by a huge Semper Fi banner. I’d been planning to change my side up over Christmas vacation, to hang manlier posters and rearrange my furniture, but after Rosie broke things off, it didn’t seem worth the bother.

Mason called on holidays and, if he could, every third Sunday; he used a satellite phone that made him sound even farther away than he was, like his words were echoing toward us from the past. He rarely sent photographs and letters, but when a new one arrived, my mother pinned it to the fridge with fruit-shaped magnets. More than once I’d come into the kitchen to find her rereading what he’d written. She seemed to be searching for a hidden meaning, some clue she’d overlooked. That Mason stayed in-country after his deployment had wounded her. She saw it as tempting fate, but also an affront: He’d had the opportunity to return to us, and he’d declined. I viewed it that way, too, and despite the tacit silences in our house, I worried one of us would cop to our bitterness. Or one of us would say something we’d regret if he didn’t come home. If she hadn’t heard me behind her in the kitchen, I’d ease out of the doorway and close myself in my room; I’d pull a random lock from the pillowcase and make myself crack it before venturing back into the kitchen. If she did hear me, we’d pretend she was upset about one of her patients.

“Mr. Raybourn might be glory bound soon,” she said one evening in early January. I’d come into the kitchen for some milk and found her wiping her eyes. She opened the fridge and squatted behind the door to gather herself.

“He has the wiener dog,” I said.

“That’s him.”

“We’ve never had one of those.”

Our pets always came from my mother’s patients. Sometimes their owners wrote her into their wills, sometimes the surviving family guilted her into taking the animal. We’d had as many as four dogs and three cats at one time. We’d had a blue macaw and a pair of box turtles. When she wasn’t working, my mother was finding homes for left-behind creatures. Forever homes, she called them. She placed ads in the paper, contacted veterinarians and ranchers, cajoled friends. She’d given goats to the 4-H club at my school, an aquarium of impossibly bright fish to the museum downtown, and an elderly hound to my friend Coop’s mother, though it didn’t last long. If she couldn’t find homes for the animals, we carted them out to my grandparents. They had land near San Saba and took in what others wouldn’t. That January, we were down to a black-and-white cat named Panda. She disappeared for days on end, and though we hadn’t had her long, her absence made the house feel lifeless.

“Mason likes wiener dogs,” I said, not because it was true but because hearing my brother’s name could buoy my mother’s spirits.

“Does he?” She took a beer from the fridge and started hunting for the bottle opener in the drawer. The clock on the wall ticked, ticked, ticked. My mother had gotten it as a grocery store promotion a while back; it had songbirds in place of numbers. She said, “Then he’ll be tickled come September. Yes, sir, he’ll be happy as a puppy with two tails.”


On the Lamb

Podcast Episode 12

Guest: Sheriff Elias “Eli” Moreland (retired)

Recorded: July 2024

Waco–McLennan County Central Library

Waco, Texas

They don’t have any ashtrays.

I’ll make do.

If someone from the library—

I was good to those people, even-handed. If there was word of some trouble, I’d call Perry and tell him to come in and we’d get it sorted. Civil-like. Aboveboard. I sent CPS out there, too. Clean reports. Those folks had their beliefs, but laws weren’t broken.

We thought of them as a different country, a territory with its own customs. They kept to themselves mostly. When they ventured into town, they were courteous and quiet. Never panhandled or pestered you with leaflets or spoke in tongues. They were friendly. I was trying to stop the raid right up until it happened.

Editorial Reviews

05/20/2024

A Texas teen tries to rescue his crush from a Branch Davidians–like cult in Johnston’s gripping sophomore novel (after Remember Me Like This). In 1993 Waco, rebellious 14-year-old Roy, son of the local sheriff, meets California girl Jaye Carroll and falls hard. Jaye’s mother, Marie, brought her there after meeting Perry “Lamb” Cullen at a gun expo and agreeing to join his flock of disciples in Texas. Jaye, who’s now living with Marie on Lamb’s compound, is skeptical of his doomsday prophesies and unnerved by his stockpiling of weapons. When she tells Roy about the obsessive attention Lamb pays to her, Roy enlists his dad’s help to rescue her, setting the stage for a Shakespearean tragedy of star-crossed lovers. The propulsive plot, which builds to a violent raid on the compound following the sheriff’s discovery of Lamb’s arsenal, is juxtaposed with colorful excerpts from a present-day podcast called On the Lamb, featuring interviews with former cult members and their loved ones including Jaye’s father, who rails about the “pissant pedophile” who “cost me a family.” Amid the plethora of stories about cults, this stands out. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A magnificent portrait of how even as the rivets of our republic are popping loose, plumes of beauty still rise from the soil upon which so much wrong continues to repeat. I read We Burn Daylight in a sitting, devoured it in a breath. It’s an amazement.”—Rick Bass, author of For a Little While and Why I Came West
 
“This gorgeously rendered novel asks many questions about humanity: Who do we follow and why? Who decides what we believe? Johnston allows curious onlookers inside the compound and the hearts of Waco in a perfect marriage of history and art.”—Booklist, starred review
 
“Amid the plethora of stories about cults, this stands out.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“A moving and epic tale. I would expect no less from Johnston.”—CrimeReads
 
“Symphonic and suspenseful, We Burn Daylight reimagines events at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. In an epic act of empathy, Bret Anthony Johnston inhabits every point of view, from doomed devotees to perplexed law enforcement, and even manages to infuse the tragedy with moments of poignant, very human, humor.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March

“A colossal achievement of We Burn Daylight is that it demands to be read in a breathless rush, and afterward, demands deepest and most private reflection.”—Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning

“With bravery and compassion, Bret Anthony Johnston takes on a watershed moment in American history, cutting through the myth and messiainism to reveal a story that is profoundly—and tragically—human.”—Cristina Henriquez, author of The Great Divide

“Fascinating characters and an engaging, authentic style give We Burn Daylight a fine shot at the Great American Novel sweepstakes. Few people can bring Texas to life on the page like Bret Anthony Johnston.”—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

“Yes, it is spellbinding. Yes, it is explosive. Yes, it is a must-read book. An ineffable work of fiction, We Burn Daylight is full of characters grappling with the ways loss and language and space and desire make it so hard to speak not to the loss but to each other.”—Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit: A Novel

“A magnificent portrait of how even as the rivets of our Republic are popping loose, plumes of beauty still rise from the soil upon which so much wrong continues to repeat. I read We Burn Daylight in a sitting, devoured it in a breath. It's an amazement.”—Rick Bass, author of For a Little While and Why I Came West
 
“Fast-moving and emotionally sophisticated . . . Johnston adeptly shifts between mundane moments and episodes of vivid drama. . . . An evocative reimagining of the Romeo and Juliet story set amid the catastrophic collapse of a religious cult.”—Kirkus Review, starred review

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-17
Young lovers struggle to overcome the powerful forces working to separate them.

Inspired by the events surrounding the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Johnston’s second novel is a fast-moving and emotionally sophisticated account of the dangers of religious extremism and the tender story of two teenagers caught up in the tragedy that ensues when sectarianism collides with the larger world. Not long after 14-year-old Jaye Carroll and her mother move in early 1993 from California to the millenarian community near Waco controlled by Perry Cullen—known to his followers as “the Lamb”—she meets her contemporary, Roy Moreland, son of the second-generation county sheriff, at a gun show. Jaye is smart, self-aware, and under no illusions about Cullen’s true motivations, while Roy is mainly smitten to discover his first true love. In the early days, relations between Cullen and the surrounding community are peaceful, if coolly distant, but as suspicions grow that he’s accumulating a massive arsenal while sexually abusing young women under the guise of faith, the apocalyptic clash for which the Lamb has been preparing his followers gradually becomes inevitable. The brief chapters that alternate between Jaye’s and Roy’s points of view heighten this rising tension. Interspersed with their narrative are excerpts from a podcast three decades later that features interviews with surviving cult members, law enforcement officials, and others familiar with the tragedy at the ranch. Johnston adeptly shifts between mundane moments and episodes of vivid drama, culminating in the assault on Cullen’s compound that rapidly turns nightmarish for both sides. Even as the bullets fly, a protracted standoff ensues, and the novel moves toward its devastating climax, he keeps his deeply sympathetic protagonists clearly in focus. He also gracefully summons images of the rugged Texas countryside that provides the setting for a novel that beautifully evokes “the hubris, the naivete, the irrationality of love.”

An evocative reimagining of the Romeo and Juliet story set amid the catastrophic collapse of a religious cult.

Kirkus Reviews