Calgary, Alberta – August 14, 2026 – In Canadian culture, cults are often treated as distant, American, or safely in the past. In Shattered Faith, author A. L. Beck places a high-control religious group in contemporary Calgary and asks what it does to a child who never had the chance to choose it.

At the centre of the novel is Quinn, a boy born and raised in Scientology. Shattered Faith stays close to Quinn’s experience. He grows up speaking the language of stats, conditions, and Ethics as naturally as other kids talk about homework. The Church is his school, his social world, and his moral framework. The outside world exists mostly as a warning.

Scientology’s internal systems—Sec Checks, reports, conditions—are presented to Quinn as help and “tech.” On the page, they read as tools of surveillance and pressure. The more he tries to be “good,” the more he learns to doubt his instincts and treat uncertainty as a failing.

The book also shows how control reaches into Quinn’s most personal spaces. His emerging queer identity and closest relationships collide with the rigid expectations of the Church. Love and attraction become dangerous, not because of who he cares about, but because caring outside approved lines threatens his standing.

Set against a clearly Canadian backdrop, Shattered Faith suggests that vulnerability to high-control groups is not a foreign problem but a human one. Calgary’s ordinary streets contrast sharply with the upstairs world of drills, interrogations, and whispered fears.

A. L. Beck offers a grounded, character-driven look at Scientology in a local context. Shattered Faith is now available in print and digital formats.

About the Author

A. L. Beck was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in the early 1970s and raised by their maternal grandparents, who later adopted them when Beck was an adult. Beck went on to earn three degrees in literature, including a PhD, completed while caring for their aging grandparents. Their academic work has explored vampires, Catholicism, Rikki Ducornet, Pre-Raphaelite art, and especially the influence of the Catholic Church on Anne Rice.
Beck now lives in Calgary, Alberta (“Cow Town”) with their husband, four dogs, and a housemate, and enjoys gardening, animation and anime, horror, baking, and fostering dogs.