Читать книгу Ice Blue - Anne Stuart - Страница 3

The True Realization Fellowship and its leader, the Shirosama, is very loosely inspired by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan and their charismatic leader, Shoko Asahara. Most people remember the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subways twelve years ago, when terrorist attacks were less common, and there’s something about cults, Jonestown and the like, that are macabre and fascinating. Believe it or not, the real characters were just as badly behaved as my fictional ones—sometimes more so. I simply used Aum as a jumping-off point to create my own delusional madman.

For those who want to explore the story further, there are a number of excellent books, including Destroying the World to Save It by Robert Jay Lifton, A Poisonous Cocktail? by Ian Reader and Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami.