*SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRAND PRIX DU LIVRE DE MONTREAL*
A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2023

“I spent eighteen years in a group that taught me to hate myself. You cannot be queer and a Jehovah’s Witness—it’s one or the other.”

Daniel Allen Cox grew up with firm lines around what his religion considered unacceptable: celebrating birthdays and holidays, voting in elections, pursuing higher education, and other forays into independent thought. Their opposition to blood transfusions would have consequences for his mother, just as their stance on homosexuality would for him.

But even years after whispers of his sexual orientation reached his congregation’s presiding elder, catalyzing his disassociation, the distinction between “in” and “out” isn’t always clear. Still in the midst of a lifelong disentanglement, Cox grapples with the group’s cultish tactics—from gaslighting to shunning—and their resulting harms—from simmering anger to substance abuse—all while redefining its concepts through a queer lens. Can Paradise be a bathhouse, a concert hall, or a room full of books?

With great candour and disarming self-awareness, Cox takes readers on a journey from his early days as a solicitous door-to-door preacher in Montreal to a stint in New York City, where he’s swept up in a scene of photographers and hustlers blurring the line between art and pornography. The culmination of years spent both processing and avoiding a complicated past, I Felt the End Before It Came reckons with memory and language just as it provides a blueprint to surviving a litany of Armageddons.

"An unbeliever writes his way out of a "doomsday cult," one chapter at a time. As an adolescent, Daniel Allen Cox was a dutiful Jehovah's Witness, preaching door to door even before his baptism marked a formal dedication to the movement. Then, at eighteen, whispers of his sexual orientation made their way to his congregation's presiding elder and catalyzed his disassociation from the group. But the difference between "in" and "out" is never that simple. His mother's dangerous refusal to get a blood transfusion and his stepfather's distrust of education and literacy left indelible imprints. The bonds of affection survived with some family members, while others stopped looking him in the eye. There are friends who stayed in "the truth," others who drifted, and "worldly" ones who introduced him to philosophers and birthday cake. Shunning and growing apart are sometimes indistinguishable. And not all doctrine is easily unlearned. How does one so inured to visions of Armageddon face legitmate disasters like the climate crisis? Redefining the language that held him back is sometimes the only way forward. Can Paradise be a bathhouse, a concert hall, or a room full of books? An intimate and nuanced memoir-in-essays, I Felt the End Before It Came interrogates the lifelong act of disentangling from a cult-like past and, in turn, produces a blueprint for getting out--and starting over."--