By Kate Barlow. Goose Lane, 240 pp, $19.95, softcover.

Abode of Love promises a lot. Subtitled Growing Up in a Messianic Cult, it suggests sex, death, and all kinds of mystical secrets. We can probably be forgiven for expecting parallels to Brother XII, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, or that creepy bunch of polygamists at Bountiful; few locales are more fascinating than the intersection of faith and perversity.

To her credit, Kate Barlow gives it all she’s got, but she doesn’t have much. Abode of Love dusts off a century’s worth of family secrets, only to paint the author’s late grandfather as a garden-variety religious loony and his Agapemone enclave in rural England as the most genteel cult imaginable.

Mystical secrets? Well, John Hugh Smyth-Pigott believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, a common delusion among the faithful. As for sex, the gaunt yet commanding former seaman and Salvation Army major convinced a horde of female believers that he was indeed the Messiah but did not make a harem of his flock. He did, however, maintain two concurrent “marriages”: one with his lawful wife, and one with the young and comely “Spiritual Bride” who bore his three children, including the author’s grandmother. ?Deaths in the cult compound were limited to a couple of suicides: ?one precipitated by a preexisting psychiatric condition; the other, perhaps, by jealousy.

By cult-bio standards, this is all decidedly subdued. With most of the other principals dead, Barlow has to piece her story together from her grandmother’s whispered confidences, delivered over tea and Madeira cake. For the most part, Grandma and her aged companions remain devoted to their late “Beloved” and to their beliefs; Barlow, too, recalls her childhood years in the Agapemone mansion as more golden than not, despite her mother’s struggle with alcohol.

And why not? Surrounded by servants, devoted old ladies, and the green lawns of a handsome country home, she led a rather charmed life. Charm is largely missing from her memoir, however. Between Barlow’s pedestrian writing and the stale fare of the Agapemone scandals, Abode of Love simply falls flat.