White's Collection Management in School Library Media Centers described the book as a critical and sensitive analysis on the effects cults can have on their converts and family members.

McConnell's Stepping Over described the work as an insightful seminal study, which could have been written specifically with regard to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.

[3] J. Milton Yinger, writing for Contemporary Sociology, notes that Stoner and Parke seem inconsistent about some of their book's details, like the range of people who enter cults.

[5] W. L. Hendricks for the Journal of Church and State thinks that the book "suffers from the 'cover-all' mystique" and attempts to give a survey of too many groups to be effective.

He believes the book is "entirely preoccupied" with the dangers of cults that "break up families" and use brainwashing techniques and with what American society can and should do to "rescue and rehabilitate the alleged cultic zombie".