The Mosquito Coast
Allie Fox was a genius in his inventions. And his predictions of things to come were usually accurate. At least his family felt so. He hated educated people, so he taught his children at home. And regarding religion, he could only say "What a thoroughly rotten job God made of this world." And then when he claimed the United States was about to be destroyed, all his family took his word for it and fled with him to Honduras.
Charlie Fox, his oldest son, was 13 years old and the narrator of the story. And even though his father chose him to do senseless, unreasonable jobs, Charlie accepted most of Allie's complaints and forecasts. Their mother and the twin girls went along with most any of Allie's undertakings, too. Jerry, the younger brother, was the only one who claimed to hate his father.
When the family gave up all their possessions to sail to Honduras, Allie labeled themselves as "escaped prisoners" from a doomed country. But the other family on their ship were missionaries returning to Honduras and they didn't share that philosophy. So most of the natives the Foxes met in Honduras had some religious training. They were good workers in Allie's projects, but he became frustrated when they treated him as God. "They prayed at me..." he confessed to his wife.
They worshiped his Fat Boy, an invention that made tons of ice, something they'd never had before. But when the ice maker exploded and the village burned, the family was forced to leave with only the clothes on their backs. First they ended up in a lagoon and lived in a hut they'd made from driftwood. The father justified this because he claimed America had been wiped out, and "...we were the last ones left."
Then heavy rains flooded them out of the lagoon and they ended up at the missionary's small village, which was well-equipped with a lovely church, electricity, TV, a jeep and an airplane.
Allie Fox could be either persuasive or insulting to whomever he faced. The three white men who wanted to share the family's first settlement died "accidently" in his Fat Boy invention because they represented competition. And Fox's obsessive dream that he might be the last man on earth was difficult for his family to accept or deal with.
Theroux's fictional creation of a person such as Allie Fox was compelling, not necessarily because the man was to be hated by the reader, but because he was too close to reality.
The Mosquito Coast was written in 1982 and later made into a move starring Harrison Ford.