Being back in grad school, I just do not have the time to read like I used to. However, last week on a retreat, I knocked out two religious horror books I had been meaning to read for a while and since they were both thematically similar, I figured I’d dump the reviews here.
American Rapture
This is juuuuust clearing the 4-star threshold, mostly because I liked C.J. Leede’s writing, even if her plotting and pacing could frustrate. I also get easily annoyed with survival tales of moving quickly from one disaster to the next without stopping to breathe. And I would have liked some Catholic mysticism that the book’s beautiful cover alludes to (and never really delivers). However, what I DID like was the protagonist Sophie and her feverish quest to understand her body amidst the ground shifting beneath her. Many panned this book because it constantly talked about how horny Sophie was. To which I say: do you remember being a teenager? Like Xander from BtVS said: linoleum puts me in the mood for sex. And with the end of the world coming? After having led a sheltered, repressed life? Leede being raw and honest about Sophie’s struggles was the best part of the book and saved it from being an otherwise meh read.
This is My Body
This one banged. Ostensibly about exorcisms, it’s more about religious trauma and how that gets passed down, literally and physically. We wear trauma on our bodies and sometimes, we cannot help but show it. That trauma can sometimes be passed by organized religion and Lindsay King-Miller does a great job of teasing that out for a moving, poignant story. There is also a queer Catholic character and their faith doesn’t feel tokenized, it feels lived in, which gave the book a deeper sense of grappling with faith even while it questions and criticizes its gatekeepers. Wasn’t always a big fan of how it handled Brigid’s love life but I did really appreciate the complex portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship and was deeply moved in spots (and deeply grossed out in others).