A gripping, emotional, and darkly funny queer horror novel about family trauma and possession, for fans of Rachel Harrison and Catriona Ward.
Single gay mom Brigid always thought that cutting ties with her extremist Catholic family was the best thing she could have done for her daughter, Dylan—and for herself. But when Dylan starts having terrifying fits of unnatural violence, Brigid can’t shake her memories of a girl from her childhood who behaved the same way . . . until Brigid’s uncle, Father Angus, performed an exorcism.
Convinced that her daughter is suffering from demonic possession, Brigid does the thing she told herself she’d never she goes home. Father Angus is the worst person she knows, but he’s also the only person who can help her daughter.
But as Brigid starts to uncover secrets about Father Angus, that long-ago exorcism, and her family’s past, she realizes that she and Dylan have never been in more danger.
This Is My Body is a piercing journey into religious trauma and childhood shame, building towards a heart-pounding twisty climax that will spin your head all the way around.
“Darkly funny”? Bro, where? Where was this funny? It’s horrifically relatable in the swells of anger and fear and shame is what it is. Get the fuck out of here with that “funny” crap. Funny, my ass.
I almost DNF’d this one. Got real close. It didn’t engage me much in the first third, but I needed to get through it, so it just… took me some time to get there. I managed in the end.
Mostly this book isn’t scary so much as it is… relatable. Which is weird because I’m not a gay single mom. I’m just filled with enormous anger problems that make it hard to listen to other people when I’m bebopping into the void. The Catholic guilt is strong as well, even though I’ve never been Catholic in my life, but man.
There is a brief sex scene so I just sort of stuck the smut bar down here.
Smutty Stuff:
Biting, Fisting, and Oral
There ya go.
Mix that in during a confusing moment of main character spiraling into an unreality of confusion and fear and you get, “I guess this is what allo people do to blow off steam?”
I don’t know that I really enjoyed this one. It had its moments but mostly I just was following along the action. I don’t think I was ever supposed to like Brigid, the main character. Sure, her anguish and anger is relatable, but I never said that it made her likeable. I certainly followed her story to completion and I applauded her character growth as she slowed down in the end to think shit through before something happened again.
I’m more confused abou……………. sorry, Sunny was starting to type.
I’m more confused about Dylan. It’s… weird. She’s a device more than a character, taking on the role of “teenaged daughter”. I don’t understand how in the end the relationship between her and Cypress as friends sprung up. I don’t understand how she isn’t freaking the fuck out more about being possessed and having her tongue literally shredded in half. I don’t understand how this kid was completely fine with eating living flesh just because???
I mean, it’s a story about Brigid struggling and trying not to pass on the terror of her own life and still having that terror passed on both physically and spiritually through a possessed ghost and witchcraft that just happens to work for once. I assume there’s layers of faith in there somewhere and some questions of how the faith makes some things work as intended but not other things? But how the fuck is this kid like that?
Urgh. I don’t know. I do not recommend this to Remy.
