Good Morning Folks. Have you ever ended up with a book that you have no clue why you have it? That was me with American Rapture, and at some point, I acquired the audiobook version of this… probably on a sale… and probably because I saw someone recommending it somewhere. Last week, I needed something to take my mind off the medical system hellscape that I find myself trapped in, and I thought the cover looked cool and decided to yolo it. This was both a great and an awful decision at the same time. I was not fully prepared for the book that I was about to read. I knew that it was horror and vaguely zombie apocalypse adjacent. These are two things that I do enjoy quite a bit, but what I was not fully prepared for was the unique spin on both.
The novel centers around Sophie Allen, who is an extremely sheltered, ultra-conservative Catholic teen, living somewhere in the vicinity of Spring Green Wisconson. I had family in the Madison area, and have visited a lot of the locations that were mentioned in the book, including The House on the Rock that American Gods also seems to be fond of. Having been there, it is a fucking trippy place, so I get why authors would set scenes in novels there, because it feels like it is a place that cannot really exist. The ultra-conservative Catholic thing is a bit odd for me personally, because here in Oklahoma, the Catholic church that I grew up in was deeply liberal with a borderline Heritical priest that even though I am no longer religious… I owe a lot of my mental development to. Sophie is a twin and lives in what feels like a fairly cloistered community, attending a parochial school, and is eternally scarred by this early moment where her twin brother Noah was ripped away from her. Turns out he had a bad case of the “gay,” was fairly violently shuffled off to some “Sacred Heart” hospital to “cure” him. You could copy and paste this storyline onto Southern Baptist, and it would effectively work the same, so I was able to apply my own personal experience to the tale.
Where things get really fucked is when it comes to the virus. It is sweeping the country, but poor Sophie knows nothing about it… because sheltered by awful parents and has completely controlled access to the internet both at home and through the Nuns at school. So when she starts noticing people getting hot, bothered, and randy… with glassy-eyed stares, she is completely clueless as to what is going on. American Rapture features a plague that is effectively 28 Days Later, but instead of turning the infected into rage machines that want to attack everything in order to spread their “bad blood”, this one makes folks want to aggressively copulate with anything and everything… including their own reflection comically. At this point, you are thinking “Zombies that fuck? Bel you have accidentally ventured into sexytime literature”, and you would be wrong. There is nothing “sexytime” about anything that is depicted in this tale. Sure, there are descriptions of engorged members… but they have more in common with Lovecraftian horror than they do with a dimestore novel. All through the lens of someone who does not even understand their own body, let alone the functionality of sexual intercourse.
If this were all that was going on in this novel, it would be pretty forgettable. Walking Dead, But Fucking is a curious premise… but the end result is way more insidious than it sounds. In a Zombie film, someone has to die in order to turn, but with this virus, they can go “randy” at any moment… making pretty much every place where the remaining law enforcement is trying to corral people into a bad idea. This would be its own challenge were it not for a group called “St. Michael’s Crusaders”, who come from the same religious cloister that Sophie grew up in, and have decided that this is all “God’s Plan”. They have made it their mission to burn the “sinners” by effectively setting on fire every shelter that the ragtag group of survivors seems to find along their path. So we end up contending with random sex machines and zealots in red robes trying to set things on fire… or just use good old-fashioned firearms… in equal parts. I spent a lot of time with this novel, wondering why exactly I was continuing on… only to realize at some point… that it was way more compelling than I expected.
American Rapture at its core… is a book about coming to terms with religion and the awful things that it makes people do. It is a book about what has collectively been referred to as “deconstruction”, as you come to terms with harmful thoughts and ideas that you had been implanted upon you at a very young age, when you had zero control over them. This is largely something that you see in ex-Evangelical circles, but at least in the terms of this book, it focuses on Catholicism. Like I said before, my experiences growing up Catholic were wildly different than poor Sophie’s, but I do get some of the same trappings of my experience. The programming largely missed me, and that was in large part because of said “Heretical Priest” telling me that it was more or less okay to not believe or be uncertain of my belief. I’ve spent my adult life vacillating around various states of unbelief, and I still deal with fairly religious parents who are unwilling to accept this. My wife was Southern Baptist and still deeply faithful, and we came to a level of acceptance that we were each on our own path. I still spend a significant chunk of my Sunday editing the sermon for her church to post it every day, because I understand the role that faith had in her life, and that it is important for some people.
My problem with Religion is the hateful things that people do in the name of it. This book covers some of that, especially when it comes to LGBTQIA+ folks. Realizing I was bisexual has been its own journey, and has frankly taken me further from faithfulness. While the trappings of this tale were way more extreme than anything I ever personally experienced, Sophie’s journey through realizing that she was taught some pretty fucked up things still resonated. Collectively, Horror is one of the best genres for exploring uncomfortable topics, and traditionally, you regularly find it coming to terms with subjects on the fringe of society. So it makes sense why a book about “zombies that fuck” would really be this story about queer folks just trying to survive in the world, and ridding themselves of the harmful notions they were raised under. I am thankful to the online community, because they have been the family that I found a kinship with… when my own was not exactly ready to deal with the thoughts and struggles I was tackling. Maybe there is a world where this book lands in the hands of someone who needs it and can help them start to dissect their own feelings.
Do I suggest you read this book? I honestly do not know. It took a very specific set of cultural experiences for it to really resonate with me, and it might not with you. It was compelling enough that I wanted to devote time on my blog to talk about it. Will this entire experience be deeply blasphemous in the eyes of someone from a more sheltered religious upbringing? Probably… no scratch that, absolutely. It does, however, make me want to track down some other things from this author and give them a spin. I know they run in the same circles as Chuck Tingle, so it makes a heck of a lot of sense the sort of book this ended up being. Camp Damascus is still one of the hardest novels that I have finished, and it took a lot out of me. This was a much more chill experience… minus the gratuitous zombie copulation.
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