American Rapture by CJ Leede – Book Review

“HOW TO RECOGNIZE THE LAST MOMENTS BEFORE THE WORLD ENDS:

You won’t.”

“Could Eve have been sick in the Garden? Is desire an illness in itself?”

American Rapture by CJ Leede – A Horror Book Review by Jonathan Thornton

CJ Leede’s debut novel Maeve Fly (2023) was one of the most exciting horror novels of last year. Her new novel American Rapture (2024) builds on the transgressive promise of her debut. The novel is a powerful exploration of Catholic guilt and the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the USA, as well as being a chilling plague novel that despite its darkness still manages to find warmth and humanity in found family. Leede expertly maintains the tension throughout the book’s considerable length, keeping her likeable cast of characters under constant threat.

As Maeve Fly is a love letter to LA and Disneyland, so American Rapture is a paean to the Midwest.

As its characters explore a transfigured but still profoundly American Wisconsin in the wake of apocalyptic disaster. Leede has delivered another classic of modern horror, one that cements her as one of the most exciting authors currently working in the genre.

Sophie is a good Catholic girl, raised by her strict, conservative parents in a strict, conservative Christian community that isolates her from the outside world and indoctrinates her with its values. However the watchful eyes of her parents and the nuns who run her school can’t keep her away from her local library, where the librarian helps her to escape the restrictive list of approved books and discover the wonders of literature via Madeleine L’Engel and Jean M Auel. Nor can it keep her from loving her twin brother Noah, who has been cruelly sent away to a hospital for troubled teens after being discovered with a gay porno mag in his bedroom by their parents.

She sees no end to her sheltered, dull existence, until one day it is all brought crashing down around her. A virus known as Sylvia is spreading through the population of the US, turning its victims into sex-crazed zombies. Sophie barely escapes her parents’ succumbing to the infection, and embarks on a desperate race across Wisconsin to reunite with Noah, before the zombies or the murderous Christian fundamentalists who have decided this is the Rapture catch up with her.

As with Maeve Fly, American Rapture is told entirely through Sophie’s first person perspective.

Leede proves herself just as adept at capturing the inner monologue of a complete innocent as she is at drawing us in to the mind of a complete unhinged person. Sophie’s journey is one of sexual awakening but also of widening perspectives, of learning that the world is much bigger than she has been brought up to believe, of learning to escape the guilt and repression she was brought up indoctrinated with and embrace her sexuality and other people’s viewpoints. Along the way she gathers about her a found family of disparate individuals, each of whom teaches her something important. From Maro, the cop who takes her under his wing and protects her, she learns the art of self-defense and to trust her own initiative.

From Cleo, a beautiful and elegant woman who also shed her Catholic upbringing, she learns to disentangle her feminine sexuality from guilt and shame. Helen, a girl her age who adopts Wyatt, a child whose parents are missing, she learns strength and independence and to nurture those around her. From Barghest, a rescued dog who takes to Sophie, she learns that bounds of friendship and love can transcend species. And from Ben, the handsome son of the librarian who helped her as a kid, she learns to love. Each of Leede’s characters is well drawn and convincing, and the reader winds up caring for all of them.

But before anyone could think this catastrophe to be a bit too cozy, American Rapture is a brutal and challenging book in which no one is safe.

Though it ultimately comes down on the side of found family and that people can and do find the best in each other in a time of crisis, this is a book that is not afraid to shy away from the ugly truth about how we behave at our worst. After all, we have experienced the COVID pandemic, and the book would not feel as honest or as insightful as it is if it didn’t address both aspects of humanity.

In particular, we see in American Rapture how the conservative Christian fundamentalists use the zombie plague as an excuse to band together and attack everyone they perceive to be outsiders. This taps into the apocalyptic nature of much fundamental Christianity in the states in a way that feels timely and true to life.

This is a novel in which anti-vaxxers burn vaccination centres with people inside them, in which apocalyptic Christians convinced they are living through the Rapture use this as an excuse to violently attack and murder everyone else who they see as evil, immoral and corrupt. Part of Sophie’s character development is her coming to understand that these people that she grew up with, that prided themselves on their moral righteousness, are the ghouls attacking and murdering people, smugly certain that they are in the right. Leede’s novel brilliantly and unflinchingly confronts this toxic strain of Christianity, revealing it in all its bigotry, small-mindedness and vindictiveness.

American Rapture is also a powerful exploration of female embodiment,

and the guilt and shame that our society frequently attaches to female sexuality as a form of patriarchal control. Maeve in Maeve Fly was acutely aware of how people reacted to her as a woman, and often subverted and used this to her advantage. Sophie, on the other hand, has been brought up to be ashamed of her sexuality.

Her mother has instilled in her that to be female is to be wicked, a source of temptation that threads all the way back to Eve in the Garden of Eden, whilst at the same time centering Sophie’s worth on her virginity as something pure and special that must be protected and preserved for her marriage.

All this is going on while her brother’s queer sexuality is repressed and violently denied. The zombie plague caused by the Sylvia virus metaphorically works as an eruption of all this repressed sexuality, the sexuality that Sophie’s parents, church and school have tried so violently to deny returning in an inescapable storm of violence. Sophie must learn, through the help of her new friends, to embrace a more open, healthy relationship with her sexuality to counter this repression, before she can learn to love Ben. 

With American Rapture, CJ Leede joins the ranks of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Alison Rumfitt as one of the most exciting new voices in horror.

Her vivid and gory imagination is perfectly linked to a sharp sense of characterization and a need to explore the issues which our society is grappling with. Hope and humanity are all the more precious in these novels because they are hard earned. We need these books more than ever in our desperate times, and I await Leede’s next book with keen excitement.  

American Rapture by CJ Leede

From CJ Leede, the author of Maeve Fly and a new voice in the feminist horror space, comes a scorching new apocalyptic novel.

Blessed are the meek, Sophie was taught; blessed are the pure of heart. Blessed is the good Catholic girl who honours her father and mother, who renounces the sins of pride, greed, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth, for she will inherit the earth.

But nothing in her strict religious upbring could have prepared Sophie for the arrival of the scorching winds that sweep through the Midwest – not the righteous breath of God, but an evil gust that delivers an ungodly, fevered lust unto the virtuous and the wicked alike.

Separated from her family in the chaos of the apocalypse, Sophie is overcome by an unfamiliar fire from within, a steady pulse from somewhere beneath her belly that draws her toward the boys her mother warned her against: their eyes, their lips, their hands, their skin. The hellscape around her is foreign and strange, but so is the frantic desire that blooms in Sophie, tempting her away from the light. Though her own body has become a carnal battleground, she must somehow find her way through the ravaged world to rescue her brother, hoping the fever hasn’t taken him; hoping he can still be saved.

‘Keep an eye on this rising feminist voice’ Tori Amos

Further Reading

https://gnofhorror.com/cj-leede-as-the-maeve-flies-through-the-american-rapture/