Let’s talk about This is my Body by Lindsay King-Miller. More specifically, let’s talk about how much I loved it because man, this book got to me. It’s got a possessed kid who levitates and eats the local birds and squirrels, but that’s not what haunts me. What haunts me is how relatable all the religious guilt and family dysfunction is.
Books about generational trauma seem all the rage right now and most of them don’t really do it for me. The trauma is so big and abstract, it’s hard to really connect to it on a personal level. This book, though, is a look at that trauma up close. Ridiculous amounts of repressed guilt and anxiety. Imprenetrable emotional armor and narcissism. Everybody blaming everyone else for their pain and everybody being at least a little bit at fault. If you pull back far enough you can see the epically oppressive institutions pouring pain down through the generations, but on the daily human level it usually doesn’t feel sweeping. It feels like a big painful mess that no one quite knows how to deal with.
So. Back to the possessed kid. Or actually, we should start with the possessed kid’s mom, Brigid. Brigid has so much Catholic guilt. Like, as much Catholic guilt as you can fit into one person. When she was little, she and her mom (her single mom who was never married to her dad) had to move in with Uncle Angus, a domineering priest who always kept the curtains closed and wouldn’t let her watch TV or read books that weren’t the Bible. This already sucked, but when Brigid fell in love in middle school, Angus got even worse. Mostly (entirely) because Brigid’s crush was her best friend, Alexandra. I’m pretty sure a straight crush would have still bothered Angus but this gay crush was soooooo much worse. Angus rained down the wrath of his god and Brigid’s mom was pretty much on his side. It was bad.
Eventually Brigid grew up, officially came out of the closet, opened an occult bookstore, and cut Angus and her mom completely out of her life. If only she could cut the secret guilt and shame out that easily. Still, she’s tried hard to keep all that from her daughter, Dylan. Dylan’s gonna grow up pampered and protected and connected to a mother who really sees and understands her. History will not repeat itself, dammit! (Honestly, this is what most of us strive for with our kids. Sad thing is, when we don’t repeat our parents’ mistakes we usually make new and different mistakes instead.)
And then Dylan gets possessed. At first we’re not sure that’s what’s happening. Dylan’s a middle schooler and they can act pretty weird, especially when they’re going through some stuff. Dylan’s fighting with her former best friend, Kai, and when she punches him and then later actually bites him she gets in big trouble with the school. Dylan doesn’t want to talk about it and Brigid is freaking out, wondering where she went wrong as a mother. And on top of all this drama, Brigid is trying to reconnect with that old school crush of hers, Alexandra, who’s even more awesome as an adult than she was in middle school. Connecting with Alexandra (Zandy for short) is good but the timing really sucks.
Especially when, right before their first date, Brigid discovers all the dead animals in Dylan’s closet. A few pages later we’ve all decided Dylan is definitely possessed. It’s bloody and there’s levitation involved. The only person Brigid knows who’s ever exorcised someone is her shitty Uncle Angus. In the absence of better ideas, she heads to his house in Denver to beg for his help.
This turns out to be a terrible idea. He’s just as awful as she remembers, only now he’s being all fake nice to Dylan, who is totally falling for it because she’s so delighted to suddenly have a grandpa. Brigid never told her why she didn’t talk to her family. Then Zandy calls; she googled Angus and found out he was actually defrocked in the 1980s for running a cable access show where he “exorcised” people on screen. Was the exorcism Brigid witnessed fake? But she saw it with her own eyes!
And things get even worse when Brigid finds an old journal her mother made before her suicide. It’s full of clear evidence that her mother never forgave her for being gay, but also full of news clippings of people who committed heinous crimes after being on Angus’s exorcism show.
It’s all just crazy and Brigid has no idea what to do now. If Angus can’t actually exorcise her daughter, who even can? She has to save her daughter somehow but Brigid almost feels possessed herself, filled with panic and shame and a growing desire to just smash Angus’s face in.
I’m not gonna tell you how it all ends. I’ll just say it gets worse and weirder before it gets better. This is a quick read full of drama and horror and I loved following all the mysterious little threads weaving together as the book progressed.
What I loved most, though, was how real and complex all the relationships felt. Angus is a hateable villain but we also get glimpses of where it all comes from. Brigid’s mom is incredibly frustrating and grossly unfair to her daughter but we also get glimpses into her own personal torture. She feels all too familiar to those of us who grew up in conservative religious families. Brigid and Dylan are sympathetic and relatable, while also being flawed and human.
I didn’t grow up Catholic but my background is close enough that this book was all sorts of familiar. I grew up during the Satanic Panic, around people who tried to “pray the gay away” and wouldn’t watch R-rated movies because they’d “drive the spirit away.” This book captures the spiderweb of complex emotions and relationships that culture tends to weave around you, while also being an exciting horror novel. If you like possession stories (which I do) and/or carry residual religious guilt (which I do) go read this book. Go read it right now.
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