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Jesus Saves
Jesus Saves is a chilling horror story, a suburban gothic that explores the darkest limits of human degradation. Set in a landscape of strip malls and feral kudzu-covered dump sites, this book focuses on the other suburbia, not the green manicured lawns and well-tended ranch houses, but the trampled, trash-filled strips of woods lying between subdivisions and superhighways, launchpads for adolescent ritual, whose sacramental remnants are discarded beer cans and charred wood. At the center of this community are two girls: Sandy Patrick, who has been abducted from summer camp and now smiles from missing-child posters all over town; and Ginger, a troubled minister's daughter, whose fixation on Sandy borders on obsession. Ultimately, these two young women are brought together by a violent and dispossessed man who leads them into a night of diabolical terror and the final confrontation between the sacred and profane.
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1997
21 people are currently reading
1181 people want to read
About the author
Darcey Steinke
29 books185 followersDarcey Steinke is an American author and educator known for her evocative novels and thoughtful nonfiction. She has written five novels, including Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, Milk, and Sister Golden Hair. She is also the author of the spiritual memoir Easter Everywhere and Flash Count Diary, a meditation on menopause and natural life. Her fiction often explores the intersection of the spiritual and the physical, with two of her novels, Up Through the Water and Jesus Saves, selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Steinke has contributed essays and articles to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Vogue, and The Guardian, and co-edited the essay collection Joyful Noise with Rick Moody. In addition to her writing career, she has taught creative writing at institutions like Princeton University, Columbia University, Barnard College, and the American University of Paris. Originally from Oneida, New York, and the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Steinke now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, journalist Michael Hudson, and their daughter. A former guitarist for the band Ruffian, she continues to explore the connections between art, spirit, and human experience through her work.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews
September 17, 2017
(For those concerned about the title, be aware that this novel -- which I find to be a grand achievement in fiction -- has other things in mind; it's an ambitious examination of contemporary America...
The original review follows:)
Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role model preferred by the attendees of her father's suburban church, where he ministers to an aging, ever-dwindling congregation.
Even so, Ginger deeply loves her father, or more precisely, empathizes with him. Like her, he is haunted by the death of his wife from cancer, and the father-daughter bond is solidified by their mutual sense of alienation. The minister's church has long been in decline, housed in a banal suburban box-like structure after being forced to move from a beautiful old downtown cathedral due to the socio-economic decline of the neighborhood and subsequent white flight.
The church is under siege by the presence of a nearby corporate mega-church, where pandering and feel-good seem to be the modus operandi. Ginger's father is not unlike Gunnar Bjornstrand as the tortured priest in Ingmar Bergman's Swedish film, Winter Light, sensitive and perhaps too truthful in his harsh sermon messages of everyone's personal culpability in evil to be much of a balm to the simple-minded sheep. Whatever their differences, Ginger admires her father's principles, his unwillingness to sell out.
The most powerful member and opinion-leader of the congregation, Mulhoffer -- a well-to-do furniture tycoon and lover of the TV advertising that made his fortune -- wants the church to become a TV ministry and open health spas and such to serve the members. To paraphrase him: people who don't watch enough TV are troublemakers.
While Ginger watches her father's struggles and contends with her own teenage rebellion, she obsesses over the abduction of a young girl named Sandy Patrick. The novel's chapters alternate between snippets of Ginger's life and of Sandy's experiences in captivity with her psycho abductor. It is obvious that she is not the first, nor will she be his last victim.
This is a very bold novel: thematically ambitious, meticulously and beautifully written and full of literary invention. Much of it is hallucinatory and surreal, even difficult to follow at times. Sandy's inner reality is marked by dream-like reminiscences of her past alternating with Lewis Carroll-like imagery of unicorns and bears and other carefree anthropomorphic characters who flit in and out of her consciousness.
Steinke blends and explores the obsessions of her characters fearlessly, painting a vivid and terrifying portrait of Southern life in the 1990s; hers is a contemporary update of the classical southern Gothic novel. She references much pop cultural detritis on her sweeping canvas: everything from TV talk shows to the infamous Polaroid found in a parking lot showing bound-and-duct-taped abductee Tara Calico (although she does not mention Calico by name).
The book is filled with imagery of decomposition, decay and decline: of cancer, of the South, of America, of religion, of death -- everything seems to be rotting in humid, fetid confines. Moral bankruptcy is blanketed in hypocritical religious and corporate righteousness.
I have to admit that, at first, I thought Steinke was missing the forest for the trees with this one; that the writing was way overly descriptive. When Ginger puts in her tampon, for instance, every bit of the action is described in detail, and I wondered if such mechanical minutiae was necessary. Much reference is made of blood imagery, linking the book's incidents to Christ. It's perhaps not surprising that the book begins in the most American of venues, the open road, and with a collision with a deer. Thus, much thematic foreshadowing and quirkiness are established early on. Ultimately, and by the end, Steinke's method brings it all home and the book packs a wallop.
I'd read another of Steinke's more popular books, Suicide Blonde last year, but this one is much more substantial on every level. A rewarding experience for those with patience.
---
KR@KY
Updated with slight amendment in Sept. 2017
The original review follows:)
Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role model preferred by the attendees of her father's suburban church, where he ministers to an aging, ever-dwindling congregation.
Even so, Ginger deeply loves her father, or more precisely, empathizes with him. Like her, he is haunted by the death of his wife from cancer, and the father-daughter bond is solidified by their mutual sense of alienation. The minister's church has long been in decline, housed in a banal suburban box-like structure after being forced to move from a beautiful old downtown cathedral due to the socio-economic decline of the neighborhood and subsequent white flight.
The church is under siege by the presence of a nearby corporate mega-church, where pandering and feel-good seem to be the modus operandi. Ginger's father is not unlike Gunnar Bjornstrand as the tortured priest in Ingmar Bergman's Swedish film, Winter Light, sensitive and perhaps too truthful in his harsh sermon messages of everyone's personal culpability in evil to be much of a balm to the simple-minded sheep. Whatever their differences, Ginger admires her father's principles, his unwillingness to sell out.
The most powerful member and opinion-leader of the congregation, Mulhoffer -- a well-to-do furniture tycoon and lover of the TV advertising that made his fortune -- wants the church to become a TV ministry and open health spas and such to serve the members. To paraphrase him: people who don't watch enough TV are troublemakers.
While Ginger watches her father's struggles and contends with her own teenage rebellion, she obsesses over the abduction of a young girl named Sandy Patrick. The novel's chapters alternate between snippets of Ginger's life and of Sandy's experiences in captivity with her psycho abductor. It is obvious that she is not the first, nor will she be his last victim.
This is a very bold novel: thematically ambitious, meticulously and beautifully written and full of literary invention. Much of it is hallucinatory and surreal, even difficult to follow at times. Sandy's inner reality is marked by dream-like reminiscences of her past alternating with Lewis Carroll-like imagery of unicorns and bears and other carefree anthropomorphic characters who flit in and out of her consciousness.
Steinke blends and explores the obsessions of her characters fearlessly, painting a vivid and terrifying portrait of Southern life in the 1990s; hers is a contemporary update of the classical southern Gothic novel. She references much pop cultural detritis on her sweeping canvas: everything from TV talk shows to the infamous Polaroid found in a parking lot showing bound-and-duct-taped abductee Tara Calico (although she does not mention Calico by name).
The book is filled with imagery of decomposition, decay and decline: of cancer, of the South, of America, of religion, of death -- everything seems to be rotting in humid, fetid confines. Moral bankruptcy is blanketed in hypocritical religious and corporate righteousness.
I have to admit that, at first, I thought Steinke was missing the forest for the trees with this one; that the writing was way overly descriptive. When Ginger puts in her tampon, for instance, every bit of the action is described in detail, and I wondered if such mechanical minutiae was necessary. Much reference is made of blood imagery, linking the book's incidents to Christ. It's perhaps not surprising that the book begins in the most American of venues, the open road, and with a collision with a deer. Thus, much thematic foreshadowing and quirkiness are established early on. Ultimately, and by the end, Steinke's method brings it all home and the book packs a wallop.
I'd read another of Steinke's more popular books, Suicide Blonde last year, but this one is much more substantial on every level. A rewarding experience for those with patience.
---
KR@KY
Updated with slight amendment in Sept. 2017
June 13, 2020
Darcey Steinke’s JESUS SAVES creates a dark and forbidding world that is at the same time penetrated by the divine—or at least, it might be. The novel centers on two young women—Sandy, who has been abducted by a rapist; and Ginger, who cycles through a life angst and despair—in a decaying suburb that followers of David Lynch will find thoroughly recognizable. Told in alternating chapters, their stories obliquely comment on each other: Sandy descends into a fantasy world of unicorns and friendly animals in order to endure confinement and sexual abuse; Ginger turns to sex and drugs in order to make herself feel alive and vital in a world that seems to lack meaning and purpose. Both women’s survival strategies give them momentary comfort but not much else.
The comments from Ginger’s father, a Lutheran minister, provide a possible spiritual answer to the malaise and evil awash in the text, a solution suggested in the novel’s title, though spiritual redemption is anything but a sure thing (some readers will no doubt think JESUS SAVES? would be a better title). But such uncertainty is precisely Steinke’s point: doubt and questioning must be at the heart of faith in the contemporary world. The blinding recognition of evil, as well as the possibility of grace, voiced in the novel by Ginger’s father is repeatedly contrasted to the feel-good religion that his congregation wants, a religion based on personal well-being and social enjoyment (as found in potlucks, aerobics, etc.). Steinke’s scorn for what she clearly sees as such easy religion is everywhere palpable, recalling Flannery O’Connor’s observation that faith is not an electric blanket but the cross.
In Steinke’s world there are no simple affirmations of faith that settle all problems and bring people spiritual enlightenment. What faith accomplishes, even if momentary and fleeting (as it usually is), is to cut through everyday pretensions and protections. Faith works on an elemental level of urgency, which is what draws Steinke’s most memorable characters (as well as Steinke herself) to it. As she comments in her memoir EASTER EVERYWHERE, faith provides “the kind of care and connection one feels with strangers at the site of an accident or in an emergency room, where pulse and heartbeat mean more than the status or wealth or whatever else people use to subdivide themselves.”
The comments from Ginger’s father, a Lutheran minister, provide a possible spiritual answer to the malaise and evil awash in the text, a solution suggested in the novel’s title, though spiritual redemption is anything but a sure thing (some readers will no doubt think JESUS SAVES? would be a better title). But such uncertainty is precisely Steinke’s point: doubt and questioning must be at the heart of faith in the contemporary world. The blinding recognition of evil, as well as the possibility of grace, voiced in the novel by Ginger’s father is repeatedly contrasted to the feel-good religion that his congregation wants, a religion based on personal well-being and social enjoyment (as found in potlucks, aerobics, etc.). Steinke’s scorn for what she clearly sees as such easy religion is everywhere palpable, recalling Flannery O’Connor’s observation that faith is not an electric blanket but the cross.
In Steinke’s world there are no simple affirmations of faith that settle all problems and bring people spiritual enlightenment. What faith accomplishes, even if momentary and fleeting (as it usually is), is to cut through everyday pretensions and protections. Faith works on an elemental level of urgency, which is what draws Steinke’s most memorable characters (as well as Steinke herself) to it. As she comments in her memoir EASTER EVERYWHERE, faith provides “the kind of care and connection one feels with strangers at the site of an accident or in an emergency room, where pulse and heartbeat mean more than the status or wealth or whatever else people use to subdivide themselves.”
November 2, 2019
Told from a teenage misfit daughter of a failing minister, alternatively from a bound kidnapped young girl and her troll pedophilic abductor. Disturbing, but very skillfully written. The author has a gift for prose and gets into the head of the girls. The storyline just didn’t resonate, perhaps because it was so hard to relate to the protagonists. Bought in Roanoke while visiting my daughter. Not a waste of my reading time, a harsh view of American suburban wastelands that are all too familiar in the 1990s. Almost four stars for the evocative prose, just hard to relate to the abused girl’s fantasies and talking stuffed animals. A bit of modern demented Alice in Wonderland.
August 9, 2022
reread this bc i found the first printing / hardcover version at the strand in july!! i love darcey steinke so much, i just genuinely feel like this spiritual connection to her. every book feels like reading a distilled quasifictional parable serving as a dispatch from steinke's then-current view of reality. it's blurry and selfish and urgent but doesnt answer any questions. all of her novels feel like a mirror and a projection screen at the same time. it's all unmistakably contained in her psyche but its also completely removed from her as a person. steinke is such a huge huge huge influence on me as a writer, and i got so giggly when i saw that the first version of JESUS SAVES came out in 1997, my birth year:333 I love you literary foxaunt darcey!!!!! how can i not love you when you describe the sound of skin ripping as "like wet lettuce" or the dried shit from pigeons as "oystery"????? taking this one to my grave, along with MILK and SUICIDE BLONDE, idgaf!!!!!!!!!!!! yall are not seeing the pure genius she is as an artist.
January 29, 2024
Darcey Steinke writes the most gross-beautiful descriptions I've ever read in my life. I'm shocked that the Otessa Moshfegh girlies aren't more tapped in to her...anyways, that was the best part of the book. Plot-wise, it's sparse, kind of hard to follow, unsatisfying, and honestly just too depraved and disgusting sometimes, even for me. It got vaguely feminist near the end but in a way that felt hastily installed? I think that's what she was going for but there's a lot of subplots and characters with dead ends. Honestly, I don't know what she was trying to achieve with this one. But if she was just trying to create a Southern Gothic horror ~vibe~ she killed it. I really cannot praise her writing style enough.
August 21, 2024
really really enjoyed
November 28, 2021
This is a coarse and disturbing novel. It is a hair shirt. But you put it on and wear it, because even though the novel makes you uncomfortable you want to find out what happens.
The story opens with a car crash and a dead deer. Later, the deer’s head becomes the centerpiece of a shrine. To what? No idea. Maybe chaos or maybe random acts of violence. And that’s before you realize a teenage girl (like so many before her) has gone missing.
There will be blood. Literal and metaphorical. Blood spilled through cruelty, violence, negligence, and nature. “[Y]ou have to respect the earth, and if you don’t the earth gets hungry and wants blood. That’s what plane crashes are all about, blood payment.” And it’s not just the earth. Society is a vampire. Fortunately, there are plenty of vulnerable and desperate people to feed upon.
The story follows the parallel lives of two teenage girls in southwest Virginia – presumably Lynchburg or Roanoke (Ms. Steinke went to high school in Roanoke). Ginger is a minister’s daughter. Sandy is everyone’s daughter, and she has been kidnapped so she can be sold to a sex trafficking ring. The stories intersect briefly near the end.
Ginger is hardly religious in a traditional sense. “In the Bible [Ginger wryly observes], God was famous . . . for being more pleased by living animals and their slaughter than by a basket of inanimate vegetables.” Ginger’s mother recently died of cancer, and her father can barely function. It doesn’t help that the church’s major donors want him to become a televangelist. In describing a minister at a modern church, he tells Ginger the “head minister wore red suspenders and a blue striped shirt, like a Wall Street banker. They’re using corporate philosophies to make everybody feel like they’re moving up the church ladder, getting a raise or a promotion. But spiritual change is more subtle than that; you can’t just check items off a list.” Unfortunately for him, no one in his church is interested in spiritual change. They want to be entertained.
Our first introduction to Sandy is through a sermon by Ginger’s father. “Her mother says she has a dreamy side, that she collects stuffed animals, reads fantasy novels where horses fly and fairy princesses wear gowns made from flowers.” To Ginger’s father, Sandy is Christ-like, and the community must accept its complicity in her abduction. Everyone must “come to terms with the evil that resides within us.” Needless to say, the customers in his church are not entertained.
Sandy uses her childhood stuffed animals and the flying horses and unicorns in her fantasy novels to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, these characters come to life. They are as real as her kidnapper. As real as Jesus. Sandy’s ordeal is brutal. Or said another way, it is realistic. The violence is not gratuitous or titillating. It is devastating.
So why is the book called "Jesus Saves"? We don’t know. Jesus is frequently discussed, but he never manifests. However, because we live in southwest Virginia, we would never suggest the title is ironic. That would get us shot. We accept, without question, that Jesus saves. We just wonder when he intends to start.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor - Pungent Sound Journal of Pulp Poetry (PungentSound.com)
The story opens with a car crash and a dead deer. Later, the deer’s head becomes the centerpiece of a shrine. To what? No idea. Maybe chaos or maybe random acts of violence. And that’s before you realize a teenage girl (like so many before her) has gone missing.
There will be blood. Literal and metaphorical. Blood spilled through cruelty, violence, negligence, and nature. “[Y]ou have to respect the earth, and if you don’t the earth gets hungry and wants blood. That’s what plane crashes are all about, blood payment.” And it’s not just the earth. Society is a vampire. Fortunately, there are plenty of vulnerable and desperate people to feed upon.
The story follows the parallel lives of two teenage girls in southwest Virginia – presumably Lynchburg or Roanoke (Ms. Steinke went to high school in Roanoke). Ginger is a minister’s daughter. Sandy is everyone’s daughter, and she has been kidnapped so she can be sold to a sex trafficking ring. The stories intersect briefly near the end.
Ginger is hardly religious in a traditional sense. “In the Bible [Ginger wryly observes], God was famous . . . for being more pleased by living animals and their slaughter than by a basket of inanimate vegetables.” Ginger’s mother recently died of cancer, and her father can barely function. It doesn’t help that the church’s major donors want him to become a televangelist. In describing a minister at a modern church, he tells Ginger the “head minister wore red suspenders and a blue striped shirt, like a Wall Street banker. They’re using corporate philosophies to make everybody feel like they’re moving up the church ladder, getting a raise or a promotion. But spiritual change is more subtle than that; you can’t just check items off a list.” Unfortunately for him, no one in his church is interested in spiritual change. They want to be entertained.
Our first introduction to Sandy is through a sermon by Ginger’s father. “Her mother says she has a dreamy side, that she collects stuffed animals, reads fantasy novels where horses fly and fairy princesses wear gowns made from flowers.” To Ginger’s father, Sandy is Christ-like, and the community must accept its complicity in her abduction. Everyone must “come to terms with the evil that resides within us.” Needless to say, the customers in his church are not entertained.
Sandy uses her childhood stuffed animals and the flying horses and unicorns in her fantasy novels to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, these characters come to life. They are as real as her kidnapper. As real as Jesus. Sandy’s ordeal is brutal. Or said another way, it is realistic. The violence is not gratuitous or titillating. It is devastating.
So why is the book called "Jesus Saves"? We don’t know. Jesus is frequently discussed, but he never manifests. However, because we live in southwest Virginia, we would never suggest the title is ironic. That would get us shot. We accept, without question, that Jesus saves. We just wonder when he intends to start.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor - Pungent Sound Journal of Pulp Poetry (PungentSound.com)
March 13, 2021
This is probably the worst book I've ever finished. I thought the premise was interesting and it even showed some promise at times, but overall...I kinda hated it. I only read it because a friend gave to me as a birthday present and said it looked like the kind of books I like to read. Upon reading it, I realized he was insulting my tastes. Well played. Alas, not even he could have predicted how bad this was, especially the end. Let's just say if you didn't like the movie Sucker Punch because of the weird fantasy sequences and the ending—which I actually thought was okay, funny enough—you will hate this book.
January 21, 2024
Gingers tampon was my fav character… writing 8.5/10… plot 4/10
January 12, 2025
RIP Ethel Cain you would of loved Jesus Saves by Darcy Steirke
Read
August 9, 2025wow that was super upsetting thanks zoë
December 23, 2020
Dark and depressing yet great. A bracing antidote to the American dream.
December 14, 2021
I think about this book a lot. Not sure if there's anything below the surface of the grimy and decadent prose, but I dig anyway.
September 29, 2017
A four for one particular reason: I have never read a novel that actually made me feel grossly uncomfortable and disgusting and imperceptibly helpless.
There's a huge paradox inside me where I want to reread this and bask again in the intriguing links that I would have otherwise missed had I not read it through the first time, but I also want to hide this book in the depths of my shelf and never have to deal with the discomfort I felt whilst reading this ever again. Steinke's writing is very conversational and poetic in that it's fragmentary and a bit odd, yet pleasing. Her writing is dense and packed with imagery, the main scenario that comes to mind being Ginger's period. An, actually, pretty relatable situation. The flow comes and goes when it wants.
The striking and constant itch of voyeurism and helplessness and the genius of Jesus Saves is in the secondary character that comes after Ginger, Sandy, a missing girl with her head consistently in the clouds. Escapism is a huge role in Sandy's story, and it's the most haunting imagery of fairytale characters and worlds I've ever encountered. Sandy is a compelling character in that despite how simple she seems, she is so immersed in a dissociated version of herself that she becomes as unreliable of a narrator as you can get. The last imagery of her haunts me and I doubt I'll be able to sleep without seeing her icy face of spider bites as a backlight to my lids.
A terrifying read, in the haunting and almost realistic kind of way.
There's a huge paradox inside me where I want to reread this and bask again in the intriguing links that I would have otherwise missed had I not read it through the first time, but I also want to hide this book in the depths of my shelf and never have to deal with the discomfort I felt whilst reading this ever again. Steinke's writing is very conversational and poetic in that it's fragmentary and a bit odd, yet pleasing. Her writing is dense and packed with imagery, the main scenario that comes to mind being Ginger's period. An, actually, pretty relatable situation. The flow comes and goes when it wants.
The striking and constant itch of voyeurism and helplessness and the genius of Jesus Saves is in the secondary character that comes after Ginger, Sandy, a missing girl with her head consistently in the clouds. Escapism is a huge role in Sandy's story, and it's the most haunting imagery of fairytale characters and worlds I've ever encountered. Sandy is a compelling character in that despite how simple she seems, she is so immersed in a dissociated version of herself that she becomes as unreliable of a narrator as you can get. The last imagery of her haunts me and I doubt I'll be able to sleep without seeing her icy face of spider bites as a backlight to my lids.
A terrifying read, in the haunting and almost realistic kind of way.
December 22, 2025
Whoa.
Darcey Steinke has written a gritty, realistic tale of two young American women- Ginger, a Lutheran minister's daughter, and Sandy, a girl abducted by a rapist from summer camp, kept as a sex-slave hostage.
Her writing shows us the difficulties living as young women in religious patriarchy, where women are judged whether they are virgins or experienced, religious or atheist, wealthy or working class.
Ginger seeks happiness through smoking weed, and sex with her casual boyfriend, who is mentally unstable.
Sandy tries to escape into childhood fantasy, as her captor keeps her bound, underfed, in a dark basement , a van and cheap hotel rooms. The police don't make any effort to find Sandy, despite sightings of her, and the church pasting posters around the town.
the two women eventually meet, in tragic circumstances, a sad climax that I sped-read towards, impatient to find resolution.
This is the kind of powerful, moving, non-formulaic writing which many of us strive towards.
Darcey Steinke has written a gritty, realistic tale of two young American women- Ginger, a Lutheran minister's daughter, and Sandy, a girl abducted by a rapist from summer camp, kept as a sex-slave hostage.
Her writing shows us the difficulties living as young women in religious patriarchy, where women are judged whether they are virgins or experienced, religious or atheist, wealthy or working class.
Ginger seeks happiness through smoking weed, and sex with her casual boyfriend, who is mentally unstable.
Sandy tries to escape into childhood fantasy, as her captor keeps her bound, underfed, in a dark basement , a van and cheap hotel rooms. The police don't make any effort to find Sandy, despite sightings of her, and the church pasting posters around the town.
the two women eventually meet, in tragic circumstances, a sad climax that I sped-read towards, impatient to find resolution.
This is the kind of powerful, moving, non-formulaic writing which many of us strive towards.
September 15, 2023
Bleak doesn’t even begin to describe this book, but it is a word I’m seeing frequently on here to review it. There’s always this need for a happy ending, even if the book is darkly depressing but we just don’t get that here. We get the stark mundanity of tragedy wrapped in the fantasy of a dissociative little girl and the parallel of another girl with the lost hope of survival in another way. I think that’s what it was trying to get across, the notion of survival and what lengths or lack thereof we’ll go to to find some sort of peace. While the title implies some kind of religiosity, I think there was an overall lack of that, more like disbelief in the holy, because of the brokenness of our characters. Overall, a sickeningly beautiful rich prose book that hands us harsh reality with sticky prying fingers.
August 21, 2018
This is a dark story that encompasses a lot of thematic ground: abduction, coming-of-age, religion, etc. Steinke really knows how to make you cringe with terror. Her portrayal of white trash South in the 90s is painfully accurate, describing every bit of garbage dotting the highway ditches and the peculiar smells of old houses. Everything here is described with enough detail to make it seem like you're watching a particularly gruesome movie. Her descriptions of the longings and rebellions of a pastor's child were vividly real and Ginger was a likable protagonist even if you longed for her to make better choices than she was capable of making. This is a dark story, but one that paints a picture of a place in time.
August 20, 2023
This book is by far one of my favorites that I have read in a very long time. The subject matter it quite heavy, which is why it took me a while to finish it. The imagery within this novel, however, and the picture that it paints of disassociation in the face of traumatic events was so interesting to me.
As a person who grew up in the Deep South and in the church, I thought that this novel did such a wonderful job of portraying a coming-of-age story from a unique point of view. I would recommend this book to anyone who listens to Ethel Cain, is interested in Southern Gothic settings, or is just looking for an overall great read.
As a person who grew up in the Deep South and in the church, I thought that this novel did such a wonderful job of portraying a coming-of-age story from a unique point of view. I would recommend this book to anyone who listens to Ethel Cain, is interested in Southern Gothic settings, or is just looking for an overall great read.
March 15, 2025
This novel felt like I was tumbling through a dream sequence. Not in a good way, but not in a bad way either. It was just very disorienting, like I wasn't sure how I got to where I got. The imagery and language was amazing though, very lyrical, and I was rooted in each scene, even though I had no idea what was going on. I didn't know much about any of the characters, like I was on the surface of each of them and they felt like ghosts or just distance memories, which again, isn't so much of a bad thing as it is a disorienting thing.
January 14, 2023
This book is like if David Lynch had no concept of story cohesion and wrote in depth about how to take a tampon out. No character development, no cohesion. It’s written like poetry, but I feel nothing for either of the protagonists.
September 23, 2025
the writing in this was so so excellent - i can only hope to write something half as well as steinke wrote this, each distinct word felt completely cherry picked. religion and violence and girlhood and a damp sickness.
May 11, 2017
Bought this at Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books a long time ago, probably after buying a ticket for something at Film Forum and killing time before the movie started.
July 22, 2019
Definitely read this with a friend if you can. I book clubbed it, and the discussion we had was incredible. There is so much subtle symbolisms and connotations - this book has a lot to unpack!
October 29, 2019
The most richly descriptive book I have ever read, in a beautifully broken way. Also the only book that has ever given me nightmares. Glad I read it. Glad to be done with it.
April 11, 2020
Too brutal for me, at least right now.
January 13, 2023
this is the most bleak shit i’ve ever read in my life.
October 14, 2023
Don’t even bother reading this unless you want to be extremely pissed tf off and anxious the entire time.
March 26, 2025
literally had no idea what was going on the entire time
April 7, 2025
i really wanted to like this but alas i did not. neither character came out very clearly to me and despite the beautiful atmosphere and symbolism i couldn’t really … follow anything
September 16, 2025
I enjoyed the writing style, and the first few chapters. It was difficult to follow at times, though, and just kind of abruptly ended.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews