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Spoilers Ahead

I’ve read two of Morrow’s previous books (Cherish Farrah and A Song Below Water) and didn’t really enjoy either of them, but when I found out about The Body, I hoped that this go-round would be better. Third time’s the charm, right? For some reason, I really do want to like her work.

Unfortunately, this is the third strike.

This is a pretty low rating for me because there’s genuinely not anything I like about this book. Not the writing, the characters, or the plot. This novel was framed as a religious horror, and I thought it would deliver something in the same vein of religious horror films I’ve seen or stories I’ve read. The mark was missed.

The interior world of this novel is extremely strange. I’m not sure how much of it I actually understand. Let me try to summarize this:

The story is about Mavis and Jerrod, a married Christian couple. Mavis is immediately shown to be…anxious within their marriage, though we don’t know why until about the middle of the book. On my first impression, her anxieties came off as her being in an abusive marriage. This isn’t quite the case, but their relationship definitely isn’t perfect, either.

Mavis is in a car accident involving a couple who were part of the congregation at Mavis and Jerrod’s wedding seven years prior. After this incident, a spate of bad things start happening to them, including a near-attack at a hardware store and a nighttime ambush in their own home. They start believing they might be cursed. They’re not wrong.

We find out that both Mavis and Jerrod have cheated on each other at different points of the relationship, and these transgressions have turned the members of their former wedding congregation into possessed killing machines hellbent on delivering Old Testament justice. Whenever any congregation member lays eyes on either Mavis or Jerrod, they lose control of their body and are overcome with an urge to murder them.

This occurs because of the “congregation vow,” which acts as a sort of ritual that binds everyone together—the newlyweds and every person witnessing the ceremony. If the newlyweds don’t hold up their vows, the members of the congregation therefore have a right to dole out retribution for any “sins” as they see fit. Commence the killing.

So, my thoughts about this book. I’ll condense them into bullets in an attempt to organize them somehow, because they’re all over the place:

• This book is essentially Black Church Drama™️in novel form. Which is not something I’m interested in. It’s heavy on the troubled interpersonal dynamics in the church community and leans less on the horror and thriller aspects. There’s a lot of detail given to and discussion made about church politics and the roles to be played within a congregation, within a family, and within a marriage. A lot of this content will likely be triggering to people who have religious trauma. I found some parts unbearably uncomfortable because of this aspect, yet this discomfort didn’t make me sympathize with the main characters or understand their motives more clearly.

• How many times can we say “talon(s)” in one book? Lord have mercy. I don’t think any synonyms were even used for this term. Maybe not using synonyms is intentional—as in, this is a specific word for a very specific psychological phenomenon that happens to Mavis, and it wouldn’t work as effectively with a substitution. But if that’s the case, there needs to be less instances of the word itself or a way to refer to it with determiners/pronouns so that it’s not just “talon(s)” several times on one page.

• In the first half of the book, there are entire “flashback” chapters that disrupt the main action and just don’t do much for me. I know they are meant to gradually build context at key points of the story so that we begin to understand the characters’ motivations and behaviors, like thriller/mystery narratives often do. I don’t know if that was successful here.

• The twist in this mystery, I guess, is finding out that Mavis has cheated on Jerrod with the ex she used to be obsessed with, and who was condescending and abusive to her. Then the second twist is finding out that the congregation is hunting them down not because of Jerrod’s infidelity, but hers. Because I think hers happened first. The first twist is very anticlimactic; I felt no sense of shock or disbelief to find out that Mavis had cheated. Maybe this is because everything else about the narrative felt so convoluted that the satisfaction of the reveal was lost to me.

• The concept of the congregation vow itself, and the way that it is able to “possess” people and make them murderous with zero explanation of its mechanism, is odd and a bit nonsensical. This requires significant suspension of disbelief. Since the title is “The Body” and I thought the book might involve ghosts/hauntings, I probably shouldn’t be so put off by this. I’ll admit this is probably a “me” issue; I don’t tend to like stories with monsters that are never shown, events that are never explained, etc.

• The book title feels misleading. I can only assume it refers to Cyrus’ body (Mavis’ ex), but I’m not entirely sure of that. Mavis isn’t the one who kills him. She’s not even present when it happens. The title and summary of this book had me thinking for months that Mavis would kill someone and try to hide it/have to answer for it, but…not exactly.

This might be the book for you if you’re very into the religious aspect and can temper your expectations somewhat about the horror/thriller potential. I’ve seen other reviewers with admitted religious trauma ranking this book pretty high, which I find surprising, but there’s something for everyone.

Pick up this book if you like:

• Examinations/critiques of religion
• Failmarriages
• Unexplained paranormal events
• Revenge narratives

Pass it by if you don’t want to read about:

• Female characters who act as foot soldiers for the patriarchy
• Cheating. Lots of it!!
• Neglectful parents
• Religion. But then, you wouldn’t have picked this up in the first place, lol
• Lots of repetition (of language and concepts)