Darcey Steinke

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.

A collection of original essays by twenty-one Christian writers: Rick Moody, Catherine Bowman, Kim Wozencraft, Joanna Scott, Madison Smartt Bell, Stephen Westfall, Jim Lewis, Ann Powers, Lucy Grealy, Bell Hooks, Lisa Shea, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joseph Caldwell, Ann Patchett, Eurydice, Benjamin Cheever, Lydia Davis, Coco Fusco, Barry Hannah, April Bernard, and Darcey Steinke.

When Jesse's family moves to Roanoke, Virginia, in the summer of 1972, she's 12 years old and already mindful of the schism between innocence and femininity, the gap between childhood and the adult world. Her father, a former pastor, cycles through spiritual disciplines as quickly as he cycles through jobs. Her mother is dissatisfied, glumly fetishizing the Kennedys and anyone else that symbolizes status and wealth. The residents of the Bent Tree housing development may not hold what Jesse is looking for, but they're all she's got. Her neighbor speaks of her married lover; her classmate playacts being a Bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; the boy she's interested in fantasizes about moving to Hollywood and befriending David Soul. In the midst of it all, Jesse finds space to set up her room with her secret treasures: busts of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, a Venus flytrap, her Cher 45s, and The Big Book of Burial Rites, which she reads obsessively. But outside awaits all the misleading sexual mores, muddled social customs, and confused spirituality. Girlhood has never been more fraught than in Jesse's telling, its expectations threatening to turn at any point into delicious risk, or real danger.