Lay Your Body Down

Lay Your Body Down is a powerful and alluring novel about mob mentality, indoctrination, and confronting one’s demons.

Delilah vowed never to return to her hometown in Minnesota and its cult-like church, but when her ex-boyfriend, Lars, dies, Del follows her gut instinct to go home. At Lars’s funeral, Del begins to believe that his death was more sinister than she thought. To bring the truth to light, she must face Pastor Rick, the church’s enigmatic priest, whose influence and power have grown internationally through the help of Eve, Lars’s wife. Eve is the author of the blog for the ‘Noble Wife’ movement, which espouses Pastor Rick’s conservative and fundamentalist philosophy on women’s roles and on marriage.

As the writer, linguist, and podcast host Amanda Montell wrote in her 2021 book, Cultish, ‘... unlike the cults of the ’70s, we don’t even have to leave the house for a charismatic figure to take hold of us. With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry is the simple frisson of tapping Follow.’ Amid the misogyny that much of Eve’s blog comprised and promoted, there were sensible moments that expressed the desire to be loved and cared for. These moments are what makes cults so terrifying because, as Montell discusses in her book, language cannot brainwash you, but it can make you believe in something that you already, on some level, may think you want to believe, and it can send you down a rabbit hole into extremism from there.

On an important note, I do love that in Lay Your Body Down Del hasn’t lost her faith in God, despite her experience in a cult. Amy Suiter Clarke is not malicious against Christianity, but rather brings attention to how the manipulation of faith can lead to the villainisation of, and violence against, women. This novel is a gripping and nuanced examination of how there is no intrinsic evil in religion itself, the danger lies in how religion can be abused and weaponised to exert power over others.