American Rapture by CJ Leede
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American Rapture
By C. J. Leede
Tor Nightfire 2024
C. J. Leede made her debut last year with Maeve Fly, a feminist take on the horror classic American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Now she’s back with her sophomore effort, American Rapture. Set in Wisconsin, American Rapture follows sixteen-year-old Sophie, a good girl from a conservative, Catholic family. Sophie finds her life suddenly turned upside-down when a virus starts sweeping across the country. Forced to run as the virus spreads and quarantine areas begin to pop up around her, Sophie becomes part of a ragtag group of survivors searching for safety in a world that is determined to kill them.
American Rapture is C. J. Leede’s pandemic novel, but it also explores some of the extreme movements and threats within America today. Sophie’s adolescence is spent in a household where information about the world is heavily restricted. She’s not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio. She may only read, “preapproved middle-grade books, how-tos, and, of course, religious texts.” Incidentally, the how-to manuals equip Sophie for this new world far more than her parents might have expected.
When the pandemic begins in American Rapture, it is mainly affecting the Northeast, and Sophie’s parents believe they are protected not just geographically but also spiritually. The pandemic cannot touch them because they, “are protected by Christ’s blood. We invite and accept Him inside ourselves, again and again.” This strategy for avoiding a highly contagious virus works about as well as you’d expect. The willful ignorance on Sophie’s parents’ part and their negligence in preparing their daughter for adulthood form the basis of Leede’s critique of conservative, religious extremism in America.
The virus spreading across the country, NARS-CoV, is similar to SARS-CoV-2. Those infected develop unpleasant flu-like symptoms that lead to hospitalization and death in a larger-than-average segment of the population. But the variant of NARS-CoV, named Sylvie, is more than just a harsher form of the original virus. After the initial flu symptoms pass, those infected with Sylvie are filled with lust so aggressive that they attack and attempt to have sex with any and every person they come across, until their body gives out and they die. It is as horrifying as it sounds. And for a young woman like Sophie, who has heard her entire life about, “what happens to those who sin. The wicked ones who turn from God’s light. The ones who question, who seek forbidden knowledge, who bend to temptation, disobey,” it is almost too much to bear. Living in a culture that teaches young girls to not only be ashamed of their bodies and their sexuality but to blame themselves for everything bad that ever happens to them makes it easy for people to interpret the Sylvie variant as a punishment from God. And this is exactly what Sophie does, at fist.
Naturally, as the world becomes overrun with this biblically-inspired pandemic variant, Sophie finds herself going through her own sexual awakening. The contrast between this young woman exploring her body and her feelings and the rabid fiends roaming the street attacking everything that moves is incredibly effective at highlighting the absolute absurdity of raising girls to be simultaneously helpless and responsible for the actions of everyone around them. Sophie doesn’t understand what she’s feeling and seeing at first—literally—no one in her life ever bothered to explain it to her. Which does young people a great disservice at the best of times, and in this world, leaves them especially ill-equipped to protect themselves. The contrast between Sophie discovering her own body and desires while the world around her is falling to lust calls attention to the damage we do to women and girls living in high-control social and religious groups.
There are two types of pandemic novels. There are pandemic novels that acknowledge that people have a fundamental desire to do good. That when things get bad—really, truly bad—people will come together to survive and build something better on the other side because, “When it really counts, people take care of each other.” And there are pandemic novels that explore a more depressing truth: that when things get bad, people can’t be counted on to do the right thing. American Rapture is arguably a bit more of the latter sort. Which is not to say there are not moments of hope in the book, there certainly are. But C. J. Leede doesn’t let readers look away from the reality that sometimes, “No one goes to help.” This is not a pandemic novel written from a place of optimism; it’s written by someone who has just lived—is living—through a pandemic and has seen how people react.
American Rapture is a frighteningly real look at life in America during a pandemic. It’s uncomfortable and upsetting to read, yet impossible to look away. Unflinching in its depiction of the worst aspects of the country’s tendency toward extremism, individualism, and tribalism. C. J. Leede plays with repression and religious extremism to construct a wholly American, post-COVID-19 pandemic novel.
Amberlee Venters is a freelance editor and writer living in Northern California.