Book Club - Amy Suiter Clarke’s Lay Your Body Down

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Amy Suiter Clarke is the author of Girl 11.

Del swore she’d never return.

But years after she left Bower and the Messiah Church Del finds herself drawn back into its orbit by a mysterious message from her ex Lars. Del also swore she’d never talk to Lars again after he left her for her friend Eve, but now Lars sounds contrite.

Before Del has the chance to call Lars back though she discovers he’s been killed. The press are calling it a tragic accident but Del knows better about Messiah and how they always protect their own.

Lay Your Body Down is at turns a mystery and a thriller. The reader travels alongside Del as she returns to her hometown and into the hostile arms of the extended church she fled after high school.

Within the world of the Messiah it’s all ‘nothing to see here’ and we must take Del at face value that the church is an insidious threat. At its core Messiah church and the teachings of its charismatic Pastor Rick are fairly stock standard evangelical stuff. The twist here though is a regressive sense of gendered duty that compels women in the church to go above and beyond in a doctrine they call ‘Noble Wife’.

‘Noble Wife’ compels the women of the church into extremes of purity and is spearheaded by Del’s best friend Eve. Eve has written a blog about the Noble Wife teachings that exported the smalltown doctrine around the world. The same Eve who stole Del’s boyfriend and is why Del can’t believe this is all just a simple accident.

Off-balance is one way to describe the experience of reading Lay Your Body Down.

We meet Del and she is off-balance in life. It’s a state we come to understand has been her normal since she left Bower and her entire life in Messiah.

Del’s state of personal and social vertigo follows her as she tries to investigate Lars' death. We quickly learn it’s one thing to have suspicions and another entirely to prove them (or even get others to believe they might be true).

Del’s uncertainty at the truth of her case mirrors the social unease she feels ostracized from her church. Even if she was no longer able to follow their misogynistic doctrines that doesn’t mean she knows how to exist in a world outside of the church’s oppressive embrace.

The novel is terrifically terrifying because even as we are rooting for Del to solve the mystery at the heart of Lars’ death we understand that it may just lead her to lose so much more. The spiritual death she felt when she left Messiah the first time is visited on her again and again making her constantly doubt herself.

As we follow Del on her quest we come to view in its full horror the methods and means of control exercised on all the women at Messiah. Lay Your Body Down may ostensibly be about the death of one man but it comes to reveal a much darker and deeper violence being perpetrated.

This was a real page turner and got me as much with its social commentary as its whodunnit style.

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