The Plastic Priest

In previous works Nicole Cushing has provided spectacular visions of the Pit ("The Orchard of Hanging Trees", The Sadist's Bible) and blackly humorous accounts of depression and depersonalisation in Trumpsterland (A Sick Gray Laugh, Mothwoman). In this novella, psychological and religious themes are combined with deadpan panache in the story of the spiritual crisis afflicting an Episcopalian priest.

As a fifty-pushing female cleric in Owlingsville, a Midwestern small town "of median angst and arithmetically mean fortunes," the Reverend Heather Kaye Ford is off to an authentically unpromising start. Her never very enthusiastic congregation has been thinned by the pandemic and is leaking parishioners to the local megachurch; her vaguely liberal ways are viewed with indifference or suspicion in a town which has purged the bird of wisdom from its name by altering the pronunciation of the first syllable; and her vocation, while genuine enough as far as it goes, is not enough to sustain her against the maddening idiocy of the everyday. While the breaking of the magic wafer still inspires to some extent, Kaye is increasingly aware that she is really just another working stiff in a dead-end job, and that she stays in the job largely because leaving it would be too much trouble and would precipitate a humiliating parental I told you so.

When she tries to take just enough of the initiative by holding an informal prayer meeting in the park, the inevitable washout is accompanied by an ambiguous sign. The single other communicant claims several identities in turn, the last and most troubling of which serves to bring Kaye's crisis to a head. It remains unclear exactly to what extent the head in question is her own, especially as we never learn who is telling Kaye's story. The narrative mood is a fine third-person sardonic, but an I drops in a couple of times without deigning to declare itself further. Perhaps this voice belongs to an outside observer; perhaps it is Kaye's own demonstration of her new-found mystical detachment, which leads her at last to a state of being appropriate to the current reality.

The paperback edition from Cemetery Dance is nicely presented and properly copy-edited; although, appropriately enough, the last sentence of the author biography at the end says that The Plastic Priest is yet to be released.