Church Of The Mountain Of Flesh
Written by Carolina Cruz: 2/4/2025The Church of the Mountain of Flesh by Kyle Wakefield is a body horror story about a tentacle god that grows underneath a medieval Italian village. It’s a religious horror story about Sole, who agrees to rebuild God’s church in return for a man’s body. It’s a descent into madness that brings you alongside it, devolving into a whirlwind of crumbling identities and cracking skin.
Amongst all the tentacles of flesh and mounds of clay and seaweed, I saw something in Sole, the main character, that I’ve never seen in a character before. I saw myself.
There are certain experiences that can feel very isolating as someone who grows up struggling with gender identity. You might not even know that’s what's happening in the moment, but you know something is wrong. I remember daydreaming about how my male friends would treat me if suddenly I became a man, by some curse or miracle, overnight. I imagined pretending I was someone else, starting our friendships over from a place of equality and mutual understanding I wasn’t afforded as a ‘girl’. Then, when you’re creative, there are even more isolating experiences. Desire can compound with the ability to express yourself, and that expression can lead to a strange, unsettling mix of euphoria, catharsis, and guilt: ‘genderbent’ versions of favorite characters, self-inserts that are the gender you’ve told yourself you’ll never be, self portraits that skew just a little bit more the direction you want to be going.
In the Church of the Mountain of Flesh, Sole is a sculptor. His town has a tradition he harbors a lot of resentment for — the inhabitants of this seaside town carefully, reverently sculpt their own forms. When he’s made to do so alongside his peers at a formative time in his life, Sole begins to play with his own image. He makes his jaw just a bit wider, just a bit stronger, his visage just a bit more masculine. And then he throws the sculpture on the ground before anyone else can see what he’s done.
Sole is the burden of all that isolation incarnate. He’s a passionate, creative man but above all he is an ANGRY one. A desperate man. He literally and figuratively claws his way into manhood, sacrificing more than he even knows for the body and acceptance he craves.
And that’s just the obvious.
While the representation of Sole’s holy transition was something I expected to resonate with when I picked up The Church of the Mountain of Flesh (indeed, it’s what drew me to the book in the first place), what I didn’t expect was the way the other characters treat him. There are moments where other characters observe how he has changed, even before the change has truly taken hold, and how they react says just as much about Sole as it does about them. The town treats Sole with such a delicate variety of fear, love and disgust that it left me breathless. One character, Ersilio, brought me to tears several times over the course of the book with how consistently gentle he was with Sole without being condescending or patronizing. Ersilio and the other people in Sole’s life serve as fractals of a mirror of how Sole sees himself, giving the reader a more complete and nuanced vision of him than we can glean from Sole’s narration.
Sole and the world around him are nasty, desolate, and hungry, and I love them. I’ve read many books that promise a protagonist who is consumed by his own desires, who devolves into pure madness and destroys the very things he fought so hard to save, and all of those books have left me wanting, or angry, and always disappointed. The Church of the Mountain of Flesh did not let me down. I have never come to the end of a tale like this and felt the way I felt after reading Church of the Mountain of Flesh — empty and aching, but with that isolation of my experiences with gender so deftly dismantled that I struggle to say that I’m the same person I was when I started reading it.
I won’t try to convince you to read this book. If I was doing that I’d mention the beautiful illustrations drawn by the author himself, or the flowery descriptions of horrible things, or the masterful way this story weaves two timelines together. Instead, I hope this review expresses what I could not say after watching I Saw the TV Glow. I think that’s because the message of ‘there’s still time’ resonated with me in a way that made me feel almost guilty. Implicit in the message of ‘there’s still time’ was this needling idea, telling me that I had waited so very long already. That I still had more to do. That I needed to do more, be more. This is not to lay any blame for my feelings at the feet of I Saw the TV Glow, which did make me cry many times and did rip a hole in my chest open. The Church of the Mountain of Flesh, however, is what you would see if you could make sense of the static inside that hole.
I Saw the TV Glow says ‘there’s still time’. What does the Church of the Mountain of Flesh say? I’m not entirely sure yet. I know it says something I’ve known for a long time, I just don’t know what it means for me going forward. Am I still Sole as he was, sculpting himself and afraid that others would see what those sculptures meant about the man who was making them? Or am I going to learn from him, and refuse to live in desperation and anger until it drives me into madness? I’ll have to think about it. And luckily, ‘there’s still time’ for me to figure it all out.