It sounds kinda fucked up but I'll explain.
I write songs, i tend to be very narrative, I guess I like to tell fictional stories in the music form instead of writing them as tales, and I usually read a lot about the themes I want to write about to kinda broaden my palette of references and find different approaches to telling stories.
I'm putting a lot of time into an album about religious trauma and I would love to find some fiction that goes that route, the thing is, a lot of that is trauma connected to sexuality and a toxic relationship with faith, so an erotic component as a mean to confront that trauma is key in the narrative, I've been trying to find something along those lines but I can't find anything and I'm getting a bit frustrated lol.
I'm liking the divine comedy and it's shaping a lot of my current writing but I think I need some more interesting takes on the concept.
I would love to find stuff where God is presented as an actual character instead of a concept, preferably as someone antagonistic, but maybe its asking too much, honestly at this point anything remotely related would be really appreciated.
Thanks in advance:D
by HappyColt90
3 Comments
You might give the His Dark Materials trilogy a try? It’s speculative fiction and gets marketed as YA but Philip Pullman wrote it with no particular audience in mind. He was influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost and a lot of the plot is about religious institutions and even sort of “God” as a character being…not great. It was heavily protested by the Christian organizations when it came out. There is also a pretty central love story although it’s very innocent in a way. It’s hard to explain without it sounding kind of silly but it’s really really good!
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Well, there’s always Richard Dawkins’ infamous “The God Delusion.
Jeanette Winterson has a beautiful memoir about growing up queer in an ultra-religious community, from her struggles with sexuality, depression, and even attempted exorcisms. “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” Additionally, there is a separate book, “Jeanette Winterson and Religion”
by Emily McAvan, just to explore the interplay between faith, doubt, and knowledge in Winterson’s fictional novels.
“The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver deals with faith, colonialism, and the disaster that is the White Man’s Burden.
“Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin is a semi-autobiographical novel about religion, abuse, race, sexuality, faith, and generational trauma.
Finally, there’s everybody’s favorite buckaroo, Dr. Chuck Tingle and his religious gay conversion camp horror novel, “Camp Damascus”. The horrors of religious extremism meet the horror of the supernatural, with attention on sexuality, found family, and good, old-fashioned hope.