Godshot by Chelsea Bieker
Gold glitter adorns the cover of Chelsea Bieker’s debut novel, Godshot. It is glitzy, and enticing as it draws the reader in with the promise of beauty and glamour. Except it hides something darker, something oppressive, something nobody wants to confront — a story of abandoned women, women left to the control of patriarchal structures constructed with the propaganda of fear. Just like the gold cover, and the gold glitter falling from the rafters of Gifts of the Spirit church, what we see on the outside is just a thin veil for a more sinister reality.
Lacey May is a 14-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, living in the fictional town of Peaches, California with her alcoholic mother. Once an agricultural oasis, Peaches is now a barren wasteland. Drought has dried up the canals, the land, and the people. The thirst is overwhelming as residents are baptized in cola and given over in servitude to Pastor Vern, the messiah charlatan who promises to bring the rain, if his congregants sacrifice, spread the Gifts of the Spirit (GOTS) gospel, and complete their “assignments” without question.
“...I knew people on the outside of the church wouldn’t understand how I could stay instead of leave, withstand instead of run. I would say those people have never been under the hand of a bad thing so bad it can start to seem good” (96).
On the surface, a narrative of cults and religious fanaticism seems to be emerging, except it is much more. Lacey May is a dedicated follower of Vern and his brand of gospel. She frustrated me with her acquiescence which seemed naive, even for a girl-woman. But, this where Bieker’s craft becomes apparent. I didn’t hate Lacey; I admired her. A herculean feat for what should be an unlikeable main character.
Lacey goes behind her mother’s back and tells Vern about “her blood,” she does not stand up for her when she is being excommunicated, she keeps finding a way to justify Vern’s edicts. Except like the water-starved landscape, she is thirsty. Bieker’s use of water, or lack of it, as a metaphor for lack of knowledge is deft. As Lacey becomes more aware, and more pregnant, she becomes more parched. She needs water. The veil lifts and she starts to cling to the reality of her body, and what she knows is the truth. She travels to the Diviner’s Red House for life without the facade of Vern and GOTS, and as she drinks water with Florin and Daisy, she sees the spell people of Peaches are under. She recognizes that the paint on the lawns only disguises the fact that everything is dying, and Vern is not bringing salvation. He just uses women, like her former beauty-queen mother, to fulfill his own desires. He and the other men of Peaches subjugate women and make them property of the church — stealing their childhoods with rape, stealing their hopes with sex work, stealing the babies growing in their wombs to perpetuate the abhorrent cycle of abuse.
Ultimately for me, this was a story about women, and especially about mothers and daughters. Lacey’s mother is shown as a lost woman and a transient mother. Always revered for her physical beauty, she leans on it to survive, moving from alcohol to men to faith, often leaving her daughter as the victim of all three. In a rare moment, Lacey May offers clues about the depth of abuse she has suffered because of her mother’s absenteeism, “She’d left me all alone, caged, with her boyfriends” (263). Lacey’s mother is a broken woman and she has allowed others to break her daughter. But, Lacey loves her and forgives her, even after she abandons her to Cherry, her fanatic grandmother, and Vern, the architect of her baptism into womanhood.
“I don’t tell her I’ll always crave her embrace. I’ll always wish she was with me, hand through my hair at night, voice vibrating through the same rooms. But I’m old enough to know it was never really her I wanted. It was the eternal mother. The mother I had dreamed up. The mother I was never meant to have. The mother, instead, I was meant to be” (321).
It was this moment for me that brought Lacey May full circle. She finally voices the mythos she built around her mother. Lacey understands it was the romantic ideal of what a mother could be that she had always longed for. She finally sees the truth beneath the narrative she built about her mother, Vern, the church, and what a family is. Daisy and Florin offered Lacey that first drink of clean, cold water that awakened her to the mirage she was living, and now as a mother herself, she fully embraces reality devoid of the gold glitter.
While a pregnant 14-year-old turning to sex work for a dose of reality is an uncomfortable detail, Bieker builds a world around the Diviners that is separated from the all-consuming control of GOTS, a world where women acknowledge their bodies, their power, and their worth. Lacey comes to them as part of her journey to find her mother, but instead finds herself. Daisy and Florin offer her a chance at another life, a life away from Peaches. “To think about this baby and what was best, and I nodded along, imagining our new life in the trees where water would fall endlessly from a heaving sky, far away from deadlands, from the scent of my mother rising from my pillow...And for a moment, I was free” (318). Lacey sees a life of her own, where things grow, where things are nurtured as she never was, where she can finally escape the pain of feeling unwanted, and become the mother she has always wanted.
Shades of this narrative can be seen in Chelsea Bieker’s own life. She was abandoned at 9 years old to live with born-again Christian grandparents. Like Lacey May, she became uncomfortable with the group-think of religious sects. She also has a living mother she talks on the phone to as her main source of communication, just like Lacey. Bieker and her main character both lost a mother, both found paths to understanding by becoming mothers, both understand the notion of “loss” is complicated by the fact that the “mothers” are still alive, still a pull, still a paradox of grief and love.
Godshot shattered me with its relevance to the conversations surrounding power erupting around our nation, its stark view of gendered roles, and its honest portrayal of the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters.
Be sure to check out our interview with Chelsea here!
Godshot
by Chelsea Bieker
225 page. 2020
About Carrie Honaker
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe. Currently, she is working on a memoir encompassing themes of motherhood, food, and loss interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, and on her blog Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer.
