Totally Biased Review #2: Luminous Body

Brooke Warra’s Luminous Body is a novellette preoccupied with grief and motherhood. One of the first things we learn about our narrator, Melissa, is that her mother died of cancer. Melissa’s only living relative is her grandmother Gertie, who helped raise her and is also her boss at the local diner. She keeps the ashes of her high school science teacher, whom she euphemistically refers to as her first boyfriend, in a plastic baggie. Melissa narrates the story to an unnamed “you,” detailing how she may have been impregnated by a cosmic event and everything that followed.

This is a beautifully written novella, and reads like a piece of literary realism with a speculative undercurrent. There are no tentacled monsters from beyond the stars or lunatic cultists; the darkness of Luminous Body is more grounded and familiar, the horrors of poverty, of loneliness, of disease, of family. These are intimate, internal conflicts, and excellent sources from which the Weird grows.

Once you start reading this story you won’t put it down until it has finished and left you with a quiet ache. It’s win of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette is well-deserved. As of this writing the second edition of Luminous Body is still available from Dim Shores, so make sure you pick up a copy.

-Ross