by Corrine Watson
September 2, 2025
Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! By Melissa Lozada-Oliva; Astra House; 256 pages; $26.00.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s writing stands out for blending the macabre with the absurd. Following her novels Dreaming of You and Candelaria, Lozada-Oliva returns with a stunning collection of short stories in Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! The collection draws on familiar themes of body horror, dark humor, and a desire to believe in something greater than ourselves.
Lozada-Oliva brings a sense of intimacy to her writing as women reckon with moments of shame, trauma and loss. The author’s first-person narrative style often reads as confessional, as if the characters are writing an open letter to process their experience. This point of view drives the titular story as the narrator recounts a strange sexual encounter with a former teacher. There is a sense of shame as she describes the event, but it also feels like a secondary distraction from the grief and loneliness she feels. Between processing the loss of a friend to suicide she’s also coming to terms with the quiet ways people drift apart as she watches her best friend get married. During the first dance, she admits that she’s crying “Because you are my greatest love story. Because I am slightly worried that I am going to be alone forever, in the traditional heterosexual sense, and I am worried that I am going to like it." This raw and honest moment longs with a deep desire for connection, but there is a freedom and sense of bittersweet acceptance as she learns to let go.
This yearning continues throughout the collection as characters look for something to believe in, whether that’s love, religion, or the supernatural. In spite of their desires, Lozada-Oliva’s characters tend to view higher or otherworldly powers with a healthy dose of skepticism. While visiting a holy relic with her family, the narrator in “But I’m Still the King” feels moved to tears by the experience and drawn to pray, only to be pulled back to reality when she sees the monetary offerings for a slew of unanswered prayers. In “Community Hole,” the narrator moves into a haunted house and argues, “I don’t believe in ghosts. Believing they’re real is believing the world is full of magic, and the world’s full of dog piss.” Lozada‑Oliva layers tender moments of profound emotion or epiphany with a kind of irreverent absurdity, reminding us that belief is often complicated and a little ridiculous.
These speculative stories push the idea of belief and survival further, using monsters and curses as metaphors for inherited trauma. In “Heads,” a young woman coming of age in her community struggles with the decision to visit her father in the reformatory center as she is still haunted by the way he murdered her mother, and she projects this anxiety onto the belief that he has transformed into a monster that has been leaving decapitated animal heads in her cabbage patch. In “Tails,” Lozada-Oliva’s use of absurdist body horror stands out as she explores the idea of a cursed legacy. The rules to the inheritance are simple: either exchange all body hair for a semi-sentient tail or reject the tail and be extra hairy. The narrator’s embarrassment about her natural body hair highlights the unrealistic expectation that women should be hairless and the manifestation of the tail makes her feel unlovable and further ashamed of her own body. Yet when she finally allows herself to explore her romantic feelings for a coworker, she is surprised to find that he approaches her situation with loving curiosity rather than horror and disgust. “Maybe right then, I was feeling a different kind of propaganda, the kind everyone insists isn’t created by perfume companies and the blood diamond business. No, this was something to believe in.” Rather than the manufactured commercial idea of love and beauty, she was faced with acceptance in spite of her flaws that opened the window to love herself as well.
The horror of the story runs deeper than body image. The narrator struggles with the morality of passing the tail onto another to save herself, and, as with “Heads,” there is a sense of responsibility to deal with these monsters in a way that ends the cycle of trauma rather than letting it continue. This leads the narrator to consider her own legacy and how she’ll be remembered; perhaps heroically as the one to break the curse. But in the end, she decides, “Even when we’re all gone, there will be something we’ve left behind, something humiliating and inconsequential. The receipts of us. The old underwear." Lozada-Oliva grounds the story back to reality and adds a bit of humor to the narrative because we want to think about legacy in terms of impact to prove that we mattered and not in the banal, semi-embarrassing pieces of ourselves that exist as reminders that we were just a normal person.
Beyond All Reasonable, Doubt Jesus Is Alive! is unsettling, darkly funny, and strangely hopeful. Lozada‑Oliva crafts stories that linger like whispered confessions, leaving you with the sense that survival and belief are never simple, but they are always profoundly human.
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Something to Believe In: Exploring Survival and Legacy in Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Beyond All Reasonable, Doubt Jesus Is Alive!
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Edan Cohen from Unsplash
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her work has appeared in Wretched Creations and the Southern Review of Books. Follow her on X @CorrineWatson6.
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