A horror novel about trauma, queer resilience, and chosen family.
For queer people, normal can be its own kind of violence, the pressure to fit in, to hide or change, to become something that goes against every fiber of your being. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, that pressure takes on monstrous, oozing forms within the confines of Camp Resolution, a queer conversion therapy youth camp. Like the being that gives the novel its title, Cuckoo is an amalgamation of parts absorbed into the whole. This novel pulls deep from the well of alien and cosmic horror, splashing familiar colors onto the bloody canvas to make something original. I absolutely loved Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 novel Manhunt and was thrilled to get the arc for her upcoming novel Cuckoo in exchange for an honest review.
At its heart, Cuckoo is about the system of violence queer people are subjected to every day and the resilience of queer love in spite of it all. After a lengthy, viscerally memorable, and terrifying prologue, Cuckoo introduces us to Shelby, a Korean-American teen living as a runaway in New York City after her adoptive lesbian parents refused to accept her gender identity. Even though she’s just a kid, she’s living with an abusive adult boyfriend. The relationship comes to a close as Shelby comes home to find strange men hired by her mothers to track her down and violently take her away to Camp Resolution. The men encourage Shelby’s boyfriend to seek help for being gay and tellingly murmur they won’t press charges over the fact he’s sexually involved with a child.
From there, the novel jumps to Nadine, a teenage lesbian who got caught with a girl by her folks. Now, she’s being subjected to the same legal kidnapping by Camp Resolution’s goons. Her family watches with indifference as she fights them tooth and nail, dealing vicious wounds against her attackers before she’s finally subdued. Nadine might get her ass kicked a lot, but she’s almost pathologically incapable of surrender. Her fighting spirit is the wind that carries us through this novel and is the heart of our core group of characters. As she becomes the de facto leader of a small group of rebels, they all come to love her and look up to her. For the kids, Nadine is almost like an adult. It’s only when she’s nearly defeated that they remind themselves, and the reader, they’re all just kids. The banal cruelty and indifference of the world at large towards LGBTQIA+ suffering is a bigger monster than any alien in a basement.
The novel provides a wide diversity of voices for POV characters and explores them with intersectionality. Identities aren’t static in Cuckoo as the characters, having found chosen family, explore and learn about themselves. As the camp subjects these children to forced labor and varying other forms of violence and torture, we start getting flashbacks of each of these children’s lives. We see the abuse that brought them here, that’s now being outsourced to the camp. These kids may long for home, but the novel makes it heartbreakingly clear that home doesn’t long for them. Home wants someone else. Someone imagined.
All of the kids are getting headaches and having strange dreams. Further, there’s something wrong with the camp counselors and upperclassmen, and it becomes apparent that the kids who leave are not the same people who entered. As the brutality begins to take a toll, the kids know they need help or escape, but they don’t know where they are, only that they’re in the desert and that if they leave, they might succumb to the elements or be shot.
Reading Felker-Martin is a master class in imbuing text with physicality. Every unspoken smell, taste, sight, or sound associated with being and knowing human bodies comes to life in explicit detail. One of my writing idols once advised that we need to see more bodies on the page; in Gretchen Felker Martin’s novels, bodies fill every page. Where Cuckoo makes the most use of these corporeal details, is in the descriptions of its titular alien monstrosity. I’d recommend reading about this creature with a barf bag in hand. The Cuckoo is part Pennywise (from the novel IT, not the films), part John Carpenter’s The Thing, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I wonder if it also shares some DNA with the oozing mass of corruption in Brian Yuzna’s Society. The point is, this beast was created to gross you out, big time.
Felker-Martin’s text calls out gays who treat their trans siblings the same way conservative Christians would treat them. Shelby’s mother, Ruth, a former victim of a conservative Christian family, doesn’t behave all that differently than some of the other mothers we encounter in this novel. The Camp Counselors and upperclassmen, while many are assimilated, aren’t completely divorced nor ever “cured” of their queerness. They go on harming their siblings in service of a collective alien mind, which seems like a decent allegory. The Cuckoo uses authority figures to do its bidding, hiding its vulnerability and weakness, much like patriarchal, heteronormative society.
Cuckoo, in many ways, is a story about trauma and how it shapes a person. Without spoiling too much, the impacts of what they’ve gone through are made abundantly clear in the latter portion of the novel. The kids grow from hurt and hurt people hurt people. The heroes are no exception, but what allows them to overcome is their mutual support, love, and unwillingness to allow another child to experience their collective nightmare. Cuckoo delivers a satisfying ending, but one that reminds you, for the LGBTQIA+, happy endings still come in a world that is full of cruelty and unease. The nightmares never cease. It shouldn’t be this way.
Cuckoo hits shelves June 11. Preorder it from your local independently owned bookshop. I’ll link a few of my favorite St. Louis stores below.
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