Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Korean trans MC, sapphic MCs, Black gay MC, fat/plus-sized gay MC, non-binary MC, assorted queer secondary cast
Protagonist Age: 16-17
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 11th June 2024
Goodreads

Cuckoo is a searing new novel from Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin, where a motley crew of kidnapped kids try to stay true to themselves while serving time in a conversion camp from hell.

In the late 90s, five queer kids, whose parents want them “fixed,” find themselves thrown together at a secretive "tough love" camp deep in the scorching Utah desert.
Tormented and worked to the point of collapse by hardline religious zealots intent on straightening them out, they slowly become aware that something in the mountains north of the camp is speaking to them in their dreams, and that the children who return home to their families have...changed.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~when they come for you, bite a chunk out of their arm
~stick together or they’ll break you
~that is not science
~pay real close attention to your nightmares
~the real monsters are, as usual, not the actual monsters

I’m really not kidding when I say Felker-Martin’s books don’t need trigger warnings, because her name on the cover IS the trigger warning.

*

Technically, this is a DNF review. Surprising absolutely no one, this book proved too much for me. I wasn’t able to finish it. But I read a big chunk of it, and then the ending, and I have enough thoughts for a full review, so. Enjoy?

*

I am a horror wimp. I’ve said it many times. But I loved Manhunt so much that I thought I could make it through Cuckoo too, and folx, it turns out I Cannot. My stomach is too weak, and my rage is too great. I found the supernatural, monster parts so much less scary than the human awfulness (I would not be surprised if that was deliberate on Felker-Martin’s part), and it turns out I have an easier time reading about apocalypses than I do conversion camps.

It will probably not surprise you when I say that I hate conversion camps. Of course I do. (If you don’t, then wow are you on the wrong blog.) But I knew that Cuckoo was about one, and I thought I was mentally and emotionally prepared for that aspect, going in.

I was not.

It’s not as simple as, this is a Thing for me. I have read other stories about conversion camps that did not make me react this way, that didn’t claw inside me and shred my guts, the insides of my head. It’s all about execution, isn’t it? Two people can write about the same kind of monster, and one will put you to sleep while the other makes sure you never sleep again.

Spoiler: Cuckoo did not put me to sleep.

Felker-Martin’s writing is so immersive that there was just no way to keep any part of myself calmly detached. I had no chance of keeping my chill. She had me going from 0 to 100 in seconds, over and over again, every time some new awful thing happened, and it’s not that I’ve never experienced that (although not often; I can name the authors who get me that hard in Feels on the fingers of one hand), but there was something different about the emotions I felt, reading this.

I mean, Manhunt made me rage; transphobia is personal to me in a way that conversion camps are not; the willingness of a certain kind of ‘polite’ liberal and/or the kind of prim and proper cis LGBs (no T, and by gods no +) to turn their backs on trans and non-binary people is fucking personal; I want every TERF to be roasted to death on a spit.

And yet what I felt, reading Cuckoo, exploded from somewhere even deeper than my feelings about transphobia. There was a different quality to the rage and hate and helplessness this book made me feel, something I’m not familiar with, that I don’t ever remember feeling before. I don’t know how to explain it. I can only tell you that it was kind of terrifying, feeling that. It was a bit addictive and a lot scary. I don’t know when I’ve ever sunk that deep into a story, and it’s not because of the topic, it’s not because the characters are queer. I’ve read things like that before and not felt this. This was wholly Felker-Martin’s unique brand of black magic, is all I can say.

With Manhunt, I couldn’t put the book down because I needed to be sure the main characters were going to be okay. I desperately needed them to be okay. Cuckoo, though, switches POV a lot more often, and although Felker-Martin does a very good job of giving you reasons to care about each character right away, those rapid POV shifts meant it was a bit easier not to get so attached. Combined with the nausea-hate-fury the whole book ignited in me, it was easier to walk away from Cuckoo than it was Manhunt, and I think I needed to walk away.

And I think a big part of that is because [what I read of] the horror in this book is not, as might be expected, the monsters. It’s not even the people running the camp. It’s not even the world outside the camp, which allows places like this to exist. All of those things are horrifying, and they are rage-inducing, but that’s not what got me.

It was the slowly glowing realisation that the real villains here are the parents.

They were talking about pitting themselves against adults, against people whose authority over them was as total as it was unquestioned, who had the right to drive and carry guns and drink themselves stupid without worrying they’d get caught. They were talking, he realized with a cold thrill, about fighting their parents.

In the opening chapters, we see several of the characters being abducted (and it is a fucking abduction, I don’t care that their parents signed permission forms) by the camp guards, thrown into trucks and driven off. Which means we do get a glimpse of a few of the parents – who in those moments are depicted as enragingly pathetic, unable to face the reality of the violence they’ve paid for, but equally unwilling to put a stop to it. As the book goes on, all the characters give us flashbacks (not whole scenes, more snippets of dialogue from past conversations and the like) to their parents, who are, without exception, either actively or passively evil (ie, physically/verbally/sexually abusive, or allowing the abuse to happen). And although on the surface it’s the people running the camp who are the bad guys (and do not get me wrong, they are villains), gradually, it becomes clear that those people are really only stand-ins for the parents.

Because they are, aren’t they? What they’re doing to these kids, the parents have signed off on. They have paid for these people to do these things. They would do these things themselves, if they had the stomach for it. They are as guilty as is the person who hires the assassin; it may be someone else who pulls the trigger, but if you hire a hitman, you, too, are guilty of murder, ethically and legally.

(I want to know: in real life, do any survivors of these places ever sue their parents for abuse? Is that a thing? Do they ever file charges of assault? Are they able to? Does the law even allow for that? I don’t want to look it up, because the search results would break my heart and send my blood pressure through the roof, I’m sure. But I can’t help wondering.)

I think this is brilliant of Felker-Martin. It’s a point I’m not sure I’ve ever seen made about conversion camps/’therapies’ before. We always talk about, how can these places exist, how evil the people running them are. But we almost never talk about those who deliberately and knowingly and nonconsensually send their children there.

When I was about 11, I remember being surprised, and confused, when I discovered that the penalty for buying stolen goods was a much longer prison sentence than burglary/theft was. When I asked why, it was explained to me that if no one bought stolen goods, no one would steal those goods. It was the fault of buyers/the black market that the thefts happened at all.

It’s the same thing here: no matter how you spin it, conversion camps and the like would not exist if no one was willing to send their kids to them. And that places the ultimate responsibility for their existence, and anything that happens at them, on the parents.

Cuckoo is a masterpiece in a whole bunch of other ways. It’s brutal, and gross, and mercilessly incisive. There is delicate and precious love and yearning that will have you tearing up, and none of it is safe. Felker-Martin glories in the body-horror, at which she excels. The monsters – the supernatural ones, I mean – are exquisitely horrifying. Punches are not pulled, no awfulness is flinched away from, Felker-Martin grips you by the hair and makes you look at it all – and there is absolutely no guarantee that everyone is getting out alive. No one and nothing is going to hold you hand. The worst that you can imagine will happen, and then things that are worse than that.

I read the first half, then jumped to the ending. I know.

But it’s the parent thing that’s going to stick with me.

This is an excellent book. It got under my skin, and if you give it a chance, it will get under yours. I couldn’t even read the whole thing, and I know I’m not going to forget a single page of what I read. This is horror at its most horrifying.

I mean, beware of literally all the possible content warnings/triggers. But if you want horror that’s going to give you nightmares, rip your heart out, make you think, and want to burn the whole fucking world down?

Then Cuckoo is simply – terrifyingly – perfect.

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