Pretty Poison

Wrapped up yet another horror novel last night, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo. This book is about a group of kids in 1995 who are sent to a conversion camp, experience The Horrors, and then reunite many years later to have another crack at taking The Horrors down.

First, I have to say the decision to set a horror novel in a conversion camp is kind of galaxy-brained, because it is a place that by design is traumatizing and horrifying. This book will make your skin crawl and your eyes tear up well before the monster enters the scene. There are seven protagonists and they come from all walks of life—gay kids, trans kids, kids from Christian families, kids from Jewish families, white kids, Asian kids, Latino kids, fat kids, mentally ill kids—but they all come from families who were willing to stuff them, sobbing and kicking and begging, into the back of a van and ship them off with a bunch of strangers to be “cured.”

And then there’s the monsters.

Generally I’m not a fan of “body snatcher” kind of horror stories, in the same way I’m not a fan of conspiracy theory stories, but I think it largely works here, because this is what the families want isn’t it? For their problem child to go away for a while and come back a new person, without all those icky traits mom and dad didn’t want. For the teens, watching the queer kids around them succumb to “curing” would feel like a kind of body-snatching—who are you and what have you done with the queer person I knew?

The book is also very gross, and I mean that not pejoratively, but factually. If you have a low tolerance for grossness, this one may not be for you. The monster and its ilk are nasty galore (see minor complaint below) and Felker-Martin does not pull punches about the grossness of human existence, particularly as an angry, horny, repressed teenager in a desperate situation. The characters here puke, piss, make out in public bathrooms, masturbate amidst their sleeping peers, eat pussy during menstruation, and are generally grody in the way teenagers are grody. I think grounding the book in these bodily realities works well given the nature of the horror, which is incredibly personal and physical.

I liked the teens themselves and I felt like they represented a decent spread of attitudes and behaviors from people in circumstances both similar and diverse. They exhibit many of the kinds of irritating and off-putting behaviors you’d expect from a group of young people who’ve already learned they must hide their true selves or be punished for it.

There were a couple of things that didn’t totally land for me though. First, I think the descriptions of the monster(s) are overdone sometimes. Not because it grossed me out too much but because yes okay, we get it, the thing is nasty, it’s ugly, it smells bad, it’s inchoate; can we move on? Also, I never felt like I had a real idea of what the thing(s) looked like, despite all the descriptions.

Second, the book jacket description makes it sound like the majority of the book will be the teens as adults, returning to the horrors they faced when they were young, but two thirds or more of the book is the actual events of the conversion camp. It makes the final third in their adulthood feel somewhat rushed.

However, on the whole, I liked this book and I’d be open to reading more from Felker-Martin. There are so many moments here where you want to hug these kids and take them somewhere safe, and I enjoyed the book’s balance of the power of love with the grim reality of the cost of life.