Review: Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin
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Throughout Cuckoo, characters talk about helping each other. This starts from the very first page, a prologue in which a housewife frets about the impending return of her daughter from camp, hoping that “Casey’s problems will be cleaned up.” And it continues throughout the early book. In the next chapter, some people show up at the place where Shelby, a trans girl, is staying and greet her as Andrew, saying that her parents are worried about her and that they’re “here to help you.” A few pages later the woman physically restraining a girl named Nadine and forcing her into an unmarked van says the same thing—“We’re trying to help you.” So too the counselors at Camp Resolution, where these and other queer kids are unceremoniously deposited. As Pastor Eddie, who seemingly runs the place, explains in his speech to the group, “you’re here because your parents love you.”
Opposite this helpfulness—which is, of course, simply a genteel mask for sadism in the same way that “minimizing harm to civilians” is a genteel mask for carpet bombing Gaza—is queer solidarity. The campers quickly find themselves fighting together for their survival, a trauma bond that survives a sixteen year time jump in the book’s final third. It is not that this solidarity is without pain or hurting each other. It’s a book about traumatized queers; we hurt each other all the fucking time, and so do Felker-Martin’s characters. But there’s a ride or die certainty to it—a clear sense that these people form a community that will keep itself safe.
Between these two , meanwhile, sits the Cuckoo. Felker-Martin leaves much of the nature of her monster mysterious. It is an alien presence, owing no small debt to The Thing (Felker-Martine even has her characters watch the movie), but fundamentally it is simply a ravenous Other that wants to consume not just people but lives. And, y’know, a bunch of absolutely skin-crawling descriptive passages about faces opening up like petals of a flower.
The interplay between these—as befits a Thing/Invasion of the Bodysnatchers riff—is one of paranoid uncertainty. The characters are constantly, acutely aware of the way in which the bottom could drop out of their lives at any moment. That’s not just because we spend the first two third of the book with them at a fucking conversion camp—as “bottom dropped out” a moment as it’s really possible to get as a teenage queer. When we rejoin them in the 21st century their lives still exist with a constant precarity, a knowledge that their friends or lovers could split open their faces and try to eat them at any moment.
The result abandons the incendiary directness of Manhunt, with its readymade “the TERFs are the real monsters” summary, in favor of something more enigmatic. This is not a bad thing—for one, that sort of bluntly high concept storytelling is an odd fit with Felker-Martin’s own critical taste, which, while by no means categorically opposed to populism, pointedly has more time for art films and headscratchers than it does for mass market blockbusters. For another, the sense of tenuous uncertainty mirrors actual queer lives in the twenty-first century, with its vivid combination of ability to live openly and freely and knowledge that it could all come crashing down in a blur of fascist violence.
Still, the book finds Felker-Martin working at the limits of her considerable abilities. A sprawling main cast introduced in rapid succession provides a bruising test of the reader’s working memory, and Felker-Martin is unsparing in her demands. When a character transitions over the course of the time jump, she simply has everyone using her new name, leaving it to the reader to figure out who this “Lara” person must have been in the first part of the book. Still, while there are a lot of characters, they’re also distinct, and Felker-Martin deftly wields her roving third person narration to give each a vivid portrayal. She asks a lot, but is more than capable of rewarding the effort.
The result is a book that skips right over sophomore slump and onto “difficult third album,” a category I at least have acres of time for. I doubt Cuckoo will have the seismic effect of Manhunt, but that’s not exactly a criticism given that Manhunt is easily one of the three most important SFF works of the twenty-first century. But I suspect that in years to come, as her devotees discuss her canon, Cuckoo will be recognized as a landmark of its own—a moment where an already brilliant writer started to expand the boundaries of the possible and settled in for the long haul. Manhunt was a landmark book; Cuckoo reveals a landmark author. Don’t miss it.
Thanks to Gretchen Felker-Martin for furnishing me with a review copy.
