Jaelyn reviewed Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Review of 'Cuckoo' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
This is a heavy horror focused around a group of queer teens in the 1990s sent by their parents (kidnapped) to a conversion camp in the desert. The religious zealots (and also creepy literal monsters) torture the kids through hard labour and abuse but they soon come to realise that they are being replaced; they are never intended to leave the camp alive.
It’s intense and a difficult read for the topics it covers. That’s intended of course given how horrific conversion camps are to us; the trauma is visceral, as is the gore and sex. It’s a combination of real child abuse and queerphobia with concepts from The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers; then it draws a line between them.
But I also found it a challenge as the way it jumps around, coupled with psychedelic moments and a lot of different characters to follow means it …
It’s intense and a difficult read for the topics it covers. That’s intended of course given how horrific conversion camps are to us; the trauma is visceral, as is the gore and sex. It’s a combination of real child abuse and queerphobia with concepts from The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers; then it draws a line between them.
But I also found it a challenge as the way it jumps around, coupled with psychedelic moments and a lot of different characters to follow means it demands a fair bit more focus than I had on hand on this occasion. It got a little easier towards the end (as the cast is *ehem* whittled down slightly) and a time jump to their future selves trying to save the next generation from going through the same shit.
