Cuckoo: Body Snatching Body Horror - But Make It Gay!

Like any good book person, my TBR pile ("to be read" for those who don't stack books around like furniture, planning but never quite succeeding to finish one before buying another) grows by at least three every time I make it to a Barnes and Noble. I love a sniff around a used bookstore, and never seem to come home empty-handed. All this to say, I have managed to pick up all three of Gretchen Felker-Martin's novels, Cuckoo, Manhunt, and Black Flame on different trips without realizing that I was collecting a full library of an author's work. The covers all called to me in their own way, and the blurbs on the back all promised intriguing stories with a queer focus.

(Yes, there will be some spoilers, read at your own risk!)

Cuckoo takes on queer conversion therapy through a story of alien invasion and body snatching, with plenty of body horror mixed in. A number of teens in the mid-90s, all "violating" some mainstream conservative definition of sexuality or gender presentation, are literally kidnapped and brought to Camp Resolution: a prison camp promoting conversion therapy in the middle of nowhere in Utah. The head-shaving and deadnaming are the least of their worries, as they soon discover that the kids who come home from this camp aren't the ones who arrived. They are being duplicated and replaced by an alien entity known as the Cuckoo who promises those who serve it a chance to live eternally, to see an end to illness and suffering.

To be clear: the horrors in this book are more real than imagined. Before we see any scenes of mutating alien meat puppets attacking these children, we are presented with the real horrors of gay conversion camps: beatings, abuse, starvation, religious fanaticism, molestation, all meant to help these children mold themselves into a version of themselves that is palatable to their religious parents and straight society. The alien mass and its machinations are merely the torture that still exists in our real world taken to a gory, shape-changing extreme.

And the book, through the mouths of its band of survivors, remind us that they were chosen because the world doesn't care about queer kids. They take on the alien creatures themselves because who would believe them? Who would care? And isn't it possible that those who should serve and protect them are actually part of this web of conspiracy, have already been replaced by these terrifying creatures? Spoiler: they have been, and these now thirty-somethings need to take matters into their own hands to hunt down and destroy their tormentors, stop them from perpetuating this abuse any further. Not everyone survives - this fantastic situation is rooted in the real world, remember - but there is a certain catharsis from seeing this band of misfits, sixteen years later, hunt down the creatures that stole their childhoods and finally put a fiery, cacophonous end to its sinister cravings for fresh meat.

As someone who came out in the late nineties, there is a certain artificiality to the teens and their understanding of their own identities that doesn't ring entirely true of the time. They are seen through today's more expanded notions of gender and sexuality; they are a little too "woke" to feel authentic. I'm not saying that trans and non-binary people didn't exist at the time - of course they did - and one thing that does feel well constructed is the way in which some of the teens shift from one identity and understanding of themselves to another as they progress through the story, but we didn't have the same language and the same concepts around these identities as we have today. This will probably help younger readers more easily connect to the story, and it is some comfort that these children who are so brutally exploited at least have the proper language to elaborate their experiences (even if it is only in the conceit of this narrative), but it does somewhat take me out of the story to see this dissonance.

The ending of the novel, shifting to a side character introduced late in the story, is equal parts hopeful and unsure, with the specter of this alien threat having possibly survived the final assault on the latest camp introduced at, appropriately enough, a Pride parade. Because as we have learned, especially in this new administration, the progress that we have made can be easily undone in a moment. Some within our community will turn against the most vulnerable among us, as if sacrificing those will somehow win acceptance from those who oppress all of us.

We must remain vigilant to protect the freedom and the progress that was gained by those who came before us. There will always be people who hate queer and trans kids, and people willing to torture and abuse them to try to make them palatable to the world at large. It's up to us to keep fighting back at these attacks in whatever form they take. Alien conquest aside, the true horror in the world is often other people and what they are willing to do to police expression and ensure adherence to their ideals, their preferences, their restrictive view of what is appropriate.