Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin A Book Review by Jonathan Thornton

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt (2022) was one of the key horror debuts of the last few years, a brilliant work of speculative horror that reinvigorated its genre by speaking to the experience of trans people in the increasingly transphobic USA and UK. Felker-Martin’s second novel Cuckoo (2024) was one of my most anticipated releases of this year, and once again she shattered all my expectations. Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a wonderful, horrifying, gut-churningly frightening novel that, like Manhunt or Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021) and Brainwyrms (2023), uses extreme horror to dissect the diseases of transphobia, homophobia and fascism that infect our modern society. It cements Felker-Martin as one of the most vital and exciting authors working in horror today, and once again confirms the power of transgressive horror as a genre uniquely qualified to speak to horrific times. 

Cuckoo follows a group of queer teenagers

Shelby, Nadine, Gabe, Jo, John, Malcolm, and Felix – who are sent to a ghastly conversion camp in 1995 by their parents. Camp Resolution has promised to turn these poor queer kids into the upstanding straight Christian citizens their abusive parents wish they were, using any means necessary (read: bullying and abuse), for the right price. However the camp hides a secret somehow even more unpleasant and disturbing.

Something evil lives deep in the desert, something that kills and replaces its victims with shapeshifting doubles, something that has been quietly infiltrating human society by feeding on those society chooses to ignore. Sixteen years later, the survivors from Camp Resolution discover that not only did the creature survive, it has been working away in secret and preparing to overthrow humanity, and its up to them to work through their traumas and defeat it again in order to save the entire world.

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin brilliantly takes the “we’re being replaced by alien doubles!”

paranoia of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955) and its subsequent filmed adaptations, and uses it as a metaphor for straight parents’ wishes that their queer kids could just be straight like them. Here the erasure of queer personhood is made literal, a striking rhetorical move that highlights the horror and injustice perpetrated against queer people. The book even points out that the reason the monster chooses to feed on these kids is because the authorities don’t really care what happens to a bunch of queer kids, especially if the abuse is sanctioned by their parents. It is this homophobia and contempt for queer lives that allows the horrible alien Cuckoo to feed with impunity and to establish such a strong foothold in humanity.

The brilliance of Felker-Martin’s use of the metaphor lies in how she is able to exploit the Cuckoo for all its terrifying, body horror goriness whilst never losing sight of the real life horrors it stands for. The opening part of the novel, before our heroes discover the Cuckoo and assume they’re just in a regular horrible conversion camp, shows that conversion camps are horrible and terrifying enough as they are without any supernatural or explicit horror elements. These are places where children are bullied and abused to force them to hide who they really are under a constructed personality that conforms to their parents’ conservative worldview, a parent-sanctioned site of violence.

Felker-Martin keeps bringing us back to the idea that what’s really frightening about being a child is that adults are bigger and stronger than you, and have the money and legal rights that you don’t, so if they mean you harm you’re largely defenseless. This fear, that so many queer children live with as a part of their day to day lives, grounds the more fantastical aspects of the novel in realistic lived experience, making the whole all the more terrifying.

The other thing that makes Cuckoo work so well

Is Felker-Martin’s wonderful characters. The seven main characters are from a diverse range of backgrounds and represent a diverse range of sexualities and genders and body types, which we see develop over the novel’s two time periods. Shelby is a fat trans girl who falls in love with the heroic Nadine. Felix is a trans man who grows into a private detective obsessed with tracking down the remains of the Cuckoo’s cult, whilst Gabe only realizes she is a trans woman after she grows up and becomes Lara, and Malcolm, an African American kid whose sarcasm and sharp tongue cast him as the gang’s joker, will grow up to discover he is nonbinary.

Jo is half Japanese, and becomes the gang’s mother figure, helping to orchestrate their rescue and looking after everyone, and John is a fat kid who becomes the heart and moral compass of the group. Felker-Martin draws each one believably and with depth, exploring how their intersectional backgrounds shape the homophobia and transphobia they face, whilst making them strong characters with their own personal motivations and foibles. Their relationships towards each other are complex, and is shaped by the shared trauma they experience at the camp, leading them to have dealt (or not dealt) with their trauma in a range of unhealthy but believable ways. Felker-Martin’s villains are horrible and monstrous, her human villains still rooted in understandable motivations that in no way excuse their disgusting behaviour. And the body horror is vividly imagined in loving, repulsive details. 

Cuckoo is a barnstorming riot of a horror novel

A propulsive ride through scares aplenty, gut-churning body horror and thrilling action sequences. It’s also an incredible, sensitive character piece that wonderfully explores the experiences of its characters with depth and empathy. And it’s an undeniable, passionate call to arms against the institutionalized transphobia and homophobia that unfortunately are shaping UK and US society. I doubt I will read another book this year half as terrifying or as good, or as vitally important. Gretchen Felker-Martin has done it again. 

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers meets Tell Me I’m Worthless in this relentless and visceral horror about a group of queer kids trying to survive the conversion camp from hell, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Manhunt

Something evil is buried deep in the desert.

It wants your body.

It wears your skin.

In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived―but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person.

Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it’s too late.

The fate of the world depends on it.

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