Camp Resolution is a brutal and degrading conversion camp for parents to turn their LGBTQ teens into the cishet kids they want them to be. But in the summer of 1996, a group of teens at the camp begin to suspect that it hides something even darker. This is the latest by Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of the excellent Manhunt, and much like that book it is a harrowing, frenzied masterpiece. I'll just tell you at the top: this book is exceptional, and you should read it. But if you want more convincing than just 'I said so', here we go:
The first thing that truly stands out is Felker-Martin's skill at character, at psychology. We saw this in Manhunt, and once again Felker-Martin demonstrates an incredible talent for getting inside the heads of her characters. Even the character we follow for the prologue, a mother suppressing her concerns about sending her daughter to Camp Resolution, is a fully-fleshed person, a scathing and disturbing portrait of a woman simultaneously repressed by patriarchy and embracing it, and a keenly-observed insight to the psychology of twisted familial bonds. The main characters, with whom we of course spend much more time? They are realer than real, compellingly noble, flawed, cruel, brave, loving, selfish, damaged, fearful. We see them joust with their foibles, and give in to them; we see what drives them, what they think drives them, the justifications they make to themselves and the doubts they have about those justifications, the moments of regret and of self-actualisation, the humanity. That we see them both as teens and as adults just gives Felker-Martin more space to explore who they are, how the years have changed them, what realisations they have come to, what potentials they have fulfilled or failed to fulfil and, of course, how the harrowing things they have been through have warped the course of their lives. Perhaps I'm a little biased – for some reason, I've always loved stories in which a group of characters who once went through something transformative together are seen years on, in their own disparate lives. But honestly, I think it's just Felker-Martin's skill at creating characters we care about, that feel like real people.
Achieving tension is another talent of Felker-Martin's on full display here. That prologue? It is a sickening, sweat-on-forehead, guts-pulled-thin-as-razor-wire burn through to an ending that is cathartic in the true sense – in the way of a nightmare, where the fearful thing catching up to you is a relief because at least you don't need to dread any more. And that sense, though on a different scale, with its peaks and troughs expertly managed like the conduction of a symphony, pervades the entire novel. The uncanny, the grotesque, the psychological, all are blended together into a potent mixture, a recipe for horror that is truly unsettling, even – perhaps, in fact, especially – when you can't quite put your finger on why.
Something that is really brought out by this novel is Felker-Martin's ability to evoke physical disgust. Manhunt had body horror in the transformations of the men, certainly, but the monster scenes in Cuckoo are on another level. She seems to have an unerring ability to know exactly which body part to reference, where to channel the revolting, where the beautiful, to hit the perfect note of discomfort and horror. And, while it may seem odd to say this about a book I've described as harrowing, it these scenes can be very fun (cue Larry Turman: 'Some critic!') in a gruesome, horrifying, sickos.jpg kind of way. That isn't to undermine the truly nightmarish imagery here, though, because it is exactly that. That slippery feeling of a nightmare, of your mind knowing exactly what is the worst thing to add to this impossible jumble, is just what Felker-Martin achieves in these scenes – but made all the worse by her keen eye for detail, her ability to ground the monstrous in the chance observation, the particular quirks or memories of the character through whose eyes we are seeing.
I think even more than in Manhunt, Cuckoo allows Felker-Martin to display a mastery of striking, affecting imagery. There is a scene in which the hollowed-out thing created by the camp in place of a living, vibrant lesbian teen is sheltered/held in a living, fleshy cage created by the bodies of its nuclear family – a scene that in Felker-Martin's hands is unsettling, gruesome, and parsimoniously symbolic. The vistas of the teens worked nearly to death on sinisterly incomprehensible tasks, the strange beauty of a lush garden in a camp in the middle of the desert, those bizarre and visceral bodily transformations – Felker-Martin brings a sure hand and a rich imagination to the visuals and the environments throughout this book.
This is a heart-pounding, heart-breaking, heart-wrenching blitz, a triumph in blending the visceral and the psychological, the emotional and the spectacle, the uncanny and the deeply, deeply human. Once again Felker-Martin has created a work that is a true standout in modern horror.
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