David Davis
on Gretchen Felker-Martin's "Cuckoo"
I used to publish articles and reviews in places other than DAVID, but I rarely do these days. As rates worsen, the time it takes to pitch, write, and revise for publication is too much—I simply can’t afford it. Which means that when I think a book or movie is worth writing about for someone other than myself, it must have really had an effect on me.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a home for my review of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, but Natalie Adler at Lux Magazine made space for me to cover it within a piece about conversion therapy in new queer horror for their Fall/Winter issue. Now that it’s available in print, I wanted to share my original review of Cuckoo with you all, as both companion and endnote to the Lux piece, and as a paean to Gretchen, a writer I think the world of.
The first half of Cuckoo, the searing second novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin, is set in the mid-nineties. Sent away to be scared straight in a remote Utahn compound, the teen prisoners of Camp Resolution are coming of age in a country in which anti-sodomy laws haven’t yet been ruled unconstitutional, euphemisms like “reparative therapy” are still picking up steam, and nascent Trojan horses like “porn addiction” are waiting patiently for widespread internet use. These campers aren’t referred to as queer unless they’re being bashed (by a relative or camp counselor, take your pick), let alone as trans, the inchoate prefix-as-identifier that had yet to attract the opportunistic sex panic now taking the West by storm. Camp Resolution isn’t about “identity.” It takes high-schoolers captive for one reason only, as Pastor Eddie reminds Cuckoo’s protagonists after their first day of back-breaking labor and beatings: because their families are fucked up.
Which isn’t to say that these queer and trans teens are not also fucked up in the eyes of their captors, but for them, their sexual and gender deviance are symptomatic of a deeper problem. As Pastor Eddie explains, their parents don’t have the guts to guide them toward something better, to teach them how to be in the world. “The minute things got hard, they pushed you out of the nest and paid someone else to fix the problem,” he says. “They’re weak, and they abandoned you.” Had their families been better, is Pastor Eddie’s point, they wouldn’t currently be providing slave labor in total isolation from everyone they know, including the one or two relatives who might see their imprisonment for what it is.
Pastor Eddie’s irony is obvious to anyone who doesn’t hate children. It is true, if perversely, that Shelby, Nadine, Gabe (later Lara), Felix, John, Malcolm (later Mal), and Jo wouldn’t have been kidnapped and sent to the middle of nowhere if their families had been better. Though hailing from diverse backgrounds and family configurations, each camper shares in common home lives of tragic neglect and violent abuse. Like all conversion camps, Camp Resolution outsources that neglect and abuse for families that have realized, on some level, that they’re not equipped to dehumanize their children to the satisfaction of American heteronormativity. Along with the schools, clinics, and prisons, conversion camps—the bloody brick-and-mortars squatting down-funnel from sport and bathroom bans—are just the market meeting a demand.
Pastor Eddie’s speech will prove to be the gentlest example of the tough love that Cuckoo’s protagonists must endure until they return home at the end of the summer. But of course, none of them are supposed to. Not as themselves, anyway.
Like Manhunt, Felker-Martin’s first novel, Cuckoo brings to life a constellation of characters and their myriad backstories with rapid-fire dialog, breathtaking action, and tightly controlled revelation of plot. Obscenely graphic and terrifically feeling, Cuckoo maintains its focus at a relentless pace as Camp Resolution’s newest cohort susses each other out among gun-happy counselors and their belt-wielding apparatchiks. Segregated by birth assignment in their lodging and labor and surveilled within an inch of their lives, the campers are nevertheless able to recognize each other—sometimes even before recognizing themselves. Watching “the transsexual” Felix in the girl’s shower, Jo registers one of the fleeting attractions over which entire Twitter discourses are waged. “‘He’s kind of hot,’ she thought, wondering if that made her less or more of a lesbian.”
Felker-Martin toggles deftly between her many main and supporting characters, demonstrating with surgical precision the conflict between their senses of self and the “reality” being shoved down their throats. Even the dipshits still complaining about the needless complexity of they/them for a single person can follow along with the campers whose very bodies are at odds with white and cis supremacy; can empathize with the desires that are mostly undesired but, like all desires, inexorable. The morning after hooking up with John, Malcolm’s fatphobia shames his pleasure in hindsight: “In the light of day, he felt embarrassed by how eager he’d been. How much he’d liked it.” Though the campers’ backgrounds and responses to their capture—Should they tough it out? Fight back? Cooperate, like the prefect-style campers that enforce just as brutally as their counselors?—are unique and appropriately conflicted, not a detail about their personalities, pasts, and hopes for the future is wasted. Among the misgendering, deprivation, and broken bones, I found myself wondering how such significant suffering could be imposed upon characters so obviously beloved by their author.
From the campers’ memories of home to their bloody resistance against their captors, Cuckoo’s constant violence is a petri dish of power, an opportunity to observe its flow around and between identity categories that aren’t the explicit projects of the conversion camp’s bare life. As pretexts for their collective punishment, the campers’ queerness and transness serve to reinforce all modes of oppression: John’s fatness is integral to his father’s understanding of (and disgust in) his son’s effeminacy; Felix’s insistence on his maleness defies his immigrant father’s hopes for assimilation into American culture; Malcolm’s attraction to other boys, while not incidental to his abuse, is convenient cover for a mother who has turned her rage at her absent husband back on her children; Shelby’s girlhood is tolerated by one of her white adoptive mothers, but is seen by the other as a punishment, in the wet-dream register typical of gender-critical types (“The lit butt pressed to Shelby’s arm. The smell of burning flesh. You cannot do this to yourself, Andrew. You cannot do this to me.”). While they’re incapable of feigning the normalcy that would have allowed them to fly under the radar—as many of us would have, if only we could—not being straight isn’t really why they’re here at Camp Resolution. Their crime is having survived the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse their families decided that they deserved. Their queerness or transness makes destroying the evidence that much easier.
Which isn’t to say that Felker-Martin renders scapegoating as a uniform experience. Cuckoo balances a diverse cast of characters who must organize, despite their differences and disagreements, in order to save themselves. These teens aren’t at Camp Resolution because they are queer or trans. They are fags, dykes, and transsexuals, or perhaps some other slur, or perhaps nothing at all. The words both used and denied in order to degrade these children describe real power imbalances that cease to matter when the campers start to suspect that even if their counselors don’t kill them, something else will—something that slithers under the cabins and peers up at them through the floorboards. With her characters’ bitter jokes about concentration camps, environments designed to use identity for the sole purpose of its annihilation, Felker-Martin underscores the co-optability of liberal identity politics. Camp Resolution is no True Directions, the conversion camp from But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) whose earnest goal is to correct gender transgression and restore its campers to happy, healthy heterosexuality. Like other conversion camps, it promises rehabilitation it can never deliver; unlike other conversion camps, its harsh physical labor and arbitrary punishment conceal something even more sinister, something that’s causing campers to waste away, suffer blinding headaches, and begin sharing the same dreams, night after night.
Camp Resolution runs on queerphobia, but the monster at its heart is no metaphor. Its purpose unclear and its reach octopodean, the creature the campers call the Cuckoo is a massive, cervix-textured, foul-smelling alien lifeform that colonizes human bodies—“They’re going to take us. Our faces. Our lives,” is Jo’s horrified realization—then sends their replicas back to their unsuspecting families, hatchlings hungry for the faces (and then some) of the people that betrayed their hosts’ utter helplessness.
Able to convince families all over the country to hand over their own offspring, the Cuckoo grows, feeding on the queer and trans poster children of the American identity crisis that has gone on to take the lives of Nex Benedict and Alex “Boo” Taylor, to name two murdered youth from 2024 alone. That crisis is literalized by the Cuckoo as an extraterrestrial mother-parasite of Lovecraftian proportions from whom the imitations of human bodies protrude like tumors, mimicking the voices and words of the parents that gave the campers up. Their delayed realizations of their abandonment are among the most painful scenes in the book. “She sent me here to die,” thinks Gabe, shattered. “They both did.”
With Cuckoo, Felker-Martin forsakes euphemism to paint an exacting portrait of the campers whose lack of power begins with the wrongness of their bodies. In her extended descriptions of the Cuckoo’s unearthly incarnation, we see the same unflinching language reconstituted to convey its fleshy, weeping, even gynecological horror. Two different kinds of monster held up for our comparison—how could we fail to tell the difference? How could anyone?
With research showing a relationship between conversion therapy and suicidality, use of the term “survivor” for those who’ve undergone the former is hardly overstated—least of all in the case of the refugees of Camp Resolution. It’s nothing short of a hard-earned miracle that some (though not all) of our original campers make their hair-raising escape through the desert to the nearest town where, devastated by their ordeal and aware they can never return home with the story they have to tell, they begin their lives as runaways with the help of Jo’s grandfather. Though safe for the moment, their relief is hardly commensurate with their suffering; thanks to trauma, it never is. Shelby, Lara, Felix, John, Mal, and Jo may have made it out of Camp Resolution, but, like so many queer and trans adults, they must continue to live on inside of their memories.
In the 16 years between Parts 1 and 2 of Cuckoo, only Felix keeps tabs on the monster, following its cross-continental metastasization with the help of online forums and lonely stakeouts at suspected conversion camps, which as the nineties fade into the past have had to become more clandestine since his summer in Camp Resolution. His fellow survivors, now spread across the country in various stages of dysfunction and levels of contact, can deny or ignore it all they want. The Cuckoo knows time, and just about everything else, is on its side.
Like the Losers Club of Stephen King’s epic, IT, the campers are summoned by a self-appointed watcher to finish what they started going on two decades later—only their demon is even more formidable than Pennywise. Like the sewer clown plugged into ChatGPT, the Cuckoo iterates rather than replicates, absorbs rather than haunts, consuming entire families at a time and infiltrating the country’s most powerful institutions, its process reminiscent of the climate-driven model of Lyme-carrying ticks and toxic algae blooms. Only Felker-Martin could one-up King with the campers’ Hail Mary plan to take out the Cuckoo once and for all, the mechanism of which is one of her many winks to Cuckoo’s transsexual readers.
Cuckoo’s strongest connection to IT, however, lies in its author’s authentic sympathy for young people, one that I sensed when reading King as a child myself. Cuckoo is gory and disturbing, and even its quietest moments of connection are shadowed by tragedy. And yet I would recommend it to any young person, because it takes their vulnerability seriously. As this country’s organized assault on trans children proves, the liberation of all children is the next (final?) frontier of any radical politics, and Felker-Martin understands this better than most. Her dedication at the beginning of Cuckoo reads simply: For all unwanted children.
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