'Cuckoo' Visualizes a Queer Cosmic Horror

It’s curious, the childhood memories that burrow their way into your mind, so intact that you can recall stray bits of dialogue over twenty years later. 

“Yeah, my dad showed up after he heard I was having such an issue with my mom,” my friend said, backpack slung over his shoulder as he leaned into my front door. A few years younger than me, he had been staying at my house after a blowup with his mom. While it all seemed relatively catastrophic at the time, the details of that fight now feel so mundane they’re barely worth recounting: he was smoking pot and skipping class, wanted to leave high school and finish at a local community college, and so on. 

“Dad actually loved the idea of me doing the college program, so I’m going to fly to Utah with him for a couple weeks and he’ll help me get the whole thing set up,” he said, only here to grab the rest of his stuff before packing for the trip. 

“Ok, you sure about this?” I asked. Even now, it’s unclear if I had a uniquely bad feeling about the situation or simply didn’t trust anyone over twenty-five. 

“It’ll be totally fine. It’ll be little more than a few days and I’ll be right back,” he responded. I did a face scan. His smile seemed genuine. 

I didn’t see my friend until over a year later, and it’s debatable how much of them ever returned.

At the airport the next day, he was rushed from the side by four men, who, with the written consent of both of his parents, took custody over him and, with hands on his shoulder the entire time, boarded him on a plane set for Utah and what would become a mix of reform prison camps, locked down facilities, and “scared straight” style rehab-meets-church institutions. When he finally was allowed to visit home over a year later, he kept his hands folded, eyes pointed down. He eventually answered why he wouldn’t hug any of us: they told him they would test his hair to see if there was narcotic residue on it. 

I didn’t think much about this until a friend my junior year of college told me a similar story, which only became uglier as the details spilled out. As a young teenager, she was sexually assaulted, which eventually led her to attempt suicide. Her father, never one to be told what to do by a teen girl, decided that this was the result of some latent drug addiction and otherwise “out of control” behavior and sent her away to a Utah confinement center where she would spend the rest of her teenage years.

For both of my friends, existence at these homes was punctuated by constant threats of beatings that would often become reality. They were forced to take unlabeled medications, which usually resulted in convulsive vomiting, which in turn was blamed on either some vague definition of “addiction” or simply the demons now leaving their body. The only way to gain privileges, such as the ability to wear shoes or sleep in an unlocked cell, was to snitch on your peers, and to eventually engage in the same “enforcement” of community standards and discipline. Sometimes the kids were allowed to gang beat the person accused of wrongdoing.

These camps and compounds are mostly a thing of the past, now mostly a lurid subject for Netflix documentaries. But these were formative experiences for tens of thousands of Millennials. While drugs and very vaguely defined anti-social behavior was often cited as the cause for warehousing kids in violent dormitories, queer youth experienced an added layer of horror, often sent here as part of aggressive “conversion therapies” to strip them of their sexualities and identities.

Now, two decades past the “out of control teens” moral panic of the 1990s, there is at least a quiet consensus about not just what was done to these kids, but what we collectively allowed to be done. So it makes sense that Gretchen Felker-Martin’s book Cuckoo came out in 2024. Martin’s horror has always been self-consciously queer in every literary respect, which is why Cuckoo focuses on a group of queer and trans teens who are sent to one of these camps with the clear purpose to convert them to a constricting model of heteronormativity. We have two primary time periods for the book, the first two-thirds of which takes place in the 1990s as these kids enter the desert camp and begin to see something terrifyingly askew with the staff who run it, and then later we see them return as adults trying to ensure the cruelty they faced will never happen to another. 

Martin’s prose unfolds with a slow and precise mastery, and it's fair to put Cuckoo into a longer history of Lovecraftian and cosmic horror, where something absolutely monstrous lies behind the eyes of those who would claim, however briefly, to care for us the most. We meet a rather large ensemble of characters, so vast, in fact, that it can be challenging to remember who is who for the first fifty pages. But once we soak into the story and get to know each character, Martin’s naturalism salves any of the confusion that might be derived as the plot moves from scary to bizarre.

One problem that occurs, however, rather early, is the level of extreme rhetoric and violence coming from the staff, and stated rather openly and bluntly, makes it challenging to suspend disbelief when we consider how these camps actually worked. When we read testimonies of those who survived camps not unlike that described in Cuckoo, the greatest horror was in its subtlety: who is next and what will be done to them? In Cuckoo, however, the opacity of the counselors and the leading pastor is dropped almost immediately, and they instead often read as frothing monsters who are ready to wantonly dish out suffering in full public view.

But as you press further into the story, something becomes really obvious: there is not some objective world in this book apart from the experiences of our characters. Instead, the brutality is front and center at all times, not a subtext but the primary memory. For those who actually experienced the trauma of these youth jails, there was little difference between the coded language of reform and the reality of compulsive labor and public torment. More than this, the open homophobia of the leadership may appear passe to modern audiences, but that would require us to forget that even just a couple decades ago (and still today in many parts of the country) there was consensus support for the idea that some degree of queerness could be purified by pain: that was just gayness leaving your body. The bluntness of the characters may not track with a literal recounting of our actual histories, but it is perfectly inline with the subjective experiences of those who often barely survived the assaults (and many who didn’t). When violence occurs, the quiet part is said out loud. When one of our primary protagonists, Nadine, gets singled out by the hawkish pastor-turned-drill instructor, she is dragged in front of the crowd to be stripped and beaten severely with a belt. He then warns them that a life of sexual violence in prison is what awaits them if they fail to repent. “They won’t touch you the way you want to be touched,” he scoffs. Neither will he.

The characters’ sexuality remains the primary way they express their subjectivity and where we encounter any form of intimacy, and there are points in which it seems excessive. We learn little about their sense of selves outside of their sexual discovery, though, for a fifteen-year-old queer person at a homophobic desert prison, there are reasons that this element might remain front and center. Martin’s prose leans into the graphicness of the sexuality, often signaling into the brutality of the violence that surrounds it, a mix of terror and allure at what our bodies could have in store for us. “Her split lip had scabbed over but she still tasted like blood, hot iron and copper mixing with her spit, which caught the moonlight as they pulled apart and Nadine took hold of Shelby’s head and guided her down towards her naked crotch.” There has been some antagonistic chatter online about the explicitness of the sex between what is presumably minors in the book, but what people seem to be responding to is the actual reality of what sex between people, thrown out of a life where heteronormative dating is possible, and where touch becomes a battle for survival. Instead of a picturesque portrayal of eros, we actually encounter queer kids trying to figure out what it means to touch each other. This reality highlights the profound queerphobia that hides under the pollyanna responses many readers have to explicit depictions of other-than-heterosexual joy, which runs in direct counter with the social pathways that have been provided by the world that encases us. Instead, queer sex is transgressive, it’s violent towards a set of institutions whose approved method of passion has been restricted so catastrophically that it turns normal teenage exploration into outlaw criminality. When we encounter intimacy between our characters, Felker-Martin describes it as is, not with post-Victorian coming of age narration, but descriptions about where fingers and hands are, whose they belong to, and where our characters wished they would go next.

There are books that redefine genres, whereby the genre itself never could contain the ideas packaged within. These are often the novels that grace top ten lists, an implicit suggestion that to rely on genre is to necessarily acknowledge the weakness in the author’s own work. Then there are those who, while not offering much novelty, can perform the genre with a master’s touch. Martin’s work, including her previous novel Man-Hunt, do something that is objectively more challenging than both: crafting a horror novel that exquisitely embodies what makes genre fans such committed acolytes, and redefines the audience, the characters, and the voice at the heart of the fear it invokes. Simultaneously genre defying and defining, Martin is not just a fantastic author of queer horror, she is a major figure who will determine what the genre will become.

New queer horror is a largely manufactured marketing term, with very little matching it together. There is a trend towards queering Southern Gothic, often where queerness is a subtle character itself that characters discover as we go along, such as Lee Mandelo's first novel Summer Sons. In this model, discovering and identifying queerness is its function, which, despite often coming in an adequate package, feels thirty or forty years too late to break much ground. At the same time we get figures like Carmen Maria Machado, whose queer oeuvre brings something almost magical and, perhaps, hopeful to queer horror tropes, where the potential of love and joy underlies even ghastly moments. This is not the space Felker-Martin inhabits, where a certain queer-pessimism exists (whether or not she would actually identify with those tendencies). Here horror exists in the queer experience, the discoveries of our bodies and the fact that, as natural as we have come to inhabit them, they appear alien to others, as are our desires and process of becoming. While stylistically she has a more grandiose vision of storytelling, there are similarities here to Hailey Piper and, especially, Eric LaRocca, who employs a miasma of New Lovecraftian and body horror that allows even the most personal of transformations to appear existential. I kept thinking back to a banner I drug along at a Pride event nearly fifteen years ago, that read proudly “Not Gay as in Happy, Queer as in Fuck You.”

In Cuckoo, horror returns to what it should be: a way to process the real frightening vulnerabilities that we actually face in our lives. Queer horror has become a major feature of the genre for a reason as mundane as it gets: because queer people exist, and our dreams, nightmares, and experiences actually matter. Cuckoo speaks to the real experiences of those demanding autonomy and finding monsters dressed as caretakers. While the characters are heightened, their vocal cruelty less a documentary and more a half-grasped memory, it will resonate for those who have survived monsters equally mythic.