Cuckoo
by Gretchen Felker-Martin · 2024
Buy on AmazonSomething 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. --Cover
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The Audacious Book Club — Monthly Picks (2024–2026) · audacity.substack.com
"Cuckoo is an ingeniously scary novel about a group of kids sent to a conversion camp in the ‘90s. There’s the terror of the socially accepted abuse the kids face (both at the camp and at home) because they are queer, but there’s yet another horrifying entity preying on them, and trying to make them – different. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s sharp novel takes on the particular vulnerability of queer kids and the body-snatching that is conversion therapy, and she does it with equal measures of tenderness and grotesquery. As harrowing and disgusting as it is, I also found it quite insightful and beautiful – and for that reason, Cuckoo is a great work of horror."
NPR Books We Love — 2024 · apps.npr.org