Wow, this book was really intense, disturbing and wonderful! It contains echoes of It and The Thing. I felt a lot of sympathy for the main characters. There is a fair amount of gore so not for the faint of heart. Very well done.

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin was a great, disturbing, bloody read. I had to take a few breaks, but I'm so glad I finished it. Not for the squeamish.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.

Set at a conversion camp, this follows a group of teens desperate to escape and what happens when they discover there’s an actual monster in their midst. Full of extremely graphic body horror and very disturbing subject matter. Lots of obvious parallels to It by Stephen King but make it unapologetically queer. The plot was so interesting but the pacing is off and the whole book was bogged down with an insane amount of descriptions about literally everything. The parts that work really work though.

What a novel!!!

I am a huge fan of Felker-Martin and I was SO excited to read this novel. We follow a few different teenagers at a conversion camp in the desert. Truly horrific events take place, and it's a fast-paced, heart pumping ride.

This genuinely was so scary and I loved every second. Some of the pacing issues I had with Manhunt (though I loved it), were worked out here. Highly recommend!

It is a great age for queer horror, and Gretchen Felker-Martin is up there with Chuck Tingle, Caitlin Starling, Tamsyn Muir, Lee Mandelo, and S.T. Gibson. Body horror and queer experiences are some of my favorite things and this book delivers in spades.

I loved this book. The author pulled no punches when it comes to the characters’ feelings of shame and self-doubt in terms of body image, gender identity/expression, and sexuality. It made me feel so invested to the characters(of which there are many and yes, they are a little hard to keep track of, but I wouldn’t want to lose any). These are not one-dimensional characters. You see their soul and every dark spot on it that they would’ve been mortified to share.

In terms of horror, wow. Gretchen Felker Martin excels at body horror. I read horror while I eat everyday on my lunch break. This has been the only book I haven’t been able to stomach. This book made me deeply uncomfortable in the way that horror should.

I loved Manhunt by love Cuckoo 10x more. Part I’m a Cheerleader and part IT, this book has queer trauma, resilience, body horror, and Lovecraftian horror done right. Cuckoo has brutal, disgusting, and visceral images that will haunt my dreams for years to come. Beautiful character development and prose abound, this is now in my top 10 reads of 2024.

For queer people, normal can be its own kind of violence, the pressure to fit in, to hide or change, to become something that goes against every fiber of your being. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, that pressure takes on monstrous, oozing forms within the confines of Camp Resolution, a queer conversion therapy youth camp. Like the being that gives the novel its title, Cuckoo is an amalgamation of parts absorbed into the whole. This novel pulls deep from the well of alien and cosmic horror, splashing familiar colors onto the bloody canvas to make something original. I absolutely loved Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 novel Manhunt and was thrilled to get the arc for her upcoming novel Cuckoo in exchange for an honest review.


At its heart, Cuckoo is about the system of violence queer people are subjected to every day and the resilience of queer love in spite of it all. After a lengthy, viscerally memorable, and terrifying prologue, Cuckoo introduces us to Shelby, a Korean-American teen living as a runaway in New York City after her adoptive lesbian parents refused to accept her gender identity. Even though she’s just a kid, she’s living with an abusive adult boyfriend. The relationship comes to a close as Shelby comes home to find strange men hired by her mothers to track her down and violently take her away to Camp Resolution. The men encourage Shelby’s boyfriend to seek help for being gay and tellingly murmur they won’t press charges over the fact he’s sexually involved with a child.


From there, the novel jumps to Nadine, a teenage lesbian who got caught with a girl by her folks. Now, she’s being subjected to the same legal kidnapping by Camp Resolution’s goons. Her family watches with indifference as she fights them tooth and nail, dealing vicious wounds against her attackers before she’s finally subdued. Nadine might get her ass kicked a lot, but she’s almost pathologically incapable of surrender. Her fighting spirit is the wind that carries us through this novel and is the heart of our core group of characters. As she becomes the de facto leader of a small group of rebels, they all come to love her and look up to her. For the kids, Nadine is almost like an adult. It’s only when she’s nearly defeated that they remind themselves, and the reader, they’re all just kids. The banal cruelty and indifference of the world at large towards LGBTQIA+ suffering is a bigger monster than any alien in a basement.


The novel provides a wide diversity of voices for POV characters and explores them with intersectionality. Identities aren’t static in Cuckoo as the characters, having found chosen family, explore and learn about themselves. As the camp subjects these children to forced labor and varying other forms of violence and torture, we start getting flashbacks of each of these children’s lives. We see the abuse that brought them here, that’s now being outsourced to the camp. These kids may long for home, but the novel makes it heartbreakingly clear that home doesn’t long for them. Home wants someone else. Someone imagined.


All of the kids are getting headaches and having strange dreams. Further, there’s something wrong with the camp counselors and upperclassmen, and it becomes apparent that the kids who leave are not the same people who entered. As the brutality begins to take a toll, the kids know they need help or escape, but they don’t know where they are, only that they’re in the desert and that if they leave, they might succumb to the elements or be shot.


Reading Felker-Martin is a master class in imbuing text with physicality. Every unspoken smell, taste, sight, or sound associated with being and knowing human bodies comes to life in explicit detail. One of my writing idols once advised that we need to see more bodies on the page; in Gretchen Felker Martin’s novels, bodies fill every page. Where Cuckoo makes the most use of these corporeal details, is in the descriptions of its titular alien monstrosity. I’d recommend reading about this creature with a barf bag in hand. The Cuckoo is part Pennywise (from the novel IT, not the films), part John Carpenter’s The Thing, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I wonder if it also shares some DNA with the oozing mass of corruption in Brian Yuzna’s Society. The point is, this beast was created to gross you out, big time.


Felker-Martin’s text calls out gays who treat their trans siblings the same way conservative Christians would treat them. Shelby’s mother, Ruth, a former victim of a conservative Christian family, doesn’t behave all that differently than some of the other mothers we encounter in this novel. The Camp Counselors and upperclassmen, while many are assimilated, aren’t completely divorced nor ever “cured” of their queerness. They go on harming their siblings in service of a collective alien mind, which seems like a decent allegory. The Cuckoo uses authority figures to do its bidding, hiding its vulnerability and weakness, much like patriarchal, heteronormative society.


Cuckoo, in many ways, is a story about trauma and how it shapes a person. Without spoiling too much, the impacts of what they’ve gone through are made abundantly clear in the latter portion of the novel. The kids grow from hurt and hurt people hurt people. The heroes are no exception, but what allows them to overcome is their mutual support, love, and unwillingness to allow another child to experience their collective nightmare. Cuckoo delivers a satisfying ending, but one that reminds you, for the LGBTQIA+, happy endings still come in a world that is full of cruelty and unease. The nightmares never cease. It shouldn’t be this way.


Cuckoo hits shelves June 11. Preorder it from your local independently owned bookshop. I’ll link a few of my favorite St. Louis stores below.

Cuckoo is raw, visceral body horror at its most nauseating. It is sharply written with a high-octane plot. Unfortunately for me, body horror is not my thing, and although I admire Cuckoo's well-crafted characters and clever prose (and love its unapologetic queerness), it was hard for me to get through. That being said, if you are a fan of gore, grit, and grime, this form of horror will be perfect for you. Highly recommended to fans of body horror à la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the digital ARC!

I was super intrigued by the prologue but was bored of all the conversion camp stuff about fifty pages in. I had trouble with the amount of POV characters, and all the sexual content seemed unnecessarily long-winded and trite. I ultimately didn't finish this one.

I went into Cuckoo blind. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and this was my first read by this author, so I really had no clue what I was about to go through. And holy cow, I was not prepared.

Right out the gate, this novel gets real and brutal, no holds barred. Then it becomes heartbreaking. My soul ached for every child shipped off to Camp Resolution by parents who only care that they come back "normal". The pain and misery and loathing pours from the pages in word after agonizing word.

And then it changes into something else, something similar but bigger - more cosmic, more monstrous. Suddenly the kids are fighting for their lives and becoming a ragtag little family. I loved what felt like a subtle nod to Stephen Kings "It", with the second half of the book set in the future, the now-adults returning to confront the monster from their past.

Cuckoo is a soaring, wondrous queer coming of age story that will leave you feeling empty but also full, sad but also happy, broken but also triumphant. This is a book that made me FEEL, made me want to weep and scream and also kind of throw up sometimes. And I loved it.

Please check content warnings for this one, as it includes a wide range of both sensitive and graphic horror.

Cuckoo is a love letter to queer resistance.

Felker-Martin explores so many diverse, distinct, and developed characters while maintaining an easy-to-follow central narrative. I especially loved the unflinching examination of gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia as these kids battle both internal and external demons.

There is so much packed into these pages that I thought the book was longer than it actually is...in a good way. I found the details immersive and delighted when they pay off.

I'm grateful to Tor Nightfire for the chance to check this ARC out for free. I'm leaving this review of my own accord.

A group of teenagers are sent to a conversion camp in the Utah desert by their parents in the mid-nineties. These kids are subjected to harsh and abusive methods by religious camp leaders with the intent of eradicating their true sexual identities. The teens sense a mysterious presence in the nearby mountains that invades their dreams, hinting at a dark transformation awaiting those who try to escape the camp.

Even though you don't quite get the description of the monster chasing them, what you do "see" is horrible and grotesque, which I was here for. I did enjoy the idea of it whispering under the floorboards; it was creepy! You could feel the panic and desperation of the characters. It was as if something was always there, with glowing eyes and teeth watching everything. The horror scenes were superb and terrifying.

The author captured the camp's oppressive atmosphere and the desert's desolation. The writing explores horror that affects all your senses, whether you want it or not. Emotional descriptions of the abuse the characters endured were heartbreaking, which shed light on the emotional trauma of not being safe to be who you are. 

Considering the number of characters, I had trouble with all the shifting POVs. I felt lost and had a hard time keeping up. I also thought that the explicit sexual encounters took away from the story and were in weird places in the storyline.

The suspenseful moments will keep the readers engaged. This novel is for anyone interested in LGBTQ+ issues, horror, and mystery thrillers.

I received an ARC copy from Netgalley and Tor Publishing Group in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for the opportunity.

The premise of this novel is incredibly interesting, and made me excited to jump in. Unfortunately, I had such a difficult time keeping any characters separate from each other. Each voice sounds the same, and so many different perspectives are switched through in one chapter. It made the reading experience difficult.

A cast of LGBTQIA+ youth try to survive a conversion camp in the middle of the desert. The body horror in this book is incredibly descriptive and disgusting (in the best way!).
I found it hard to keep track of all the different characters- while I appreciate the inclusivity, it did at times feel a little like some characters were only there to check a box.
The pacing is pretty good, but sometimes bogged down by paragraphs of detail and description that start to feel a little bit like beat poetry?

I also found it incredibly bizarre how horny all of the characters are at all times. Hormonal kids in a camp setting, I *guess* it makes sense, but I found it hard to believe that whilst running from/battling the horrors of camp resolution, grieving their fallen friends and desperately trying to survive, these kids were either getting weird with each other, or getting riled up thinking about it.
Unfortunately this kind of thing continues even once we catch up with the characters as adults, so...?
Overall, I did enjoy the ride and would recommend this one to anyone looking for a truly nasty body horror.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

Okay so this one is going to be a short review. I felt like this book took me forever to get through. In part that's because most of it made absolutely no sense at all. I think the author should have done some time setting up what was happening in a better way. The prologue did nothing but cause me to be confused because it had nothing to do with the main characters and just seemed like a cheap way to do something "scary." The "monster" or whatever it is really doesn't ever get explained in a clear way. The book is so focused on sexual innuendos that so much else gets lost. I think the book would have worked better if we had a clear break in character's perspectives instead of trying to follow all these different characters in one chapter. The number of characters made it hard to keep track of who was who. I love that the book was so focused on a vast range of the LGBTQ+ community but honestly that is the only thing that it had going for it. In the end for me this book just felt like a terrible imitation of It. I have no intention of reading it again... mainly because I still have no idea what it was even about.

expected it to be uncomfortable and dark. I had previously read Manhunt and was deeply uncomfortable but expected that going in. I do believe the point was to make cis readers, particularly cis women, uncomfortable, and I accepted that and looked forward to experiencing a story not meant for me.

But Cuckoo has been… even more difficult. It is conversion camp horror, so I did expect painful backstories. I did not expect such unrelenting depictions of abuse. I took it slow. That was, again, expected. Horrible to read, but conversion camps are horrible to experience and no one is sent there if their parents accept them.

The gratuitous explicit depictions of sexual acts and genitalia were less expected. Once again being made to feel uncomfortable which is probably the point. I’m not sure why, for this part of the book, though. But then came the scene I just read which to be extremely blunt:

A menstruating woman pushed a transwoman’s head between her legs without a chance for consent to be given or not, then called her “my good girl”.

To me, that is dangerous. To provide gender validation after a nonconsensual encounter involving a technical biohazard. I know from research it CAN be safe but you should have a Choice.

Anyway, I stopped there. This book pushes past far what I was expecting or looking for. I've read things that handle difficult subject matters, such as Tananarive Due's The Reformatory--that book did not feel like this one.

The bit with the Latin was a nice touch, though. As a Latin nerd, that was fun to catch.

HIGHLIGHTS
~when they come for you, bite a chunk out of their arm
~stick together or they’ll break you
~that is not science
~pay real close attention to your nightmares
~the real monsters are, as usual, not the actual monsters

I’m really not kidding when I say Felker-Martin’s books don’t need trigger warnings, because her name on the cover IS the trigger warning.

*

Technically, this is a DNF review. Surprising absolutely no one, this book proved too much for me. I wasn’t able to finish it. But I read a big chunk of it, and then the ending, and I have enough thoughts for a full review, so. Enjoy?

*

I am a horror wimp. I’ve said it many times. But I loved Manhunt so much that I thought I could make it through Cuckoo too, and folx, it turns out I Cannot. My stomach is too weak, and my rage is too great. I found the supernatural, monster parts so much less scary than the human awfulness (I would not be surprised if that was deliberate on Felker-Martin’s part), and it turns out I have an easier time reading about apocalypses than I do conversion camps.

It will probably not surprise you when I say that I hate conversion camps. Of course I do. But I knew that Cuckoo was about one, and I thought I was mentally and emotionally prepared for that aspect, going in.

I was not.

It’s not as simple as, this is a Thing for me. I have read other stories about conversion camps that did not make me react this way, that didn’t claw inside me and shred my guts, the insides of my head. It’s all about execution, isn’t it? Two people can write about the same kind of monster, and one will put you to sleep while the other makes sure you never sleep again.

Spoiler: Cuckoo did not put me to sleep.

Felker-Martin’s writing is so immersive that there was just no way to keep any part of myself calmly detached. I had no chance of keeping my chill. She had me going from 0 to 100 in seconds, over and over again, every time some new awful thing happened, and it’s not that I’ve never experienced that (although not often; I can name the authors who get me that hard in Feels on the fingers of one hand), but there was something different about the emotions I felt, reading this.

I mean, Manhunt made me rage; transphobia is personal to me in a way that conversion camps are not; the willingness of a certain kind of ‘polite’ liberal and/or the kind of prim and proper cis LGBs (no T, and by gods no +) to turn their backs on trans and non-binary people is fucking personal; I want every TERF to be roasted to death on a spit.

And yet what I felt, reading Cuckoo, exploded from somewhere even deeper than my feelings about transphobia. There was a different quality to the rage and hate and helplessness this book made me feel, something I’m not familiar with, that I don’t ever remember feeling before. I don’t know how to explain it. I can only tell you that it was kind of terrifying, feeling that. It was a bit addictive and a lot scary. I don’t know when I’ve ever sunk that deep into a story, and it’s not because of the topic, it’s not because the characters are queer. I’ve read things like that before and not felt this. This was wholly Felker-Martin’s unique brand of black magic, is all I can say.

With Manhunt, I couldn’t put the book down because I needed to be sure the main characters were going to be okay. I desperately needed them to be okay. Cuckoo, though, switches POV a lot more often, and although Felker-Martin does a very good job of giving you reasons to care about each character right away, those rapid POV shifts meant it was a bit easier not to get so attached. Combined with the nausea-hate-fury the whole book ignited in me, it was easier to walk away from Cuckoo than it was Manhunt, and I think I needed to walk away.

And I think a big part of that is because [what I read of] the horror in this book is not, as might be expected, the monsters. It’s not even the people running the camp. It’s not even the world outside the camp, which allows places like this to exist. All of those things are horrifying, and they are rage-inducing, but that’s not what got me.

It was the slowly glowing realisation that the real villains here are the parents.

<They were talking about pitting themselves against adults, against people whose authority over them was as total as it was unquestioned, who had the right to drive and carry guns and drink themselves stupid without worrying they’d get caught. They were talking, he realized with a cold thrill, about fighting their parents.>

In the opening chapters, we see several of the characters being abducted (and it is a fucking abduction, I don’t care that their parents signed permission forms) by the camp guards, thrown into trucks and driven off. Which means we do get a glimpse of a few of the parents – who in those moments are depicted as enragingly pathetic, unable to face the reality of the violence they’ve paid for, but equally unwilling to put a stop to it. As the book goes on, all the characters give us flashbacks (not whole scenes, more snippets of dialogue from past conversations and the like) to their parents, who are, without exception, either actively or passively evil (ie, physically/verbally/sexually abusive, or allowing the abuse to happen). And although on the surface it’s the people running the camp who are the bad guys (and do not get me wrong, they are villains), gradually, it becomes clear that those people are really only stand-ins for the parents.

Because they are, aren’t they? What they’re doing to these kids, the parents have signed off on. They have paid for these people to do these things. They would do these things themselves, if they had the stomach for it. They are as guilty as is the person who hires the assassin; it may be someone else who pulls the trigger, but if you hire a hitman, you, too, are guilty of murder, ethically and legally.

(I want to know: in real life, do any survivors of these places ever sue their parents for abuse? Is that a thing? Do they ever file charges of assault? Are they able to? Does the law even allow for that? I don’t want to look it up, because the search results would break my heart and send my blood pressure through the roof, I’m sure. But I can’t help wondering.)

I think this is brilliant of Felker-Martin. It’s a point I’m not sure I’ve ever seen made about conversion camps/’therapies’ before. We always talk about, how can these places exist, how evil the people running them are. But we almost never talk about those who deliberately and knowingly and nonconsensually send their children there.

When I was about 11, I remember being surprised, and confused, when I discovered that the penalty for buying stolen goods was a much longer prison sentence than burglary/theft was. When I asked why, it was explained to me that if no one bought stolen goods, no one would steal those goods. It was the fault of buyers/the black market that the thefts happened at all.

It’s the same thing here: no matter how you spin it, conversion camps and the like would not exist if no one was willing to send their kids to them. And that places the ultimate responsibility for their existence, and anything that happens at them, on the parents.

Cuckoo is a masterpiece in a whole bunch of other ways. It’s brutal, and gross, and mercilessly incisive. There is delicate and precious love and yearning that will have you tearing up, and none of it is safe. Felker-Martin glories in the body-horror, at which she excels. The monsters – the supernatural ones, I mean – are exquisitely horrifying. Punches are not pulled, no awfulness is flinched away from, Felker-Martin grips you by the hair and makes you look at it all – and there is absolutely no guarantee that everyone is getting out alive. No one and nothing is going to hold you hand. The worst that you can imagine will happen, and then things that are worse than that.

I read the first half, then jumped to the ending. I know.

But it’s the parent thing that’s going to stick with me.

This is an excellent book. It got under my skin, and if you give it a chance, it will get under yours. I couldn’t even read the whole thing, and I know I’m not going to forget a single page of what I read. This is horror at its most horrifying.

I mean, beware of literally all the possible content warnings/triggers. But if you want horror that’s going to give you nightmares, rip your heart out, make you think, and want to burn the whole fucking world down?

Then Cuckoo is simply – terrifyingly – perfect.

The prologue is incredible! Felker-Martin knows how to tell a nasty tale and I was immediately hooked.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book is not as strong as the first chapter. The biggest problem is that there are too many point-of-view characters. It is very challenging to keep track of all of them or invest in them. What's more, this is the horniest and filthiest group of kids I've ever read about. I get that they are hormonal, but these kids seem to be aroused by every human they encounter. Coupled with the author's focus on the grimier elements of like pubes on toilet seats, sweat-soaked clothes, and first kisses in bathroom stalls. I was left confused and grossed out.

The author is clearly influenced by Stephen King namely his novel It. The book reads like a what-if version of the book with kids at a gay conversion camp. Sadly, Cuckoo misses the mark. I didn't feel bonded to these characters like I did with the losers in It. Cuckoo tries to duplicate the structure of It ie having half the book with the characters as kids and the other half with them as adults. This worked in It namely due to the book being so long. It does not work in Cuckoo. The book is too short and there are too many POV characters to pull this off. One of the characters is even a shameless ripoff of Henry Bowers. To make things even more confusing, one of the characters transitions to female in the second half of the book and goes by a new name. The book assumes we know who this character is and doesn't clarify until many chapters later. This makes zero sense since the author tells us right away with another trans character,

The other reason Cuckoo fails where It succeeds is the monster. Pennywise is an epic monster that feeds on fear. The cuckoo...well, not so much. It's more like The Thing without the great body horror moments.

This one wasn't for me, but if you love Stephen King's It or LQBTQIA+ horror, it is worth checking out.

Felker-Martin's truest strength, besides a knack for the most disgusting descriptions of broken teeth and flesh gobbets and piles of hair, are her characters; since starting it, the whole time I wasn't reading this book I was worrying about these children (to be honest I still think about Fran and Beth all the time too). These kids colored my entire experience with this book in a profound way and I'm sure I'll still be thinking of them all for months to come, which is great because it'll help me forget about the rushed-feeling last third of this book where they're all grown up and come up with a mildly preposterous plan to save the day.