Why? Why did I pick a book I’ve never read? Why did I pick a book I suspect my friend might hate? Why did I pick this book, specifically?

That is, of course, the question I committed myself to answering when I devised this series, and subsequently when I chose this book for it.

The short answer, unglamourous as it is, is that I didn’t pick anything else.

I knew that whatever Abbigale picked, I wanted to depart from.

At one point I toyed with the idea of being a bitch, stretching the term “novel” as far as I thought it would give, and making my co-worker play the delightfully homosexual slice-of-life tedium simulator visual novel VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartending Action.

The angel on my shoulder got the best of me, however, and soon I found myself on the floor of my apartment strewing books my girlfriend and I had carefully organized only a month prior every which way in a frantic search for “The One.”

Abbigale had already telegraphed to me her intentions to pick Bunny by Mona Awad, to which I promptly developed the normal and healthy instinct to say “Right, hold my (proverbial) beer.” Initially, I contemplated choosing Gretchen-Felker Martin’s debut novel, Manhunt, though when Abbigale finally announced that she had settled for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I began to have second thoughts.

Despite being a raucous, gory, dystopian cannibal novel, Manhunt to me resembled in many ways the book which my colleague had chosen. You might well be thinking: “Evan, I missed the part where On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was about trans women in New England hunting down feral, zombified men and eating their testes—these novels sound nothing alike,” and you would be right.

However, for better (and for worse), Manhunt has been canonized as an institution of contemporary trans lit alongside other perennial Book Club favourites such as Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby and her debut Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, the first and only book written by a trans woman ever.

This, coupled with the fact that Manhunt was Felker-Martin’s debut, would have conspired to see our book club tackling not one, but two “modern classic” debut novels one might feasibly find in the feed of @gay_writes, or on the “Pride Picks” shelf at your local box-chain bookstore (I’m kidding—everyone knows they ignore any books written by trans women).

While both Felker-Martin and Vuong are occupied with writing about the Queer experience, the former’s preoccupation with horror is where their respective approaches diverge. If On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a queer coming-of-age, detailing how one finds one’s place in a world, Manhunt is about queer adversity—coming to terms with one’s unbelonging in a world they nonetheless inhabit.

Manhunt belongs to a recent boom of extreme horror novels written by trans women. Felker-Martin is perhaps the defining voice of this movement, though increasingly others such as Alison Rumfitt (Tell Me I’m Worthless, Brainwyrms) and May Leitz (Girl Flesh, Fluids) have started carving out their own spaces within the niche.

So instead, I decided to take a novel approach, and pick Gretchen Felker-Martin’s second novel.

At the time I was plotting this series, Felker-Martin’s sophomore effort, Cuckoo, had just been released and it was just about all I and Take Cover Books’ Sean Fitzpatrick could talk about. I was beyond excited for this novel and needing, as I do, an excuse to engage with anything I enjoy, I decided to mix business with pleasure and forced myself (and my friend) to read it for Book Club.

Above anything else, Cuckoo is a step up from Manhunt. While being a book people who I find incredibly annoying love to call “important to the culture,” Manhunt is, at times, a bit of a dredge, mostly because you’re hyper-aware that the person wrote it spent too much time on Twitter.

Cuckoo is more focused, more deliberate, and even (dare I say) more artistic both in its execution and what it actually has to say.

Now, Felker-Martin’s prose is not what I’d call “stellar.” The sentence “Sometimes it rained and the rain was thick and viscous and smelled like the hairy trench of skin between pussy and butthole,” does, in fact, appear in this book. 

Yet the occasional artlessness of it serves, in a way, to punctuate the horror. While not exactly deft, there’s something about the bluntness of Felker-Martin’s prose that makes the imagery all the more visceral. 

There’s nothing especially rhapsodic about the book’s prologue, and yet the detail in which it attends to the quotidian menialities it depicts build remarkably to the book’s first, dramatic glimpse of its eponymous monstrosity.

This is a creature feature, after all. While my colleague will elaborate on that later, it falls to me to make the disclosure that “maybe the real monster is other people, dude.”

Cuckoo is a book about conversion therapy, and that theme is sort of inextricable from the more supernatural and macabre bits of the book. Its human villains—the directors of Camp Resolution, and the parents of the kids sent to it—are transparently despicable to the point that this book can be a big downer at times.

If you’re looking for fun, schlocky horror, this is not the book for you. Cuckoo is more than happy to bum you out, but it does so in a way that at least feels productive.

As with all things horror, your mileage may well vary. This is not the best horror novel I’ve read by any means, but it leaves an impression. 

Above all I’m happy to report that Felker-Martin continues to have ideas which she explores in interesting ways, and seems more than capable of executing on her vision. This is not a book which struggles for want of things to say. It is both extremely blunt and extremely pointed in its purpose.

If you liked Manhunt, you should probably read this—but then if you read Manhunt you probably already know that.

If you’re not sold, however, I’d defer to my horror-agnostic colleague.

Man, I sure hope she doesn’t hate it.

Abbigale:

As Evan pointed out above, I had intended to pick another book for my Arthur book club entry. Now, having read Cuckoo, I wish more than anything that I had. This is not so much because of my colleagues' mixed reviews on Vuong’s novel, but rather because I was disappointed at the end of Felker-Martin’s novel. My initial pick, Bunny by Mona Awad did everything I felt Cuckoo fell short on.

Let me explain.

Firstly, I feel I should preface by stating that horror, thriller, or any sort of slasher in any type of media is not my go to. I don’t like to be scared. My favourite genre is “anything written by gay men and/or weird women.” Felker-Martin does strike me as the sort of weird woman I would normally love, and for the first half of her novel, I did.

The beginning of Cuckoo had me absolutely hooked. I had read about 150 pages in one sitting lounging by a lake in Bancroft downing vodka sodas and thoroughly enjoying the grotesque, vile, and utterly disturbing scenes Felker-Martin set up. Describing the rain with pussies and buttholes? Helllll yes. One thing about me is that when I am reading something weird such as this, I need it to be freaky otherwise it just feels half-baked. 

For example, the scene where Nadine finds the rotting cow in the stable made me cheer with excitement. Finally, this “horror” novel was getting started. Unleash your inner weirdo, give me all the weird crap, describe a cow’s rotting flesh like it’s ripe genetalia—I love that freak shit!

And then…it sort of, stopped? It felt like Felker-Martin was trying to combine the best parts of Stephen King’s IT and The Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things and as a result, lost touch of the potential the grotesque creatures could have lived up to. My favourite parts of the novel were the fight scenes with The Cuckoo where Felker-Martin locked in and put her pen to work. The narrative and descriptions of the Cuckoo and its minions were fantastic, truly. No notes. 

I loved the character’s dynamic with each other, Nadine was perfect and when she was killed off, I found myself complimenting Felker-Martin yet again. One of my biggest pet peeves in fiction is novels such as this where not one main character dies, and you can always tell which side character exists simply to get killed off. It’s annoying, and I’m glad she continued with this executive decision and ripped a hole through Jo’s throat. I loved her, but one of them needed to die in the second half.

Speaking of the second half…what the hell was that? In my honest opinion, it felt like Felker-Martin was not ready to let go of her characters, and as a result wrote nearly a hundred pages of nonsense. The premise here was to save Nadine’s younger sister from camp by killing The Cuckoo, I think?

Yes, John and Mel’s relationship is complicated. Yes, Shelby misses Nadine. Yes, John is self conscious of his weight—all things that can be said once and done and not drawn out over several pages being constantly repeated. It honestly is sort of frustrating how Felker-Martin completely fumbled the second half of the novel (aptly titled “Abby”) because up until then, this was one of my favourite reads of the summer. It got so bad that I skimmed several pages, internally groaning to myself “Oh my god get on with it.” 

The prologue to me now looking back in hindsight feels like false advertising. The entire second half of the novel is nonsense. I loved the concept of the characters meeting years after their harrowing escape, but what did it really accomplish? In my opinion, this book could have been about 100/150 pages shorter with less filler scenes (majority of the second half) and more focus on the actual goal of the novel: killing the Cuckoo. 

Mona Awad’s Bunny revolves around a cult of prissy creative writing students who turn men into bunnies and kill them. Awad understood perhaps what fell short for Felker-Martin, in that a thriller that focuses too much away from the source of the plot can sometimes take away from the actual *horror* of the novel. 

Cuckoo had too many redundant and otherwise boring scenes that just muddied the entire story—which could have been so cool had it not been ruined, in my rather jaded opinion. 

I liked these characters, but at the end of the novel, I was all too happy to close the book for good. Felker-Martin is one of those writers who are easy to read and understand how to keep a story going (albeit rather distracted majority of the time), and her freak shines through in this novel, I just felt like maybe this story got away from her at the end. 

She references this exact problem in her story on a page I have now forgotten, but one that details the loss of control authors feel when their characters develop a personality of their own: a case of the call coming from inside the house perchance?

Maybe Manhunt will treat me better than Cuckoo. 

Thank you for reading this most recent splattery, O’Keeffian entry in Arthur Book Club. Join us again soon as we talk about Sebastian’s in absentia Book Club pick: Herman Melville’s treatise on whether or not whales are fish: Moby-Dick A.K.A. The Whale.