Sam's Reviews > Cuckoo

Thank you to Goodreads and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Selling Pitch:
Gretchen: hey, can I copy your homework
Stephen King: sure, just change a few things so it’s not obvious

Camp Damascus if it was actually horror. King’s It but now everyone’s ~explicitly~ not straight.

Pre-reading:
I loved Manhunt last year. For all its flaws, it lives rent-free in my brain. This is one of my most anticipated releases for the year, but I am weirdly intimidated by it. I’ve had the arc for a little bit but kept putting it off. I really hope it’s good. It’s got another killer cover.

Thick of it:
One of these things is not like the other 🎶

Anyone who picks this book up and says this author can’t write is lying.

We’re already going in on the satire, and I’m live laugh loving.

If you tell me she’s gay because she got baby raped I’m out. (What is it with queer horror implying this this year?)

Oh no.
What the fuck is in the box? My gut just sank. (We never find out. Unfair.)

Hell yeah, hyenas!

You make me do too much labor🎶

I know a lot of people demonize these anti-religion books, but it’s just like this is the reality for so many people. This is what your religion has done. And even if you didn’t experience the abuse to this degree, you can spot echoes of it in your own home life.

And that’s on undiagnosed postpartum depression.

chivvy

I am uneducated and had to Google the Turner Diaries. Very different from the Princess Diaries.

Detritus sin

It’s my dick in a box🎶

Ew ew ew

Now this is what I was expecting from C. J. Leede’s new religious horror book!

This is creepy. This is scary. This is so good. I smell five stars. (SIGH.)

Are you kidding? That was just the prologue? That was so good!

I love the chapter names. This has such menacing voice to it. It’s so good.

Love how she writes gore.

This is what I was expecting from Camp Damascus.

What is it with the overlap between Christians and Peanuts? Is it just because they did the Christmas movies? It’s wild to me that every single religious trauma horror with a Christian skew brings up the Peanuts. And like I relate, my parents were obsessed.

The cast is too big for me to keep track. Oh no.

I’m already invested in these children, and I want good things for them. Oh no.

I like John a lot. And Malcolm even though he’s an ass.

A Sam!

This is gorgeous imagery.

Jo feels expendable so it’s not looking good for her

Ayyy Dune! Still hate that book lol.

Not me fresh off the Ernie mysteries and trying to decipher these letters like they’re something I can solve.

I mean, it’s not a braid, but you do have convergent evolution…

I’m having a really hard time keeping track of names and genders and it doesn’t matter for the book but it does matter for the summary so that I get pronouns right and it’s stressing me out a little bit. It’s such a big cast.

One time, Regina punched me in the face. It was awesome.

Every book is about bears

Detritus sin again

Don’t love how we’re playing sexual trauma bingo for the kids’ backstories. Like I know they’re all very real instances that have been in the news, but it’s heavy to read, and it kinda reads like people’s sexualities and gender identities only come about because of their trauma. No likey.

My brain also autocompleted Ghostbusters.

Stochastic

Big fan of Nadine.

This would make a good Goonies-esque TV show.

The Glovers as in body gloves omg.

Really wish everyone was 18+ if we’re writing orgies and trying to make it sexy. Call me a prude but I’m aging everyone up in my head. College-aged if we’re fucking. Thanks!

Title drop

Not the dog!

Detritus sin again, jesus.

I imagine the villain is somehow their dead daughter, but I don’t know how it’ll work.

This really is like a Camp Damascus rewrite.

Oh, the audiobook voices got CREEPY.

OK, so it is saying an alien crash-landed in Utah and learned to make its body parts out of what it eats. Duskwalker-y. Never like aliens or supernatural as explanation. I think it’s lazy.

Man, we’re only halfway! How much more fucked is this gonna get? I feel like we were wrapping towards a conclusion, but like I’ve still got another half of the book!

Malcolm‘s humor is so good.

That’s the wrong there. That’s irritating.

I hate that this basically amounts to a femcel woman’s fault.

Oh man, she’s a monster fucker haha

Oh Nadine, you absolute badass. I like her so much. If she dies, I’m gonna be pissed.

These creatures are hard to picture.

I love that the horror is seductive. Like the creepy line is I’ll show you true love. That is excellent horror.

Oh, I bet that’s Malcolm and the dynamite. (It’s somebody and the dynamite. You were half right.)

Goddamnit, I liked Nadine so much!

I love you here feels cheesy. Like you shouldn’t be in love after a day or two.

But Gabe’s been body-snatched, hasn’t he? Are we playing some sort of alien long game and he’s gonna hide in plain sight and kill them all off to end this book? That’d be a bummer.

This book feels so hopeless now. I miss Nadine. I don’t wanna book without Nadine.

It’s very Goonies, very It.

Oh fuck, what if Jo got body snatched too?

Don’t trust Jo. This is too convenient. I think she’s a cuckoo. (Wrong.)

Humus

How are we not referencing It? Or the Goonies? Could they not get the IP?

There’s a lot of body shame commentary in this book.

In the nicest way, it is so hard to keep track of who is who when you have such a large cast and you have memories overlapping, and you have dead names and different pronouns for everyone based on who’s talking. It’s really fucking hard.

Props to this book for not forgetting periods during a disaster.

Oh c’mon, you’re telling me that’s not It? It’s literally in the sewers.

I love Kesha.

I don’t like that Mal is mean to John.

Ayyy Manhunt!

So you’re saying Jo exhibits parasitic behavior. Interesting. I think I’m so right that she’s Cuckoo. (You are so wrong.)

Mal is such a hard character because I love their humor, but I can’t stand that they’re mean to John because John is so nice. He deserves good things.

That’s gotta be a nod to the Winchesters, no?

sclerotic

I have a collie too.

OK, we’re even referencing King. Like this is just It.

I don’t know why I’m struggling to get through this book so much. I’m enjoying it. It’s not even that long, but it feels so long.

Why does this car chase matter?

This ending is really falling off. Like it feels kind of pointless, like we’re circling the drain. Just get to killing the monster. I don’t need all this getting from point A to point B stuff.

I’m bored. It’s not scary anymore. You faked us out with death twice now. Like I don’t care.

Where are we going with this x3

Okay, Katniss.

It’s so frustrating because the first time we got the gore descriptions, it was new. It was novel. It was interesting. It was horrifying. But now we’ve described it the same way every single time so I’m just desensitized.

Literally how is this not It. This is the exact same ending.

I genuinely think the first half of this was four stars and then it is literally just a rewrite of It so it’s down to two.

Post-reading:
I want you to look me in my eyes and tell me this isn’t It fanfiction.

The prologue? A stunner. Viscerally creepy with the right amount of caustic satire. I was genuinely hoping we were about to get some mommy horror in the vein of Grady Hendrix’s Guide to Slaying Vampires or Ainslie Hogarth’s Normal Women. There was a book there that would’ve been unique and new and exciting. I don’t think I’ve seen anything published that falls into the intersection between horror and social commentary on motherhood and queerness. And you’d be doing all that with the biting undercurrent of religious criticism. Girl, in this political landscape? Fuckin’ gimmie.

But that’s not this book. Instead, we’re trying to make teenagers sexy again. Can y’all knock it off already? Tell a love story, but don’t sexualize minors. There’s a difference between talking about teen sexuality and trying to make underage characters’ actions sexy for adults to read. It upsets me every time, and you can call me a prude, but I don’t like it.

There’s a lot of sexual horror in this book. For some reason, that’s trendy right now. It seems like it’s been trendy since American Horror Story started. I think it’s cheap and 99% of the time gratuitous. This book is no exception. The sex scenes feel like they’re in the book for shock value or to titillate an audience. There’s no emotional weight to them.

This book has a gigantic cast. I would argue that it’s way too big to be digestible to the reader. There’s a lot of nothing side characters, but we still try to name them. But even if we ignore all those one-off characters, the main cast is incredibly unwieldy because we’re dealing with trans characters with dead names who use different pronouns and who get purposely misgendered within the book depending on whose point of view we’re in. It was so hard to keep track of who was who and what backstory went to which character. But the abundance of queer characters is the point of this book, and I’m not suggesting we eliminate them to make the book more palatable. I just think they probably could’ve been consolidated down. I think we should’ve referred to characters more consistently throughout the text.

Now the characters themselves are decently developed, although I hesitate to write that because most of their development comes from tragic backstories. Every single character had one. It started to feel a bit like we were playing sexual trauma bingo. What’s sad is that these backstories are all real incidences that have been in the news lately. Children suffered these fates. You just get habituated to it. If everything is sad, nothing is sad. It also starts reading like these characters’ sexual preferences and gender identities only came about because of their trauma. And that’s not an argument you wanna be making.

But fuck me, I’m real easy. I loved Nadine. Loved. I would’ve taken an entire book just about her. I loved John. I loved Malcolm. I hated that they ended up together. John deserves so much better, and Malcolm deserves to heal. I also didn’t love that most of the characters ended up being trans and all in love with each other. It gets back to that differentiation struggle. They all started to feel the same. They all started to have the same voice.

For as many pretty bits of imagery as there are in this book, there’s also sequences with the alien where I just had no idea what to picture. The descriptions for the gore and the monster also got so repetitive. They were deliciously gross the first time around. They were grating by the sixth.

I thought the book’s dialogue was excellent. The kids had snappy banter, especially Malcolm. He added such needed levity and humor to the book. It was a perfect tension breaker. They were genuinely funny.

But we’ve got to talk about how this book is a blatant rip-off of It. We have a group of kids suffering together during the summer and having a weird orgy together. They’re facing off against some alien creature. One sacrifices themselves. One tries to commit suicide. They have to go after the alien again in a part two where they’re adults now. The author even talked about how the alien was in the sewers and name-dropped King. I don’t understand if this book was trying to do a Maeve Fly where it’s a love letter to another work, but Maeve is distinctly its own story echoing American Psycho whereas Cuckoo felt like it was copy-pasting the original.

In this book’s defense, I don’t like King’s It. I think aliens or the supernatural as explanation is lazy fucking writing. I don’t like the fact that a grown man chose to write about children having an orgy. That’s fucking weird. What’s wrong with you? And if you’re like Sam, it’s weird that you’re cool with dead kids over kids fucking, I don’t know what to tell ya. Call me weird then.

And unfortunately, the ending and how similar it is to It really ruined the book for me. I felt like I knew what was coming. It didn’t feel like anything had stakes anymore. If you break that sense of dread in a horror book, it’s over. Death fakeouts are jumping the shark in books. You get one chance and then you annoy your audience. They don’t trust you as the narrator anymore.

I think it was a huge mistake to kill off Nadine. It really soured me on the book. I liked her so much that I didn’t care anymore once she was gone. It felt very pointless. I didn’t like any of the other characters enough to root for them to survive. I may not have wanted them to die, but I wasn’t actively pulling for any of them to live.

The book has a little bit of a pacing issue as well. The prologue nails it. Part one feels a little slow and clunky because we’re introduced to so many characters so rapidly. We don’t have a chance to bond to any of them before we’re thrown to another one. It almost feels info-dumpy, like you’re not sure who to pay attention to. And then if part one is too slow, part two is way too fast. Part two is another tragic backstory info dump, meandering traveling from point A to point B that is actually pointless and adds nothing to the novel, and then a bit of a deus ex machina conclusion that has to work because we’re out of pages and need to get to the end.

The ending itself is bitter. I understand that it’s an angry, reactionary book. The world does not treat queer and trans people fairly, but I think continuing to rehash the us versus them mentality only furthers the divide. It’s not a hopeful message. It’s deliberately othering, and I’m not sure if that’s the best message to leave your readers with especially when this book veers a little towards YA because of the age of its protagonists and their struggles and in spite of its graphic violent and sexual content.

Ultimately the book just leaves a bad taste in your mouth because it feels like It fanfiction. It’s a bit of a bait and switch. You prime your audience for stellar religious horror satire with that prologue and then you never deliver. It’s a messy read. And yet when this book was good, I was loving it. If you read for concept and not execution, it’s worth picking up, just bear in mind that it’s going to quickly devolve into feeling like something you’ve already read.

Who should read this:
Queer horror fans
It fans
Camp Damascus fans

Do I want to reread this:
Nope, but I will always pick up this author’s books

Similar books:
* It by Stephen King-this is the same book
* Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle-gay teens sent to pray the gay away camp vs demons
* Maeve Fly by C. J. Leede-book that’s an homage to a classic horror movie, horror satire
* The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix-horror satire
* Godly Heathens by H. E. Edgmon-queer ensemble cast, YA magical realism