Hayley (Gory B Movie)'s Reviews > Cuckoo

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 track or invest in all of 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 aroused by every human encounter. Coupled with the author's focus on pubes on toilet seats, sweat-soaked clothes, and first kisses in bathroom stalls. I was left confused and disgusted.

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 might be worth checking out. Or for a gay conversion camp horror novel that I did enjoy, check out Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus.