Book Review: Cuckoo

Book number one of my 2025 Halloween Read-athon has not got off to the best start. Despite seeing a notable level of praise and recommendation for this book both online and in book stores, I can’t help feeling I’ve been hoodwinked into reading a book which isn’t really deserving of any of it.  I hate being overly negative when I review things because I always try to see the value in stuff I experience.  I can confidently say however that despite a few interesting elements, Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin is not a book I can confidently recommend. 

The narrative of Cuckoo follows a collection of LGBTQIA2S+ teenagers who are sent away to an isolated desert-based conversion camp called Camp Resolution in the early 90’s. While at the camp, the central teenagers struggle with the sense of despair and isolation forced upon them by their families who were all too keen to send them away to be corrected.  Despite their initial misgivings however, the group soon begin to realize that the camp harbours a far more sinister secret when they discover councillors walking around on all fours and discarded fleshy remains littered across the valley.  Joining together to figure out the sinister conspiracy, the gang will learn that the camp has a grotesque and horrifying plan to reform not just the children but soon enough the entire country into one uniform entity.

I wanted to like the narrative of this book, when you look at the better parts of it, you can see a genuinely creepy setup which is well layered and shows keen inspiration from the likes of Holes or Stephen King’s It.  The mystery behind the camp and the horrific true nature of its intentions is the core element that kept me engaged right up to the end of the book.  I just wish that those strong elements were consistent enough to outweigh all the other dribble that bogs this story down.  I think the character writing in this story is incredibly poor.  I appreciate Gretchen Felker-Martin wanted to write a book inherently about LGBTQIA2S+ and their struggles, but to make that the sole defining personality of these characters robs them of any sense of depth, they’re essentially walking labels and sexualities without much else to them.  That to me is the biggest crime of this story, there’s no sense of complexity or personality to these teenagers, Gretchen’s desire to represent a core demographic is diluted when they have nothing else that defines them.  So when the story puts these characters in these high-stake situations and asks you as the reader to empathise and suffer right long with them, how can I when there’s nothing remotely relatable to attribute to them?

My biggest gripe with the book however isn’t its narrative but the downright immature tone and overly descriptive writing style.  When we first meet these characters, they are clearly under the age of 18, hence why they were taken to a conversion camp against their will.  Gretchen’s decision to write these characters and emphasize major sexual encounters and thoughts through them comes off as incredibly perverse in my opinion. I get it, kids of this age probably have these thoughts and have those encounters, but I think it’s clearly overdone in this book to a point it feels genuinely exploitative. These sexual diversions litter the entirety of the story and serve no purpose but to outline the LGBTQIA2S+ nature of the characters, which again just reinforces how shallow they are outside of those definitions.  On top of that is just the never-ending tirades the story goes on in it’s attempt to describe sequences.  I can handle a lot of descriptive writers as long as there’s a genuine point to their work, but in this books case it just feels like endless padding with no real sense of structure.  The only cases where the descriptive writing works is in the horror-themed bits, where the heavy writing helps build an image in your head to transcribe the horror.

Cuckoo had the framework to be a genuinely interesting horror story.  It wears its inspirations to other iconic stories like The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers with considerable pride.  It makes my infuriation all the worse in this case when all the strong elements of this book are lost in a sea of immaturity from the author.  This is a book so heavy-handed in its approach to diverse representation that it literally drowns the remainder of the story out in the process.  The end result is a book which ultimately disappointed me beyond measure. If you can struggle through the worst of it, you may find some enjoyment out of the horror elements, but there’s so little of it in my opinion that it’s just not worth the time or effort to read.