When horror author and film critic Gretchen Felker-Martin’s debut, Manhunt, dropped in 2022, it quickly found a cult following: her smart, furious trans take on the ‘gender apocalypse’ genre featuring two trans women eluding a fascist TERF cult, was named Vulture’s #1 Book of 2022 and won her a chorus of admirers. Now, Felker-Martin has turned her focus to another terrifying site of anti-queer violence: conversion therapy.

Cuckoo follows a cluster of queer and trans teenagers who have been kidnapped, at the behest of their parents, by a ‘tough love’ camp run by evangelical Christians deep in the Utah desert. Within the routine brutality of the camp, the characters start to notice strange things: hallucinatory nightmares, counsellors crawling in the darkness, campers going silent or acting strange. It soon becomes clear that the camp has no intention of sending them home; not as themselves, anyway.

The gay conversion camp is a recurrent obsession of queer writers and filmmakers – from documentaries like Pray Away to cult gay comedy But I’m a Cheerleader! – and conversion camps dovetail well with the summer camp slasher (you might remember 2022’s somewhat disappointing They/Them). Cuckoo understands conversion camp fiction’s YA bent, but it makes no YA concessions on its horror, which is at times shatteringly brutal. If you can handle it, though, you’ll find an exhilarating thriller mixed with a beautiful, uncompromising exploration of queer adolescence, and a book that is likely to rival Manhunt’s impact.

Dazed talked to Felker-Martin about writing body horror, the lack of fat representation in genre fiction, and how to choose which characters to kill.

What were your main influences for writing Cuckoo? What was on your mind?

Gretchen Felker-Martin: The biggest single thing that drove me to write Cuckoo was having lived through a decade-plus of intense frustration at seeing how queer children are treated in the West – just this endless torture of kids. It gives you this huge backlog of emotions that you really don’t have an outlet for, because  99 per cent of the time you can’t do anything materially to help these kids. Then the story is inflected with the media that I’m passionate about and that I think speaks to the subject. There are classics of the genre like Jesus Camp, But I’m a Cheerleader! and Saved!, and the book is openly very inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing… I find body horror really cathartic to write when I’m angry about something. 

There are some noticeable similarities in structure and focus between Cuckoo and Manhunt, but the shift to focusing on teenagers makes it feel like a very different book.

Gretchen Felker-Martin: That shift was borne out of reading a number of books that dealt with queer teenagers and feeling like they felt inauthentic; they didn’t speak to my experience of being a queer teenager at all. I’m sure none of those authors had any ill intent, but it didn’t jive with what I’d gone through. A big thing that drove me to writing was my own experience of finding myself through books when I was 11 to 19, and coming to a sense of self through literature that I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to have. I consider it a great honour that I might get to be that for kids today. So I want them to know that all the weird shit that they’re forced to think about because they’re trapped, and alone, and being punished for existing, is normal – and that other people have felt it, and gone through it, and come out the other side, and that their thoughts aren’t forbidden or deformed. That was a big driver for me.

I’m so fascinated by how you write the body horror in Cuckoo, and the complexity of the creatures you describe in the book; the particular, jarring ways they move, for instance. They really affected me, even as I sometimes felt unable to visually wrap my mind around them. 

Gretchen Felker-Martin: I would credit long, long immersion in film and television special effects, which has always been a core interest of mine. When I was a kid, my big pie-in-the-sky dream was that I wanted to go and work for Industrial Light & Magic and design monsters for the Star Wars movies. I spend an enormous amount of my time looking at concept art, researching how different films achieve different creature effects. And I have a really active imagination for that stuff. I love to picture things that I wouldn’t want to touch or have near me! 

I was really paralysed by those thoughts as a kid, actually, I would lie in bed and imagine awful textures and terrible sensations, which I think is probably an early manifestation of body dysmorphic disorder – an obsessive-compulsive family disorder that I have. So to me, it’s like, alright, I can squeeze those pimples in my thoughts and get something onto the page where, even if it’s not totally intelligible to everyone, they still get a visceral reaction to it. 

One really important aspect of your books, descriptively and conceptually, is how you talk about and describe fatness, often in really gorgeous and dedicated ways. Reading your books really highlights how rare that is in fiction. 

Gretchen Felker-Martin: As a fat woman who is in community with a lot of fat people, it has a profound impact on your place in the world and on your experience of your body and life and sexuality. So many of my most profound experiences of romantic love and sexual awakening have been with other fat people. How could I not want to put that on the page? That being said, when I started out, I felt very self-conscious about it. When I was writing Indi in Manhunt, I was like, ‘this is too raw, it’s too much, people aren’t going to get it’. But even though some haven’t, I’ve connected with others who have said ‘this was really meaningful to me, I’ve never seen anyone do this’, because it’s almost totally absent from genre fiction. Even with soft squishy romance stuff where the female lead is ‘plus-size’, it’s very anaemic. There’s no physicality to it. Nobody’s talking about chafed inner thighs, or sweat between your rolls. 

Even with soft squishy romance stuff where the female lead is ‘plus-size’, it’s very anaemic. There’s no physicality to it. Nobody’s talking about chafed inner thighs, or sweat between your rolls. 

The book’s focus on queer life and communication and sex is made more real, I think, by how precarious life is in Cuckoo. To avoid spoilers for new readers, I’ll ask this without context: how do you decide who to kill in your books?

Gretchen Felker-Martin: I think about what would be most personally painful for me, and then I usually do it. In the first draft of Manhunt, I killed Beth at the end – 

No!

Gretchen Felker-Martin: And then I reread and I thought, “I can’t do this, this is awful”. It just felt so bad, and not in a way that I found generative.

I don’t think that would have felt right, yeah. Beth spends so much of Manhunt getting wailed on, it feels like she deserves to live.

Gretchen Felker-Martin: [SPOILER] is my favourite character in Cuckoo, and [they] have to die. I don’t think the book makes sense without it. The rest of the group has to lose [them] in order to become adults themselves. 

Speaking of the core group of characters in Cuckoo, there’s an even stronger sense in Cuckoo of how hard queer people can find it to live with each other, even when we love each other. We can never get comfortable with fighting a common enemy; there’s always a lot of intracommunity tension. 

Gretchen Felker-Martin: Most trans people are born in a sort of vacuum, and have to flail around to try to find some form of connection to understand themselves. They might see reflections of parts of their identity in peer groups or in pop culture, but lots of those experiences are actually very difficult and negative, so, as a result, queer and trans cultures tend to be pretty fractious. 

There’s not much consensus on what the dominant experience is, nor is there a ton of patience for plurality of experience. Many queer people go through life with this feeling that they don’t belong, and that there’s a ‘right’ way to live as queer that they’ve never seen modelled before, that they’re feeling out the edges of without being able to see it. It creates a very complicated sense of self – one that I’m really interested in.

Most trans people are born in a sort of vacuum, and have to flail around to try to find some form of connection to understand themselves. They might see reflections of parts of their identity in peer groups or in pop culture, but lots of those experiences are actually very difficult.

The Cuckoo itself is interesting in that context of trying to ‘find form’, because as a monster in the book it’s a rapacious enemy of queerness, but it’s also quite a queer monster, very weird, hybrid, fleshy… There would be a temptation, perhaps, to make it a different, more legibly ‘straight’ kind of monster.

Gretchen Felker-Martin: To me, the Cuckoo isn’t ‘straight’ in the way that we would usually consider something to be straight. It’s very obscene, very sexual, very depraved. But nor is it queer, because it has no community, and no goal except for more of itself, forever. If the Cuckoo is anything, the Cuckoo is suburban fascism – people who have no real culture of their own, no real sense of self, just endlessly reproducing and consuming and screaming ‘me, me, me, me!’ in the mirror. And if you want, and if it wants, you can become part of that. And there’s comfort in that – you have certainty, you have ease. So its queerness is incidental to its actions.

Cuckoo is your second novel out with Tor, but you also have three novellas available as pay-what-you-want on Gumroad, and a fourth, Black Flame, coming out with Tor next year. What would you recommend fans of your work check out?

Gretchen Felker-Martin: Dreadnought would definitely be a good comparison-read for Cuckoo. It’s me doing Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show that is very, very important to me, as it is to all other trans people [laughter]. Black Flame is going to be a very different book – it follows a single character from start to finish, a very repressed Jewish lesbian working at a conservative film archive. Very different vibe. I hope people like it. 

Cuckoo is out now in the UK with Titan Books