CW: grief, loss of a spouse, unreality, surveillance

I put in a request for my library to purchase Chana Porter's The Seep last year and somehow never got around to it - I was on the tailend of reading Annihilation (VanderMeer) , Fever Dream (Schweblin) and Follow Me To Ground (Rainsford) and The Seep seemed like a logical follow up choice, especially given the queerness of the characters. As you can tell by my two star rating, the book left me less than impressed.

I feel that the author wanted to intertwine two separate storylines (alien invasion and the subsequent horror of living in an utopia vs. grief over losing a spouse through an action of their own free will) to confront grief on multiple levels, but I feel that both storylines lost more than they gained through this. I would have loved to see more about this Seep-induced utopia and the further pitfalls that lurk beneath the cheerful exterior, as the road trip our protagonist embarks on actually leads to us seeing even less of this world.

In all honesty, I'm quite saddened that this book did not do it for me at all - on paper it seemed like the perfect story, with weird, queer and perhaps unsettling elements intermingling to create a broody and icky atmosphere. None of this turned out to be the case.