Look, no one is more surprised about that 3-star rating than I am.

Cuckoo was probably my most highly-anticipated release of 2024--I read Manhunt right after it came out, and it was the best book I couldn't wait to be done reading because it fucked me up--and up through the first quarter to third of reading, I was fairly sure that it would be my favorite book of the year. As others have noted, the prologue is a well-crafted thing of gooey (in the way of slime, not emotions) genius, and that opening slides you right into harrowing scenes of queer teenagers being kidnapped by conversion therapy camp staffers (kids whose parents, it should be noted, paid said staffers good money to kidnap them).

Over the next little bit, you meet the different kids at the camp and get snippets of their various traumatic backstories interspersed with the trauma of their current plotline, watching them interact and go from distrust to desperate friendship (and attraction). Some readers have noted that there are too many POVs bouncing around, and there is a lot of that, but it didn't bother me as much because it serves the theme of

Spoiler

being groomed to assimilate into an alien hivemind

.

But around the midway point and the

Spoiler

magic mushroom-fueled teenage orgy

, Cuckoo started to lose me a little and never fully recovered. I started to wonder if Gretchen ran into time constraints and the latter chapters didn't get as much workshopping, because while the first 70% of the book is fleshed out well, the last third crams in so much more than you would expect it to in such a small space:

Spoiler

what happened after the kids' escape, how they've changed and what they've been doing as adults, the discovery of another Cuckoo camp, planning to raid it, raiding it, AND an epilogue. Jesus, right?

The result is a bit threadbare. I wanted more character development, more showing, more time for the story to unfold. There are many shades of IT here, and I think that to have the kind of richness the ITs of the world need to work well, you maybe gotta give them 1,000 pages or so.

There are also a couple of pet-peeve kind of things at play, so your mileage may vary here. But there's a horny edgelord tone to the writing that didn't quite land with me, not because I'm anti-horny edgelordiness (I've been known to dabble in such notions myself), but because it got very repetitive and abrasive. This might have exacerbated my other peeve, which was that the longer I read, the more I realized that I didn't actually like most of the characters. They weren't unlikeable in ways that I found compelling. They were just annoying in the way of queer drama and yes yes yes, that was probably the point, and they are probably deeply relatable to a lot of queer people, but dear reader, I am something of a misanthrope and despite my queerness do find a lot of us deeply annoying IRL, too.

I don't want to leave this review on a negative note, so I will say that this book does both real-life horror and creature feature horror very well. I am a legendarily hard scare, but there are scenes that made my heart beat faster. I kept thinking about how much I would love to see Cuckoo adapted into a gross movie, full of sopping wet puppets and buckets of slime and fake blood.

So there you have it. My shockingly complicated feelings about Cuckoo. If "IT and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and They Live, but make it queer" sounds good to you, go for it. Because I know that this will be a 5-star book for other people, and I'm open to hearing why.