Sorrowland (2021) is a novel by Rivers Solomon in which a young woman escapes the mysterious compound where she grows up, only to succumb to a scaly white fungus that takes over her body while simultaneously connecting her to friends and family who have died on the compound over the years. It blends the sci-fi and horror genres to explore America's scars. But Sorrowland is at its best when it leverages its plot to access scenes of queer intimacy.
Those are scenes the world needs right now. Because in the face of rising waves of hatred and otherness that will only worsen as new conservatism sweeps the U.S. and lands abroad, the best way to engender love and understanding is to show just how alike we really are.
Sorrowland revolves around Vern, a Black girl who grew up in Cainland, a religious cult from which she’s just escaped. Vern’s a teenager. She’s pregnant because her husband, Cainland’s leader Reverend Sherman, preaches a gospel that says all women should be sexually subservient to men in order to replace and grow the proud Black race. She has her baby twins in the woods while being hunted by a mysterious force that starts to haunt her mind. Vern names the children Howling and Feral in protest against Cainland and its horrifying brand of manicured fundamentalism.
The Place
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes at Cainland. There's a whole plot about planted leaders who have been installed by a secret government organization and a thread of fungus-related science fiction. But the more important part is Sorrowland's depiction of Cainland as a place where Black power becomes intertwined with the kind of extreme conservatism we’re seeing crop back up today, the kind of politics and home rules that make liberal boomers talk about how recent times have felt like going back to the 1950s.
Cainland is a locus of conflict influenced by ideals from all across the American political spectrum. It's a place started by Black folks looking to cloister themselves off from a racist society, yet also one that embraces some of that society’s most harmful social and religious norms that don’t strictly have to do with race. As a setting, the compound frames a story that is anything but straightforward, so it makes sense that Solomon’s authorial voice thrives most notably in the margins of conflicting identities.
The Plot
One such identity concerns the intersection of Vern’s motherhood and budding sexual desire. While she loves Howling and Feral, Vern barely turns 20 by the end of the novel, which take place across a four-plus years. She raises her kids in the woods before being forced out into a cold world suffused with fast food and asphalt, a world that Howling and Feral stare at in intermittent wonder, distress, and confusion. Meanwhile, Vern grapples with her sexual desire for other women, a desire she’s been taught all her life is subversive; Reverend Sherman often equated her alternative sexuality to a corrupted kind of whiteness, the exact kind that Cainland was meant to shatter and reject. Vern’s desire lands her in a handful of poignant scenes where she forgets about her children, for better or worse, in pursuit of what she wants for once. These scenes usually lead to regret. However, once Vern has learned to celebrate herself for who she is, fungal carapace and all, the story comes together.
Let me do my best to set the scene for you. A few light spoilers here, but they’re worth it if you’re trying to get a sense of whether or not this book is for you. Because when it comes down to it, the overarching plot of a secret government agency that is trying to experiment on Black bodies by implanting them with a fungus that makes them superhuman and also see dead people is straight up horror. It’s pretty well executed and most importantly is commentary on the very real instances of the US government’s experimentation on its Black population. It’s everyone’s responsibility to understand this historical context when it comes to our modern era and just how messed up things are in America. And how messed up they’ll continue to become if we keep ignoring the historical context of this fractured country and its very real implications on how we hold our prejudices close and our fears of the folks we can’t empathize with somehow even closer.
But scenes of intimacy are where Sorrowland becomes more than the sum of its parts, where it stops trying to connect the dots to a plethora of visceral historical phenomena and instead becomes singularly human, catching light in its genre-fied magnifying glass to burn right through its reader’s discomfort and biases to scorch their hearts. And since Vern, a queer Black woman who physically wears her trauma in the form of a scaly fungal carapice, and Gogo, a paramedic of Lakota descent who helps take Vern and her kids in after they emerge from the woods, fall in love; and since Solomon is the writer they are; and since the kind of folks who would want to read Sorrowland are open enough to see where it goes, we learn something new.
There's a scene where Vern resurrects the ghosts of two dead lovers – victims of the AIDS epidemic – in a motel room. After running from the dead people she sees wherever she looks, Vern confronts them. Holds their hands. Gets to know them. The two formerly dead lovers lock eyes after so many years apart and embrace. Meanwhile, Vern and Gogo talk dirty to one another on the phone. Vern’s on the run from the government agent who is out to get her and Gogo is trapped at a truckstop waiting out the gale-force winds of a storm that threatens to flood the highway. But none of that matters now.
The four make love. All together. Through virtual, metaphysical, and physical means. Through all identities and genders and sexual preferences. A queer, Black, intersex cult escapee. A native trans woman. Two gay ghosts who rose and fell in a time of infinite sorrow. All together for one moment of glory, via channels known and unknown. And it just makes sense.
The Point
Solomon is unflinching. Their depiction of the love between folks of all stripes – the very “others” that Trump supporters are afraid of enough to want them dead or worse – is the only thing that can save us. Getting scenes like these into the hands of the millions of folks who see queerness as a sin and difference as a threat, Blackness as a burden, Nativeness as something to forget, and the government as an entity benign enough to play around with but bad enough to hurt them individually – won’t undo the damage. That’s the truth of it.
But showing just how similar love looks, whether you’re friend, foe, or fungus; something tells me that would help some of the labels fall away. And when we let go of our labels, we’re just people talking to other people trying to survive and trying not to crumble under the weight of the funguses we have to carry. The ones we’ve picked up along the way, by ourselves and from our families, and from the billions of bodies that once lived but are now rotting underground. Or rotting all around us, depending on how you see them.
Books can’t change perspectives unless folks are humble enough to read them. Still, the more stories like Sorrowland we have, the more they become mainstream and the harder they’ll be to ignore. And that’s why I think genre fiction can be such an important force for change. Because maybe some of the folks whose minds need changing would be far more likely to read a book described as, “woman turns into monster and obliterates her government handler to save her family,” than they would be to pick up one that is, “a poignant tale of queer love triumphing against all odds.”
Sorrowland is both of those things, and so much more. Leave it under your conservative uncle’s Christmas tree. Tell him it's from Santa. See what happens. I dare you.
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