Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

In the woods, it doesn't matter
that there is no patch of earth
that has not known bone,
known blood, known rot.

I am nervous to take on this review, given I have no skin in the game, excuse the crass pun. I’m a white, liberal, cisgendered working class* man with no lived experience of anything mentioned in the book, so to ground myself a little, I’ve read a couple of reviews by other, more qualified readers. As a result, I’m fearful of the boggy ground into which a crass pun could send me sinking without a trace – ground made uliginous by issues of neopronouns, queer and trans history, sexual violence, the premature sexualisation of black girls, Afrofuturism (a term about which I’ve just found out), historical hate crimes, and communities on the margins of modern-day American society. Rivers Solomon manages to get all of that in and more in what is, otherwise, a gothic horror novel with shades of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (yes, he’s another white male author with a beard, sorry, but that’s the majority of my lived experience). Nonetheless, onwards but not necessarily heedless must I go.

So, plot-wise we have Vern, physically myopic (but haunted by visions), albino, from what I read I learned she/fae/they (?) is/are intersex, and only 15, escaping from a revolutionary Black commune after being impregnated by the group leader, running to the woods where she gives birth to two sons she names Howling and Feral. Pursued by someone she calls the fiend who leaves grotesque offerings in the form of dead babies, she uses the survival skills taught to her in the commune to survive in the woods for four years. Her haunting visions increase, her children grow, and she starts to manifest physical changes which we learn are a result of the micro-dosing and experimentation performed on her and other members of the commune. Her changes mean she needs to seek help and she is taken in by a Native American grandmother and granddaughter, the latter with whom she forms a sexual relationship.

There are many layers of meaning to the book, so many discussions and allegories of transformation, pain both internalised and societally inflicted, the weight of the past and the drive to rebel, and I feel that in the links to some of the reviews I’ve read below, you’ll probably find better informed commentary than anything I could provide. However, I am qualified to say how the book made me feel.

You won’t be surprised to find I was conflicted.

Vern isn’t very likeable. She has many admirable qualities – determination, rebelliousness, tenacity among them – but I don’t have a lot of common ground with her, and maybe that’s fine given I doubt Solomon was writing this to make me feel comfortable with her character. The only true moment of horror I felt was after she left her babies in the woods to wander off with a biker for a few hours, only to lose track of where she’d left them – not unforeseeable given she can’t see very well – but again she is only 15 or 16 at that point and is totally unprepared for parenthood. Her relationship with the fiend is odd and I can’t quite get around what Gogo sees in her, at that moment in the novel, chitinous appearance. Again, maybe I lack the true clarity of love to see through what to me would have been her monstrous appearance, but I am learning all the time about how the horror and sci-fi genres have presented difference and change as monstrousness and all the subtext that comes with that.

I did feel a frisson of excitement in Vern’s confrontation with a VanderMeerian (sorry, I’ve been reading Veniss Underground this week) monster, and the ideas around the storage and relaying of the collective memory of decomposed ancestors in and via the mycelium and mycorrhiza of fungi are fascinating to the latent mycologist in me. And for all my own discomfort, I found myself enjoying the narrative drive of the book; it zips along pleasingly.

Solomon is an uncompromising author and fae work demands a broad readership, so if I can help that along, I am very pleased to recommend her to you particularly. Yes, you.


*Actually, my parents are working class. I have no idea what I am, which probably lends itself to a flaccid dog-whistle and pejorative label like wokerati** or tofu-eating*** lefty wanker or whatever.

**LOL, as if! I send one unintentionally thoughtless GIF about beating hookers to the wrong WhatsApp group and now I’m a pariah.

***In all honesty, so long as it isn’t the slimy version, I quite like tofu, but have you ever noticed how much higher the calorific count is for tofu versions of classic disses like teppanyaki? As a fat, white, working class* male I have to give that sort of thing a swerve, preferring instead to get my surfeit of calories from craft ales**** and red wines.

****Yes, yes, ten points for my regular heckler with his apt and constant chant of, “Wanker, wanker!”.

Here are some of those links:
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/18/sorrowland-rivers-solomon-review
National Public Radio: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/14/996658839/in-sorrowland-the-story-gets-lost-in-the-forest
Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/feral-monstrosity-on-rivers-solomons-sorrowland/

(Paid link)