When it comes to Cainland, Vern grows to see that its founding motives had some merit, enabling black people to help one another. Eventually, fears for her health drive Vern’s small family from the forest, forcing her to acquire new skills in a quest for answers. It confers superhuman strength and the ability to heal overnight, and she feels invincible until she begins sprouting an exoskeleton and is wracked by pain.

Something else is stirring deep within her too: a foreign body that she senses has to do with the regular vitamin shots administered back on the compound. Vern becomes half animal out there, all instinct and need. Solomon’s audacity lies in imagining wrongs not only remembered but put right Also on her tail is someone she dubs “the fiend”, intent on scaring her from her hiding place with ghoulish offerings garbed in baby clothes.

Determined to “make every moment of her life a rebellion”, she’s also daring, patient, smart as blazes, which is just as well because she’s up against plenty, including debilitatingly poor eyesight, albinism that makes her skin hypersensitive, and “hauntings” – fearsome hallucinations that have followed her from the cult’s compound. It’s a hypnotic, often chilling depiction of the hard-won triumph of queer love and life over those who demonize both.Vern has an abrasive, masochistic streak. Over the next four years, while Vern heals from the trauma of Cainland and searches for a childhood friend who escaped before she did, she’s haunted by a specter she calls “the fiend” and her body transforms into something monstrous. When 15-year-old Vern, an albino intersex Black girl, is impregnated by the cult leader, she decides to make her escape, hiding out in the surrounding forest where she gives birth to twins Howling and Feral. of Sorrowland, a group of Black Americans have built Cainland, a separatist colony that began as a refuge from white capitalism but has developed into a cult with its own systems of oppression based in Christian ideals about gender and sexuality.

Award-winning speculative fiction writer Rivers Solomon’s latest is a dark and atmospheric examination of the violence done against Black, queer and female bodies in a white supremacist and patriarchal society.

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