[Book Review] Sorrowland (2021)

Vern has escaped from Cainland. She’s pregnant. Through the woods, she flees from her husband, the Reverend Sherman, and from the cult-like settlement she grew up in. Rivers Solomon’s third novel Sorrowland begins with unsettling thrills and violence, and it does not let up.

Vern, the novel’s protagonist, is a  black teenager running from an abusive past with her twin children. When Vern eventually emerges from the seeming safe haven of the woods, her body begins to transform and the hauntings she experiences ever since she left Cainland escalate. As her body alters and threats around her close in, she befriends Bridget and Gogo, a Lakota winkte woman (a term akin to transgender). With her children in tow, together they learn the appalling truth behind Cainland and contest its ruthless human experiments.

Like their debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts and the Lambda Award-winning 2019 follow-up The Deep, Solomon’s newest novel analyses systematic oppression within a speculative framework. Sorrowland’s readers shouldn’t expect straightforward horror or even horror-fantasy. It’s a difficult novel to pin down categorically: its genre-bending sensibilities veer from gothic to ecohorror to cult thriller but Solomon adeptly blends this mix-match. They cultivate its most pertinent elements into a cohesive narrative that, at its best, distills the gothic’s exploration of trauma and ecohorror’s penchant for body horror within the realist setting of an unethical government experiment that is reminiscent of the Tuskegee Study, Operation Paperclip, and others of its ilk. 

Sorrowland is an unwaveringly ferocious novel whose politics and queerness are refreshingly unapologetic. Amid the fantastical transformations and fungal horror threaded throughout, Solomon paints an apt picture of a modern-day United States—as well as the anti-black history in which the country is rooted. The fitting anger that drives the novel is infectious: when Vern wonders how one might make the “millions upon millions who woke up every morning proud to be Americans” see sense, we empathize with her frustration. This incisive examination of American society is indeed central to the novel. The Blessed Acres of Cain, or Cainland for short, is a religious and political compound founded by black nationalists in the 1960s. Vern first imagines it began as a space for black people to come together to “save themselves,” where trade skills, education, farms, and survival tactics against the KKK form an almost idyllic community. The insidious heart of Cainland, however, unravels throughout the course of Sorrowland. 

Picking up on a recent trend in horror and SFF, such as in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020), Solomon moreover explores mycelium’s connection that webs between people and temporalities, all of which return to Cainland. The hauntings that result are disturbing and visceral. Yet, despite the unethical government experiments through which Vern was brought to Cainland as a child, the strange manifestation of her body becomes an unintentional weapon against the forces that seek to oppress her. “The fungus inside Vern,” Solomon writes, “was more than an infection. It was the stuff of life itself, some ancient essence from an alien world, foisting itself upon her for its own chance at life. It was a gift, and it had chosen her.” 

Vern likewise is no demure heroine. Self-described as unsentimental and contrary, her simultaneous capacity for love for her twins and those closest to her with her unflinching attitude carry the novel. Despite Sorrowland’s relentless and raw tone, Solomon marries its ferocity with moments of joy and compassion. These moments of respite, though brief, are achingly beautiful and spur an instinct towards survival. In addition to Vern’s devotion to her children that grounds the novel, the relationship that blossoms between her and Gogo is splendidly drawn; Solomon balances the emotional and sexual tension between two people falling in love with the dire circumstances of their lives. 

At moments, Sorrowland’s pacing staggers—particularly after its opening scenes—with too many pages between action and answers to the novel’s overarching questions. Yet, though incredibly ambitious in its scope and content, Sorrowland succeeds. An impressive third novel in a series of powerful works, Solomon’s Sorrowland is a taut, uniquely radical novel. Bolstered by their exquisite language, versed familiarity with American history, and concurrently fearsome and vivacious engagement with speculative fiction, it confirms Solomon’s position as one of speculative fiction’s most prominent authors.

Rivers Solomon. Sorrowland. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. ISBN 9780374266776

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