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 Blessed Acres of Cain, or Cainland for short, is a religious and political compound founded by black nationalists in the 1960s. This incisive examination of American society is indeed central to the novel. 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.

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. Sorrowland is an unwaveringly ferocious novel whose politics and queerness are refreshingly unapologetic. 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. 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. Sorrowland’s readers shouldn’t expect straightforward horror or even horror-fantasy. 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. With her children in tow, together they learn the appalling truth behind Cainland and contest its ruthless human experiments. As her body alters and threats around her close in, she befriends Bridget and Gogo, a Lakota winkte woman (a term akin to transgender). 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. Vern, the novel’s protagonist, is a black teenager running from an abusive past with her twin children. Rivers Solomon’s third novel Sorrowland begins with unsettling thrills and violence, and it does not let up.

Through the woods, she flees from her husband, the Reverend Sherman, and from the cult-like settlement she grew up in.

Sorrowland book review