Sounds like a lot? It is, and you’ll certainly find extraneous material here, including a motel-room orgy attended by a couple of ghosts. Its frame of reference is generous – in some ways, it’s clearly rooted in Afrofuturism, owing plenty to Octavia Butler, but it nods as well to Giovanni’s Room, Robin Hood and folklore from multiple cultures. It’s about genocide and the exploitation of black bodies, self-delusion and endemic corruption, motherhood and inheritance. It’s about escape, self-acceptance and queer love. This capaciousness is echoed in the sheer range of Sorrowland’s timely preoccupations. Anything that remains of Vern’s faith is rooted in the vastness of life, and when she meets her nemesis, it’s only fitting that it should turn out to be a creature “so looming that being next to it was like falling”. Fortunately, she soon finds another sanctuary, and with it the healing ministrations of a Native American woman.Ī stirring sense of the epic animates this striking novel.

“The primary freedoms this nation protected were the ones to own and annihilate,” she declares.

She’s unable to bring this same nuanced view to bear on life in the outside world.

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. Vern has an abrasive, masochistic streak.

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon