SORROWLAND

RELEASED 6 MAY 368 pages | Hardback/ebook

Author Rivers Solomon

Publisher Merky Books

The Black Lives Matter movement of recent years has taught us many things: most importantly, that awareness is just the first step. All the shock and solidarity in the world doesn’t matter if nothing actually changes.

Over the course of Sorrowland, protagonist Vern comes to the same hard realisation. The United States is, she reflects, “a catalogue of known wrongs”, but each brutality is simply followed by another. The albino child of black parents, she has been raised in a separatist cult that’s not what it seems. Pregnant and on the run, Vern battles to survive while learning more about how the world works, and the uncanny strength growing inside her.

Any story that namechecks racialised atrocities like Tulsa (also explored in the 2019 version of Watchmen) and Tuskegee was always going to be a tough read, and so it proves; Solomon’s descriptions of physical violence and systemic oppression alike are vivid and gut-wrenching, though the writing is occasionally clumsy. But there’s also found family here, and a profound vision of the powerless taking control of their lives.

Above all, what Vern’s newfound abilities offer – what fantasy as a genre offers – is the chance not just for horror at injustice, but for some sort of reckoning with it.

Nic Clarke