HERCULINE

A 20-something woman discovers that that an all-trans, all-female commune is too good to be true in this debut novel.

Trans and bisexual in New York, stymied in her desire to be a journalist “like all the other Hot Freelance Girls,” and unsuccessfully saving money for bottom surgery, the unnamed protagonist of Byron’s novel has plenty to deal with before you take into account that she faces sleep paralysis demons almost every night. She might be able to write off these nightly visitors as the unfortunate consequences of a religious upbringing in Indiana that included three brutal years of conversion therapy and a personal interest in demonology—if only they weren’t starting to show up when she’s still awake. Into this mix comes an umpteenth invitation from Ash, her ex-girlfriend and fellow Indiana native, to join a self-sufficient rural community named for 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin that Ash insists is “not a cult.” Disillusioned by the city’s hyper-competitive social scene and hoping a new setting might help chase the nightmares away, the narrator journeys back to the Midwest. But once there, she begins to discover that some utopias come with high price tags. Byron has rich veins to mine—religious shame, the commodification of trauma, the lengths people will go in the name of bodily autonomy, and the limits of solidarity—but she misses opportunities to fully delve into these ideas and all their complications. The supporting characters are thinly drawn, the pacing is uneven, and the narrator’s disaffection and reluctance to take concrete action in the face of escalating violence may emotionally distance some readers from even the novel’s most disquieting sequences.

Creepy and crawly but not quite hair-raising, the book struggles to find its footing as either literary fiction or horror.