SORROWLAND

A Lambda Award–winning writer explores America’s dark history of brutalizing Black bodies in their latest work of speculative fiction.

Vern is a young woman raising her twin babies in a forest, dressing them in the hides of animals she’s hunted and hiding them away in makeshift shelters. Vern is being followed by ghosts and stalked by someone who butchers animals and dresses them in infants’ clothes. Both are connected to the Black separatist commune from which Vern has escaped. As a parasite takes over her body, Vern develops superhuman powers and begins to suspect that she is a test subject being used by the United States government. There’s a lot going on here—perhaps too much. The novel starts out strong; the portion of the narrative in which Vern and her children are fending for themselves in the wilderness has the feel of folklore, and the idea that she is haunted by the experience of her ancestors is evocative. As Solomon moves further into the realms of science fiction, though, their voice loses much of its force. This is surprising given the quality of the worldbuilding in An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), a dystopian tale set on a giant spaceship. The problem isn’t that the notion that Vern is part of a secret experiment conducted on Black people is implausible—Solomon references both the Tuskegee Study and the work of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist who practiced new techniques on enslaved women. The problem is that the concept that drives the plot for half the novel is barely developed. With almost no evidence, Vern intuits that she is part of a shocking conspiracy, and, from that point, readers are supposed to take this as a given. Instead of building a compelling case, Solomon wrestles fantastic tropes into shapes that fit the frame they’ve created without effectively supporting it.

The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.