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This element of the novel follows its protagonist’s efforts to formulate a life and identity for herself that is entirely her own, even as she is relentlessly pursued by an enigmatic figure hired to track her down.Īnother narrative is more contemporary, and concerns an insular religious compound styling itself (outwardly) after the various Black power movements of the 1970s, but which in fact simply deploys a hollow version of this earlier movement’s rhetoric to hide its own abuses of power. One narrative very clearly has a historical element and, at least in terms of metaphor, seems structured to elicit the experiences of a woman who escapes from slavery in pre-Civil War America and embarks on a lengthy cross-country voyage with her two children. It’s a hypnotic, often chilling depiction of the hard-won triumph of queer love and life over those who demonize both.I think it could be argued that there are technically three overarching narratives at work in Rivers Solomon’s 2021 novel Sorrowland, each of which plays off the others in subtle and frequently quite complicated ways. Over the next four years, while Vern heals from the trauma of Cainland and searches for a childhood friend who escaped before she did, she’s haunted by a specter she calls “the fiend” and her body transforms into something monstrous. When 15-year-old Vern, an albino intersex Black girl, is impregnated by the cult leader, she decides to make her escape, hiding out in the surrounding forest where she gives birth to twins Howling and Feral. of Sorrowland, a group of Black Americans have built Cainland, a separatist colony that began as a refuge from white capitalism but has developed into a cult with its own systems of oppression based in Christian ideals about gender and sexuality.

Award-winning speculative fiction writer Rivers Solomon’s latest is a dark and atmospheric examination of the violence done against Black, queer and female bodies in a white supremacist and patriarchal society.