356 pages
Published 2021
Read from June 2 to June 7
Rating: 4 out of 5
General spoilers ahead that you could probably have derived from the cover summary.
Mycelium had quite the niche cultural moment at the start of the 2020s, didn’t it?
As a writer who’s written more than my share of mycelium poetry, and as a fan of mushroom horror in general, it’s no surprise that I was enthralled by this book. I’m in awe of Solomon’s conceptual link between mycelium networks and the communication and preservation of memory, memories digested and drawn into the network — memories of the vast cruelties and appalling injustices of how white people have treated the Black and Indigenous people they enslaved and genocided. It is a brilliant thesis for a contemporary horror novel, and Solomon is an amply talented author, well able to handle the sprawling concept and to tell an engrossing, horrifying, heartbreaking story along the way.
Sorrowland has symbiotic fungus, not-deer chasing our protagonist Vern through the woods, horrifying visions of the monstrous acts of white supremacy past and present, blurring the lines between hallucinatory hauntings and reality, but only the first third or so fits into the atmospheric horror genre. Solomon is more interested in exploring the ways colonialist hierarchies can be fought. Most of the middle section is focused on building found family and intentional community, the joy and need for connection, however small that might be. The pacing can be uneven at times, but it’s an important subject to explore, more vital to what Solomon is trying to say than all the mushroom horror bits were.
Having to flee this newfound safety once again, Vern encounters a string of vignettes — hunters who react to something new with cruelty and domination, poor moteliers bickering back and forth about family trauma — and straightforwardly asks of us readers:
What turned babies, fragile and curious, into… men who could not interact with a new thing without wanting to dominate it?What order of events did Vern need to disrupt in the lives of the millions upon millions who woke up every morning proud to be Americans? What made someone love lies?
Not the most subtle commentary, but here in the 2020s we’re long past the time for subtlety. The world is burning the fuck down and colonialist white supremacy, in all its forms, is responsible. To hell with it all. Paint this book’s message over all the billboards, please.
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