Come Out, Come Out

By Natalie C. Parker

Originally published September 2024

3/5 ducklings 🐣🐣🐣

tl;dr The real horror is homophobia.

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Something lives in the woods surrounding Port Promise and it will grant your wish…for a price. Jaq, Fern and Mallory, three queer kids in this small town, just want to be safe. The price they must pay for their wish to come true is horrifying.

Jaq and Fern are normal, just like every other girl in Port Promise, auditioning for the high school musical, dating cute boys their parents approve of, attending church every Sunday. They don't even really know each other. Right?

After stepping into the woods, all of this is thrown into question and they begin to realize what they’re missing. What was taken from them.

As they frantically try to unravel what happened to them, they’re both haunted by disturbing visions of Mallory, a girl everyone said ran away. A girl they don't even know. Or do they? There they see, the more they begin to realize that something terrible happened to her.

Both Jaq and Fern begin to reclaim the pieces of themselves that were taken, but the thing in the woods does not easily give up its prizes. How far are Jaq and Fern willing to go to be their true selves and are they willing to destroy their safe, easy lives to do it?

It’s not often I find a horror novel genuinely horrifying, but Natalie C. Parker did it. What is more horrifying the the core of who you are stolen from you? Realizing it was stolen from you so that you could be forced int someone else’s expectations of you? Or realizing that you could have been blissfully unaware that anything had been stolen at all?

This book gave me the shivers right the way to the end. I think it is a nearly universal queer experience that even after the fear and uncertainty of discovering who you are, there is always something else to be afraid of. Coming out, especially to people you aren’t certain will understand, is terrifying. And then you have to do it over and over and over, every time you use a pronoun for your partners. Despite all of that, one of the most terrifying things to me is the idea of being forced into someone else’s box and forgetting who I am in the process.

Full disclosure, I read this before the U.S. election. It hits different now. Before, it was scary in the way all books that speak to a visceral, personal experience are scary. Now it feels terrifyingly real. It feels like queer people are half a step away from being forced back into the closet.

I'm not sure I’ll reread Come Out, Come Out any time soon, I have enough existential horror to be dealing with in the real world, but it was a great read had the right spooky vibe and kept me reading late into the night.

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