When Lena Johnson’s beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan.
The discoveries made in Lakewood, Lena is told, will change the world—but the consequences for the subjects involved could be devastating. As the truths of the program reveal themselves, Lena learns how much she’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of her family.
Look, let me quickly spoil the gist of this review for y’all. Lakewood! Is! So! Creepy!
The first prong of the fork of terror that is Megan Giddings’s Lakewood is the fact that you know you’d do this for health insurance if you didn’t have health insurance. It’s the reason Lakewood is such an effective satire, because regardless of the complexity of Lena’s relationship with her mother, she’s absolutely not going to leave her mother to financial ruin. If she has the ability to get health insurance for her mom, that’s what she’s going to do, even if means subjecting herself to increasingly creepy and intrusive questions and tests. Would you go to a creepy cabin in the woods, for Science, if it meant your mom got healthcare? I would! It’s even more terrifyingly plausible because Lena keeps questioning whether she’s right to be freaked out. This is a legitimate science study, right? And things like the Tuskegee study are far far in the past, right? So if she’s scared and nervous about the things that are being asked of her, isn’t that just anti-science hysteria?
(I want y’all to know this would work on me. My friend Alice always says to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t join a cult? I want y’all to keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t join a — I don’t know, some sort of thing where the cover story is that it’s to increase the sum total of Knowledge. I really like Knowledge and I also like effacing myself for the good of others1 so I would definitely fall for that.)
Lakewood is keenly aware of the history of the American medical establishment conducting unethical research / torture on Black people for the good of white people, which is one of the many reasons its chilling premise works so well. I remember my parents telling me when I was a wee child that a lot of Black people don’t trust doctors because doctors have done a lot of bad things to Black people, which is 150% more information than I ever received in my formal education. But this is exactly what makes Lakewood work as SF/horror. It’s right right right right right on the edge of being science fiction, because it is so chillingly plausible. Though the specifics of what the Lakewood researchers are trying to do arise from Megan Giddings’s imagination, their methods are all too real.
And let me tell you right now that this book is high-octane nightmare fuel. The point at which I screamed “NO” is the scene where someone’s ENTIRE TEETH FALL OUT, a literal nightmare that I have at least three times per year, but pretty much every scene is either priming you to be terrified or actively terrifying. The build of it is impeccable, from the interview scene with intrusive questions to the first experiment where Lena breaks her wrist and everyone’s like “this is fine, here’s a cast, you’re fine.” In other words, it builds quickly to clarity — for the reader — that something is very wrong. But this, too, makes Lakewood an effective satire. As clear as it is to the reader that something’s wrong, Lena keeps second-guessing herself. It’s the perfect depiction of racism, which constantly maintains a shield of plausible deniability to prevent its target from convincing anyone around her of what’s really going on.
If I have any criticism of Lakewood, it’s that I would have liked a more climactic-feeling climax. The denouement, in which Lena begins to realize more clearly the generational trauma that has been inflicted on her family, is flawless, but I’d have loved to see a clearer breaking point in her willingness to stick with the horror of the Lakewood experiments. Highly, highly recommended SF, if you can stomach some body horror.
- dammit The Patriarchy ↩