Welcome to WLW Wednesday!
Where I, your local lesbain, and English nerd review a piece of WLW media:
(This is all my subjective opinions and if you disagree with anything I say that's a-okay)
Today's subject:
Chlorine
Author: Jade Song
Genres/Tropes: Horror, body horror, coming of age, fiction
Rating: 2/5
This book excited me as a lover of all things horror and queer I expected to thoroughly enjoy this novel. I did not.
This novel is about a Chinese-American girl Ren Yu, who is a competitive swimmer decending into maddness and abandoning humanity to become a mermaid.
The first few chapters were tolerable, I was able to overlook some of the weirdly sexual content because I was invested in the plot however at a certain point it seemed to be that the very sexual discussions and situations these teenage characters were being put in were not there to provide commentary on the sexualistion of teenage girls in society but for cheap shock value. Although this is not a YA novel and is aimed at a more mature reader demographic, almost all of the characters in the book are underage.
The main character, Ren Yu is constantly eyed up by her coach (who she defends as a good person throughout the novel), is assaulted by one of her teammates and is often in extremely sexual situations, I belive these situations if delivered tactfully could have been used to paint an intresting picture of what it's like to be a teenage girl in society, and used to explain why Ren Yu wants to escape from human society, but I didn't feel like that message was fully delivered. None of these events seemed to impact her in any lasting way. Her eventual mental breaking point does not come from her constant sexualistion but from being overworked by her coach and neglecting her health, so if it is not relivant to the plot what is the point in having her coach and peers sexualise her so much? It felt very much to me to be following in the footsteps of prievous horror stories and treating sexual assault as something to be used for shock value, not offering any nuanced discussions of this abuse.
Ren Yu's delusions of being a mermaid are not fully fleshed out as to be beliviable to me, she endures bad things but they never seem to have a lasting effect on her and exist only for momentary shock value. By the end of the novel she's still a motivated straight A student, who's admired by her peers a real decent would have had her grades slipping, her peers becoming afraid or disgusted by her, he madness being more pronounced not only when it was convient for the story. I don't believe that by the end of the novel Ren Yu is desperate enough to sew her legs together and run away from society.
It was difficult to slog through page after page of poorly written uncomfortable situations that seemingly served no relevance to the overall story, like when Ren Yu (who was 17) spent a whole summer smoking weed and having sex with a 21 year old life gaurd. Jade Songs writing leans very heavily on purple prose and bizare side tangents, some of which do give the book a nice atmospheric tone but in some parts this style becomes distracting. Despite the book only being 240 pages, it took me over a month to get through, and by the end, I was just frustrated.
The queer elements were not highly relevant or explored for most of the story. For most of the book, Ren Yu jumps from one boyfriend to another, all the while stringing along her friend who's in love with her. I don't think all queer characters need to be presented as moral, correct, or good, and in a better novel that could have better told the story and explored Ren Yu's more problematic personality traits with nuance or self awareness, I would have enjoyed this. I personally enjoy queer characters who are allowed to be evil, manipulative, and cruel not because they are queer but because they are human. However I will say when a significant amount of your books branding and marketing is arround it being a queer story and those queer elements take a back seat for 80% of the story it seems like you are just using those minimal queer elements to market your book towards a community that is desperate for representation of any kind.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this novel as either a horror novel or a queer story. If you are looking for horror in general I personally love The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it is a short story first published in 1892 that does an incredible job of exploring women's mental health and oppression through the medium of horror.
If you are looking for a queer horror story, although not intended to be one, Carmilla the 1872 novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is a story that has been adopted by the queer community due to the heavy amount of queer subtext (I will do a review of this at some point in the future). There are also plenty of modern retellings of the story, both in book and screen formats, by queer creatives that lean into the story's queer elements.
