The Seep

User Reviews

chai ♡

Rating: really liked it
The novel’s title, I think, is perfect for the tale within: a story that, for the space of a few pages, fills the room like water, seeping into every corner, making its way into the minds and hearts of its readers through all sorts of invisible cracks.

Imagine that it were possible to take one step out of reality, into a place of pure pleasure, far from the familiar tin-can clatter of today’s misery. A place where hierarchies are picked apart, capitalism is collapsed, people can flow into different shapes, and time no longer feels like currency, each moment a coin that could be, if one wasn’t careful, wasted and lost. Immortality is attainable at last, and it's all thanks to The Seep, a symbiotic alien entity that glows in the mind of the world.

**
Chana Porter’s astonishingly gripping novel, The Seep, takes place in that dimension. And Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka, the novel’s protagonist—a fifty-year-old Native American trans woman—cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

When Trina’s wife, Deeba, decides to recreate into a baby, and let the Seep erase everything—replacing the remnants of her traumatic past with smooth oblivion—Trina refuses to take on the role of being a mother to Deeba, and their necessary split erases the miraculous circle the Seep had drawn around them like a shoe smudging away a chalk line. Half-mad with her own circling, heartsick with the sameness of her days, Trina decides to embark on “a vengeful quest” to tear this new world down and rebuild it in a way that made sense.

Trina’s quest, it turns out, is the artifice through which Porter embarks on a philosophical and existential journey—pondering mortality and decay, humankind and change, with a soul-baring poignancy.

One of the most intriguing questions The Seep ruminates on is the fraught tension existing between difference and conflict, and the ramifications of collapsing the formal to avoid the latter. When The Seep descended to Earth, it sought to erase all pain, fear and disaccord, in the benevolent but misguided belief that to give human dissimilarities a wave of the hand—as if distractedly swatting a fly—is the answer. But our differences, it turns out, cannot be unraveled as though they were a ball of yarn. Culture, history, experience, memory—these things shape every single one of us in ways that are unique and very particular. They are part of the rope bridge linking us to the world at large. When Trina’s white friend, Horizon Line, refuses to recognize that stealing his dead boyfriend’s brown face and sculpting it onto his own like living clay is a species of violence far worse than anything she could imagine, Horizon Line argues that “our bodies are just containers for our immortal essences.” But Trina is a queer woman who has transitioned well before The Seep’s arrival, and there was far too deep a history written over her body to simply give it up. In one of the novel’s most cutting and affecting scenes—showing how the Seep’s love for humans has distorted, sharpened and pinned them to a wall instead—Trina rages that she “had labored for [her] body! She’d fought and kicked and clawed to have her insides match her outsides, and now people changed their faces as easily as getting a haircut.”

These are all difficult considerations, and a less skilled author might have produced an overbearingly didactic text in the hope of exploring them, but Porter is so successful at framing these questions with chilling clarity without offering no clear answers or pat explanations.

At the core of the novel is also grief, and the pages are weighted with it, heavy like lead. In unguarded moments, Trina’s grief, aching and bright, strikes through in such mutinous bursts. Trina and Deeba were close and inseparable, like stones mortared together. Deeba’s absence bore down on Trina’s heart like a stone. Still, Trina would not give up her pain for anything. And when The Seep insists to erase her memories of her wife, hoping to grant Trina reprieve from her sorrow, Trina responds: “It’s my pain! Let me have it.” That the author could make Trina’s sorrow so palpable, and in less than 200 page, is quite a remarkable feat.

If there’s a criticism to be made is that—while the book's brevity and economy work splendidly for the most part—there are many threads at play in The Seep, most of which don't mesh as resonantly as they could, with many loose ends left dangling in the wind that could have been more neatly tied up. But these are minor notes in an otherwise really good story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Highly recommended!

carol.

Rating: really liked it
You probably read my book reviews to figure out whether or not a book should make it to your TBR list, and maybe even how soon you should read it. I'm solidly on the fence about The Seep, which reminds me of Annihilation, only less eerie, and about ten times more overt. So let me give you a touch of the first chapter (minus the bookend chapter) so you can get the flavor of the writing:

"When the aliens first made contact, Trina and her not-yet-wife, Deeba, threw one of their famous dinner parties for a select group of friends. It wasn't difficult to keep the guest list small. Everyone was too nervous to travel far, the subways and buses deserted but for the most intrepid or desperate travelers. They invited two beloved couples who happened to live close by, and who wondrously had never met. Emma and Mariam came first, with two types of hard cheeses, three types of olives, gluten-free rice crackers, tubs of spicy hummus. Emma was French and Mariam was from Cario, so they both really knew how to put together a cheese plate. Their little party was completed by Katharine and Laura, the friendly, easygoing lesbians from Tennessee. They came with copious amounts of alcohol (one can always depend on the lapsed Christians to bring the bar): pale ale for the butches, and drinkable red wine. Introductions were made, drinks were poured, cheese and olives exclaimed over.... A generous feeling swirled around them like a melody, like a scent. The essence of a perfect dinner party. How have we never met before? they asked again and again, but what they were really saying was, How have I only just begun to love you?"

That should tell you whether or not you are well-matched to this little book--verging on novella, really--that has less to do with aliens, and more to do with the psychology of self via identity politics. It is less grounded in theory than in artistic extrapolation, but there are lots of intriguing ideas, with profuse grey areas. Given the chutzpah to take on the issues of identity politics, it feels surprisingly non-confrontational; much like the Seep, you will find yourself agreeing with most positions, even as they oppose each other.

It's a fast read if you read it like a normal book. I think I finished easily in a couple of hours. The prose seems simple and straightforward, facilitating speed, but it also lends itself to a kind of beauty worth savoring. The above dinner party scene is one such example; the emotion of it quite touching. The downside of such prose, of course, is that it distills complex thoughts and actions into relatively bite-sized pieces, which is a disservice to many of the concepts around identity. Porter instead tries to get the reader to feel their way through the issues along with the main character, Trina.

The actual alien and post-alien transition is mostly alluded to, with almost nothing on a grand political scale, so people hoping for a traditional first-contact or post-social upheaval story will be very disappointed. There's a couple of references to alternate protest communities (which brings to memory the various responses covered in The Last Policeman), but they are peripheral to the issue of Trina clinging to her individuality in its many guises. The Seep is biological, virtually elemental, and it's effect on the psyche has "the nuance of a Golden Retriever." While one may avoid reveling in it, it is about as avoidable as air pollution.

Thematically, it is also very much about the grief of growing apart from an intimate partner and what living with that grief looks like. Despite that compounded with Porter's desire to have us empathize with Trina, it is not hopeless book as much as one of curiosity. I ended up enjoying it, although I do feel like it was a little facile in the approach to what it means to be an individual, particularly as defined by identity politics. For the most part, the author seemed to conflate labels of ethnicity and gender with identity, which is a very simple way of looking at it. Still, I'm speaking from a head-center approach, so I have to admire the fact that it kept me intrigued. This is one where the disclaimer 'your mileage may vary' will apply to the nth degree.

Nataliya

Rating: really liked it
By all means, this *should* have been a perfect book for me. I mean, it’s essentially a fever dream, or at least one of those surreal dreams that happen right before waking and you keep remembering bits and pieces for days after. Or at least the pleasantly intoxicated dream of a tree-hugging pacifist hippie who turns the front lawn into a sustainable community garden*.

* Not quite me (because cynicism) but something I can relate to in literature. Usually.

Imagine an infiltration of the Earth with the Seep, a benevolent alien symbiote that very quickly transforms the planet into a hippie paradise, with everyone connected via deep understanding, elimination of disease, scarcity, inequality, need to work for money, with communes of people high on the Seep and life having daily transcendental experiences in perfect harmony, gardening in their front yards, having consensual orgies, not needing money, using moss for carpeting and communing with nature while wearing hippie outfits and making jokes about the few who chose to isolate themselves about this paradise for all. Seriously, it seems to be what the hippie communes were hoping to achieve but failed in the world of capitalism and the notable absence of mind-controlling alien symbiote that makes it “impossible to feel anything except expansive joy, peace, tenderness, and love”.

“Just yesterday Trina had used The Seep to erase a tumor from a woman’s breast. No cutting, no incision, no radiation or chemotherapy, just the power of Seep consciousness speaking into this woman’s cells, telling them how to die gracefully, to let go and become something new. The procedure took twenty minutes, and then the woman went to a hula-hoop meet-up in Golden Gate Park.”

Pass me some raspberry leaves to smoke as I dance around the Maypole, please.

But my brain kept going “Huh?” pretty much nonstop.

Everything I mentioned above - all the transformation of the world within a few short years - all vaguely happens completely off-page. So if you’re here to see that, it’s not going to happen. It’s more of vague mentions and handwaving and not much else except for stating that it’s life now.

What we get to see instead is the exploration of grief from losing a life partner (the said life partner decides to take a full advantage of unexplainable alien symbiote powers and regress to being a baby, and is pissed that her wife does not want to become a parent to her former wife. Yeah. That.) We see Trina angry and lost, floating through this huggy, dreamy and constantly high world, broken over the loss of her wife Deeba and focusing her grief and anger on random targets in attempt to deny what she is really feels, while the Seep (initially through sentient pamphlets - just roll with it, okay?) tries to convince her that it is necessary to eliminate the feelings of grief and loss and anger since those do not belong in this surreally dreamy Brave New World.

“But right now, I feel like you’re breaking the deal you have with us. We’re supposed to have free will. That includes being unhappy. That includes making the wrong decisions and getting hurt, or even doing something terrible. We’re on this planet to grow and change, and sometimes that can only happen through struggle.”

And all I kept thinking was that addition of this strange unexplained and nonsensical world was completely unnecessary to explore Trina’s loss and grief. It was a confusing background, distracting in its unexplained oddness, like a strange flashy dream — and that comes from me, a huge fan of weird science fiction. The point seemed to be acceptance of herself and her her feelings and this allowing Trina to finally move on, find new center in life, make peace with all the conflicting emotions and pain that seem to be necessary for humanity. And that’s what the book should have focused on, in my decidedly non-Seepy opinion, explored loss and pain, maybe with injection of a touch of magical realism at most.

“The child disappeared, and Trina found that she was holding herself. She took a deep shaky breath, her arms still wrapped in tight. She had been punishing herself for years, punishing herself for the loss of Deeba and how terrible she felt about that loss, a vicious circle sucking her under. No more. She would still feel sorrow, hurt, anger at that great gaping loss. But she wouldn’t flagellate herself for those feelings. And eventually, eventually, those, too, would pass. She stood up a little straighter. Eventually, Trina would move on.”

But throwing in the mix of sorta-SF half-developed fever dream reality kept jarring me out of Trina’s experiences and emotional turmoil. It kept making me want to actually understand how that world would work (I think the explanation boils down to some “Seep wands”, for all the sense it makes) and why it wouldn’t actually work, and how ridiculous it is to expect all that just over a few years, and what exactly the point of the boy from the Compound is (is he a metaphor??? I’m afraid so) and all that logical thinking stuff that I suppose I was meant to put aside before starting page one.

Logic is not strong here. Chapter 2 — Trina’s bare feet sink into the moss on the floor, she looks at her reflection in the mirror and sees “old Levi’s, hoodie, ancient leather boots”.

Did those boots have no soles to allow bare feet to sink into the moss???

And all that kept removing the spotlight from Trina’s emotional journey to the detriment of the story’s message, and leaving me feeling a bit disengaged.

In short, a grief story shortchanged by throwing in vaguely messy science fiction — or a science fiction story suffering from too much underdeveloped vagueness in pursuit of exploration of grief. A strange thought experiment for which I’m not a good match.

In any case, 2 stars. Not for me.

Racheal

Rating: really liked it
I mostly picked this book up because of the gorgeous cover and the Jeff VanderMeer comparison in the blurb, both of which are A+ strategies for getting me interested in reading something. I'm a total sucker for books that are generally a) strange or surreal in a WTF sort of way, b) have a supernatural premise, and c) are written in a vaguely literary style.

I'm starting to think that I need to stop getting lured in with that bait, though, because while this checks all my boxes on a superficial level, it really failed in a lot of essential ways.

I mean, there are definitely things I liked about it; the writing really pulled me in and I was pretty engaged up until the final act. I love that it doesn't assume default whiteness/straightness (the main character, Trina, is a 51-year-old Native American trans woman in a long term relationship with a woman, for instance).

I also loved the whole setup for this world and a lot of the ideas that it introduces. The majority of the book is set 20 years after an amorphous alien species called The Seep first entered our water system. Once they infiltrated or bodies, they showed us that they just want to help us be happy, and that we are all connected- to each other, to the Earth and the animals and plants- and that violence and capitalism are silly.

A "soft" alien invasion where is seems as though the aliens only want to give humans everything they desire? Heck yes, sign me up!

Overall, though, I had huge problems with the execution.

I'll give one example that I think most clearly illustrates what I found so frustrating about this book. (view spoiler)

The finale also has a jarring tonal shift that I thought was entirely unsuccessful, taking it to a comedic, surreal place when the narrative up to that point had been actually quite serious and concrete. It just utterly failed in almost every way for me.

I'm giving it one extra star for being very readable and having interesting ideas and imagery, but that's where it ends.

Cece (ProblemsOfaBookNerd)

Rating: really liked it
It’s interesting, I wasn’t really loving this book. I read the whole first half feeling somewhat uninterested and unsure of this world. It had more humor and less detailed writing than I expected. And then it had to gnaw at a very fresh wound: my grief.

I lost my grandpa only a couple of months ago. Sometimes reading about death doesn’t impact me, I feel a distance from the writing or the situation, but this wasn’t one of those times. After not feeling sure about this book I spent the last few chapters sobbing because it hit home in a way that no book has since I started mourning.

This is a messy story about grief and identity and about being allowed to feel the bad feelings because they make us who we are just as much as our good feelings. It’s weird and off kilter at times. But it understood my messy grief in a way I really needed and I think that makes it unbelievably special.

TW: depression, suicidal thoughts, drug and alcohol addiction

Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨ Campbell

Rating: really liked it

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"People need to give each other space to make choices. We can't live solely for other people. Even if it hurts them. Even when it breaks your heart" (174).

I really enjoyed THE SEEP a lot! In some ways, it reminds me of a more sophisticated version of Stephenie Meyer's book, THE HOST. Set first in San Francisco, THE SEEP is about a "soft" alien invasion in which aliens, I guess in liquid form, infect the water supply and other host bodies via secretions, giving them a drug-like high but also allowing their hosts the ability to modify their bodies. Humans can turn into animals, or give themselves animal-like qualities like horns and scales and wings; they can become other genders or ethnicities; and they can even take on the very faces of people they know and admire.

The heroine, Trina, is a middle-aged Native American transgender woman, and since identity is so focal to her experience, especially as someone who is in three marginalized groups, she is horrified by what she sees as a tremendously insensitive act of mass appropriation. Identity, she points out to someone (and I'm paraphrasing here), shouldn't be something that can be taken on and off like a pair of socks. But of course, this isn't something that the aliens can really understand with their hive-mind and laughably new age-like hippie mentality.

When Trina's partner buys into the Seep's philosophy of renewal and decides to turn herself into a baby, Trina effectively becomes a widow, and ends up turning to alcohol in her sorrow... until she sees a young boy who is untouched by the Seep and ends up thinking of a person she knew when the invasion first began-- someone else who bought into the system and is using it for his own illicit gains. And that's where the story, and Trina's quest, really kicks off.

THE SEEP is a slow-moving work of speculative fiction reminiscent of Sheri S. Tepper and Ursula K. Le Guin, especially with the themes of female empowerment, LGBT+ identity, and explorations of what it really means to be human as explored from the lens of an entity that is not. The book is very short but it doesn't feel short-- and the writing is gorgeous. It's great to see a science-fiction work that features an older woman of color who is LGBT+, as a lot of popular science-fiction books tend to feature younger, heterosexual white heroes and heroines as their leads. There are so many great themes explored in this work and it feels very literary. What could have been dark is lightened by some humor and a surrealistic, fantasy-like environment that swirls around you like a Dali painting.

I would read more by this author in a heartbeat-- and by the way, big ups to whomever designed that cover because it's gorgeous. I love the flowers.

P.S. The quote I cited above may differ in your copy in form or by page count because this was an uncopyedited ARC.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!

4 stars

Gerhard

Rating: really liked it
Bartleby, the co-op member who had been there the longest, loaned him books, weird books he had never heard of, that spoke of other realities, other times, stranger than this one. Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler.

It helps having friends on Goodreads with weird reading interests. And when @Carol stated that “You probably read my book reviews to figure out whether or not a book should make it your TBR list” in her review of ‘The Seep’ by Chana Porter, she hits the nail on the head. I really do value the opinions of my GR friends, who have led me to books I would otherwise not have encountered.

This book (or rather, novella) is a case in point. It is probably a product of the Seep itself, like Pam the Philosophising Pamphlet, designed to indoctrinate (by seeping into) the unconsciousness of unwary humans. I found the 2021 Titan Books edition on Scribd, with a cover blurb stating it includes a ‘never-before-seen short story’. To my surprise, ‘The Seep’ itself ends on page 135, with ‘And the World was New’ taking up the rest of the book until page 189. At just over 40 pages, this is a bit more substantial than a short story.

Interestingly, the so-called ‘short story’ is a complete recount of the events of the main novella (yes, in just over 40 pages), but from the viewpoint of a different character. For the reader, this means a profound recalibration of what has gone before. I am unsure if this is intentional, but the Seep has much more agency in ‘And the World was New’, which also robs it of a lot of its ambiguity.

Given how short the book is as a whole, it is remarkable how many genre tropes Porter deploys (and blurs). It is a utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse all rolled into one First Contact fable, depending on your interpretation and understanding of the Seep itself. “The Seep did love us, and it wanted to help us create a perfect world. And this destroyed life as we knew it.”

We learn in ‘And the World was New’ that the Seep comprises alien beings that came to the planet in the form of a viscous substance that can enable psychic bonds between all living matter. “THE BENEVOLENT ALIEN FRIENDS, KNOWN AS THE SEEP, WHO ONLY WISH TO GIVE HUMANITY AS MANY DIFFERENT CHOICES IN LIFE AS POSSIBLE, SO THAT ALL BEINGS MAY BE FREE, HAPPY, AND AT PEACE.”

Initially it is distributed through the urban water supply, but quickly becomes airborne as well, and soon the Seep is all-pervasive. “There was talk of launching a war, but on what? Those who had been touched by the alien presence simply felt no fear. When connected with the aliens through water or bodily fluids, it was impossible to feel anything except expansive joy, peace, tenderness.”

The reference to ‘bodily fluids’ is in line with a couple of nods to Samuel Delany, who has written extensively about the type of alternative-lifestyle communes that the Seep gives rise to as humans are freed to shed all of their inhibitions and embrace every desire, no matter how obscure. New subcultures emerge like mushrooms, such as “the yellow-meeks, the decomposers/living dead, pain cults, pearl houses, that kind of thing.”

The Seep’s impact on humanity is much more than an alien high though, as people quickly discover that consciousness can be separated from the material, and that bodies can be altered at whim. All wants and needs also fall away as the Seep automatically gives people what they need. Of course, this leads to the collapse of all economic, governmental, and social systems as we know it.

The plot revolves around the lesbian couple Deeba and Trina, with the latter deciding to be reborn as (or to regress back to) the condition of an infant to experience a more fulfilled childhood. Trina is truly non-plussed at Deeba’s lack of support for her decision, and indeed her thinly disguised horror at the choice.

Hadn’t they vowed to love each other forever, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad? But what about in a time of the end of the world where the Seep, uncharitably but pointedly described at one point as having the nuance of a Golden Retriever, changes the meaning of what it means to be human forever, even as it strives to better understand humanity in order to celebrate its best qualities?

Put another way, do we have free will when every single decision or thought has been subjected to an alien influence as insidious as the Seep? Getting what we want all the time may be the worst thing for our growth as a species, because any driver for success and improvement is automatically done away with. The conclusion that Porter ultimately arrives at will surprise you.

If you are a Jeff VanderMeer or Neil Gaiman fan, there is much to delight in this deliberately strange and off-kilter book, which steadily gets weirder and weirder, while retaining a diamond-sharp focus on its human characters. This grounds the book in a lived-in reality that reminds us that anything extraordinary also contains, and is defined by, the quotidian.

Jessica Woodbury

Rating: really liked it
One of my favorite subgenres is one I call "WTAF?!" It is the kind of book that gives you this response and it isn't a genre with a lot of rules except for the fact that there aren't any rules. The joy of it is not ever knowing what will happen, not quite ever getting oriented. It is also a pretty male-dominated genre, probably because it has its roots in another male-dominated genre: horror. So I welcome THE SEEP (which joins another female-authored WTAF?! book I've read recently, the eerily similarly titled THE NEED by Helen Phillips) to the family. It also brings a little jolt of diversity with its protagonist: a Native American trans woman, Trina.

Trina is someone who understands the desire to change into who you really are. But in the near-future world Trina lives in, alien life called The Seep has become ingrained in human life that creates a whole new kind of change. The Seep wants only to make humans happy and gives them the power not only to heal themselves or achieve a happiness high, it also lets you transform your body and your entire life. At first this opens up vast opportunities for a better life, but as time passes Trina--a doctor whose services now mostly consist of just healing people with The Seep--grows dissatisfied. When her wife decides to undertake a particularly drastic modification, Trina is thrown adrift. But this new society does not have room for depression or grief and Trina finds herself on a kind of quest even if she doesn't know her goal.

This is a surreal and fluid story, where the rules of how The Seep works are never quite clear so the reader is constantly finding themselves in unexpected and strange situations. Like Trina, we feel unsettled and unsteady. It's beautifully weird to follow Trina's journey and you have to be willing to sit back and let it unfold. Sometimes it feels more like a new kind of performance art, and that isn't a bad thing. There's so much weirdness but the structure and prose is mostly traditional, so while it will probably appeal to fans of writers like Samanta Schweblin, it will also work for a lot of sci-fi readers who enjoy unusual alien stories and queer narratives.

Lark Benobi

Rating: really liked it
This novella is stretched artificially to 202 pages by using a small-book format and near-double spacing, and the story itself feels artificially stretched, as well, like an outline of something that might have been good, with a little more of literally -anything- added to the pages: more event, more dialogue, more passion, more differentiation between characters, more of an idea of who these people are and why I should care about them.

It needed more editing, too. There is a lovely soft rhythm to the narrative, but the register never changes. The dialog, when it comes, is in a strange author-speak. People say things like "perhaps" and "a bit." Is their way of speaking being affected by "The Seep?" Or just evidence of a writer still looking for her voice? The characters feel somnambulant, which maybe in part can be explained by the premise of the novel, I suppose, of an alien invasion where the aliens seep into human minds and thoughts via the water and via "bodily fluids" (a phrase that reminded me of Dr. Strangelove, of course, but I don't think the author meant it that way). The characters came across as if they're stoned, and maybe this is also meant to be part of "The Seep" effect but it was hard to say for sure.

There is a very good premise here, which made me excited to read the novel, but the actual experience of reading felt more like reading a synopsis of a novel that is still waiting to be written. This is a pretty harsh review because I was really looking forward to a novel where trans-ness becomes effortless, not just along a gender spectrum but in many other ways, and where people are able to express themselves outwardly with any physical shape that makes them feel most themselves. I love that idea and I'm still looking for that novel.

K.J. Charles

Rating: really liked it
A strange read set when the alien invasion has colonised Earth with hippy shit.

Basically the Seep is aliens connecting minds and allowing people to be at one with others and the world. So you can feel the pain of others and connect with trees and reshape your own body. Trina, our heroine, veers between finding this useful (she's a doctor who can now make cancer go away using a Seep wand) and dreadful (her beloved wife leaves her to become a baby again, she discovers a white acquaintance has appropriated the appearance of his POC boyfriend).

This is really a story about grief, mostly set several years after Trina's wife has left her, and Trina's failure to cope with it, and how real grief needs to be lived through and not wisped away by new age affirmations. The Seep is constantly, menacingly on at her to be happy, and her distress and self-destructive activities are not okay.

Which sounds great, but the book touches on a lot of stuff that ought to be really interesting but doesn't explore them, which becomes frustrating. Trina is trans, but her engagement with what the Seep can offer is limited to observing that she fought for her own transition pre-Seep. Does she resent that people can now change their outside to match the inside? Is that not a benefit, and why not? We don't explore it. There's a sense that it's better to struggle for happiness than have it gifted to you, that bad feelings are better than fake ones, symbolised by a woman eating live fish and crying while she does it because she feels their suffering. But there's no real dive into this and no driving plot, either, and as such in the end it didn't make much impact for me.

laurel [the suspected bibliophile]

Rating: really liked it
Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a survivor of an alien invasion. But The Seep didn't kill everyone—it made them immortal and gave humanity a utopia. A world without poverty. Without war. Without scarcity. And everything is going well, until Trina's wife decides she wants to begin anew. She wants to restart her life as a baby. And everything Trina wanted in life vanished.

so your wife decided to be reborn as a baby...

This was a delightfully weird book that nevertheless was such a beautiful exploration of grief and depression in a world where the gentle overseer only wanted to make everything better and bring happiness, no matter what.

I wasn't prepared to spend half the book crying for no other reason than I was crying and trying to figure out why saltwater was falling from my eyes, but I did.

I also wasn't prepared to love this as much as I did—with comparisons to Annihilation and the weirdness being emphasized in every review, I was leery as hell.

But this book is beautiful, and it is sad. And it is fantastic.

so you've decided to run away from all your problems...

After wallowing for five years, Trina is given a rude wake up call—her house (not hers, per se, since nothing belongs to anyone and everything belongs to everyone) is going to be repossessed if she doesn't get her act together and start giving a damn.

And then Trina sees a child of the Compound alone and unafraid and decides she must save him from this strange new world—she must save him from The Seep, or at least help him adjust to whatever is going on with this world.

And she embarks on a quest that brings her past and future together, with the help of a really unhelpful pamphlet named Pam.

so you're thinking of going on a vengeful quest...

The themes of this book are searing and thoughtful.

What does it really mean when we all are one? When peace rules, and poverty is no more and everyone is supposed to be happy and have literally anything they could ask for?

Does the past still matter? Can change exist with immortality?

What does it mean, to truly die?

What does it mean, to be truly human?

What does it mean, to steal another person's face? Where is the line between cultural appropriation and homage?

And how can you say goodbye to someone you'd thought you'd be with forever?

Anywho, this is weird as fuck and yet easily understandable. There was a depth I wasn't anticipating, and a hope and love that was unexpectedly beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful all at once.

And the rep is fantastic. An #ownvoices book about a Jewish-American Indian trans woman, and so much queer (mostly sapphic) rep that made me so fucking happy to read.

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

Charlotte Kersten

Rating: really liked it
“We sometimes like things even though they’re bad for us.”

So What’s It About?

Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity calling itself The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.

Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence—until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life. Using Seep-tech to make this dream a reality, Deeba moves on to a new existence, leaving Trina devastated.

Heartbroken and deep into an alcoholic binge, Trina chases after a young boy she encounters, embarking on an unexpected quest. In her attempt to save him from The Seep, she will confront not only one of its most avid devotees, but the terrifying void that Deeba has left behind.

What I Thought

Looking at reviews, this seems to be a book that either really works for readers or really doesn’t work for them. In my case, the latter was true. There is just so much about this book that didn’t click for me. To start, there are so many things that didn’t really make sense or didn't quite come together for me. It’s never really clear what Horizon Line is doing and this plot point ends incredibly abruptly; the Compound is never really explained and the boy from the Compound is the instigator for Trina’s little quest, but he barely features in the story at all. There are little things too - at one point, Trina encounters a woman sobbing while eating goldfish because she can sense their lives and deaths. Okay, but why would she be doing that if the whole point of the Seep is to avoid pain and suffering? There are little instances like these where things are there for the sake of being there, weird for the sake of being weird, and that just doesn’t really work for me.

I also struggle with how the book's politics are conveyed. It seems pretty clear that the Seep is a commentary on naive liberalism - the colorblindness, toxic positivity and “wokeness” that spirals back around to being offensive. The big climax of the book is Trina insisting to the Seep that her lived identity and its history matters, and it’s wrong to try to erase that or take it away. So it’s pro-identity politics, but I can’t help but feel that this would have been much more impactful and convincing to me if Trina’s identity as a Jewish-indigenous trans woman had been integrated into the story in a more meaningful way. How does she feel about people suddenly being able to transform their bodies dramatically? About the current state of collective land ownership and the way that religion has completely transformed? We get tiny moments of her talking about the first of these, at least, but I really wish that we could have seen more of her reflections on her identity post-Seep.

I also didn’t buy her sudden transformation away from alcoholism, suicidality and deep grief for Deeba’s loss at the very end of the story. She has a kind of sudden revelation and works through these things in a way that feels incredibly simplistic and pat. She kind of seems to suddenly accept life with the Seep after years of struggling with it, and I’m not sure what I think of that. The problems that she raises about the new world are completely valid, but at the end it feels like she just suddenly lets them go and isn’t bothered by them anymore.

I will say that I loved the charming writing style and touches of humor, as well as a cast of almost universally queer characters. I do think the idea of a benevolent, gentle alien invasion is a promising one. A lot of things about the Seep’s world are very interesting, and some of the surreal touches did work for me. Overall, though, this book wasn’t for me.

Edward Lorn

Rating: really liked it
This is my subjective opinion/impression of the book. I understand fully that I may have missed the mark or simply not "gotten it", but this is my personal experience concerning what I read, and I will only ever be honest with you guys. I fully admit that this book could be intended as a parody.

Feel free to (respectfully) discuss below.

THE SEEP by Chana Porter reads like an extended SNL sketch parodying social-justice politics. With a character named Horizon Line, and a trans character becoming irate at their S.O. because they want to transition to a baby and not seeing the irony of trying to talk them out of it, this book felt like it was written by a Trumper who's only experience with liberal ideals is what they've seen on Twitter.

I would only ever recommend this book to conservatives who want a good belly laugh, those living in an echo chamber of bigotry and solipsism. I didn't find anything in the book funny, and that's where my dilemma stems. Even the characters in the book start fighting back against the aliens who "only want what's best" for our species by letting us "live our truths", so perhaps the author is saying that a world populated only by libs would be disastrous, but that idea gives the Right fuel for their argument that all SJWs are psycho- and/or sociopaths.

The idea that we all love things that are bad for us and should be allowed our simple pleasures was cool, but it didn't fit the vibe of the rest of the book: a liberal utopia where everyone loves everyone and lives in harmony yet are under the control of a well-meaning alien presence. I did loved the section about cheeseburgers, hence the two stars instead of one, but it also seems to allude that individuals should not be allowed to make their own decisions, that we don't know what's good for us, and should be forced to succumb to the will of those who think they know best, and that, for me, is the antithesis of liberal thinking.

It's the hypocrisy for me. Always has been. The Right says they want more freedom and less government, but they force their ideals on the rest of us, then complain when we make everything "gay", as if we have some agenda to convert every soul into a same-sex marriage. And then you have this book, which seems to flip the script, making the Left seem like we'd be happy if everyone was forced to believe how we believe. In my opinion, liberals want true freedom and equality, meaning we'd love to just let everyone live their own lives, make their own decisions, as long as that doesn't include controlling others.

In summation: I don't know who this book is for. I never thought a book could be too liberal for the likes of me, but here we are.

Final Judgment: The literary equivalent of an edgelord screaming, "I IDENTIFY AS A TOASTER!" and everyone congratulating them.

Sarah

Rating: really liked it
The Seep is an interesting little book. It’s about a transgender woman going through a painful… um.. divorce? (This is a question because what it actually is, is a spoiler.) Aliens invade every aspect of Earth life, connecting us all to each other, making us all high on love. They’re in the water. They’re in your food. They can make you into anything you ever wanted to be.

This was a fairly unique story. I loved the idea of benevolent aliens who’ve come to “help.” It’s not really an idea I come across often. The word invasion typically has a negative connotation. The Seep usher in a new era in which people can live forever. Don’t like your face? Change it! Don’t want to adult? Become a child! Want to be happy all the time? It’s cool- have this drink spiked with Seep!

Which is where I think the social commentary comes in. The Seep, despite their insistence that they are only there to help, they only want what’s best for the planet, they only want you to be happy- aren’t really giving you much of a choice in the matter. On the surface they bring utopia, but beneath it all, they are colonizing Earth in their image. Sound familiar?

It definitely has a surreal, dreamlike sort of quality to it. I wasn’t sure how much in-book-time was supposed to be passing. Sometimes it felt like years, others only months. There are some weird moments that will have you scratching your head, a bear cooking soup, a woman eating fish and crying about it because she can feel their pain as she eats them. A friendly face missing the way their fingers turned neon orange when eating Cheetos.

I did become a little frustrated with the protagonist, Trina, at times. Due to her divorce she spends a lot of time wallowing in self pity and drinking her sorrows away. She wasn’t the kind of person I’d want to hang out with in real life and she’s not the kind of character I enjoy reading about. (For reference, I had a similar complaint about The Girl on the Train).

Luckily the book is short, it’s easy to read, and kept me interested until the end, even if I didn’t always understand what was going on. There were things that I would have loved to know more about if Porter ever wrote a full length novel set in this world.

The Seep releases on January 21, 2020. Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for sending an advanced copy for review.

Jenny (Reading Envy)

Rating: really liked it
A quick read about a benevolent (?) alien invasion that ends war, aging, environmental destruction and more...but a reminder that Utopia for some is inevitably dystopia for others. At times I thought it was satire about liberal politics but ultimately I decided it wasn't, but could have been. I felt the author could have done more with some themes and storylines, basically I wanted more than I got.

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