COME OUT, COME OUT

Coming out is never easy, especially for teens in the small Puget Sound town of Port Promise.

Life seems idyllic in Port Promise—it’s the kind of place where everyone knows each other and high school sweethearts expect to be together forever. The biggest news lately is the gender-neutral casting for the senior musical, Grease. When 13-year-old Mallory Hammond, an “angry, unhappy” closeted lesbian, disappeared, the townspeople thought she’d finally run away. But to her friends Fern Jensen and Jaqueline De Luca, something about her disappearance felt off. On the night Mal vanished, Fern and Jaq found themselves on the edge of the woods without any recollection of what had happened. Five years later, at a party in those same woods, Fern and Jaq are flooded with horrifying memories of that night. There’s no denying it: Mal is dead, and whatever happened to her caused Fern and Jaq to forget their own queerness. The two friends must try to come to terms with their own identities and fix whatever happened that night, even at the risk of their own lives. This strong supernatural thriller tackles the very real issues of homophobia, transphobia, and forced conversion head-on. Parker manages to balance serious discussions of identity and bigotry with genuinely spine-tingling horror. Main characters present white.

A poignant blend of queer identity and modern horror.