Publisher – Orbit

Published – Out now

Price – £3.99 kindle ebook £3.90 paperback

THEY CALL IT THE PLAGUE
A generation of children born with extreme genetic mutations

THEY CALL IT A HOME
But it's a place of neglect and forced labour

THEY CALL HIM A FREAK
But Dog is just a boy who wants to be treated as normal

THEY CALL THEM DANGEROUS
They might be right

The story of a lost generation, and a boy who just wants to be one of us.

Science fiction and fantasy have long had a fascination with the Other – the person who is not quite human. Be they alien, monster or something stranger how far from human can you get before you are not. There is a long history of the Other being a symbol for many marginalise groups who has seen the speculative genres the most sympathetic to those society has frown upon. There are though dangers in authors well meaningly taking such subjects and not doing their homework so what can to a wider audience be noble can to others be seen as just performative. In Craig DiLouie’s interesting tale One of Us we have an alternate 1980s America where mutant children are the focus and while I think it raised a lot of interesting ideas it soon fell into the most predictable of grooves too soon.

In the early 1960s the world saw a huge change in the population. A plague spread by sex that affected the birth of children. Many died but also many were born with strange physical deformities. As their number grew the US government took these unwanted children into Homes across the country. Taken away from their families to be taught to be valuable members of society. In one small town in Georgia though tensions are rising. In the Home a young boy has been murdered and the crime covered up; many of the children are finding they now realise they will never be free to live as they’d want. In the town a group of young teenagers with their own secrets and desires meets some of these mutants and must judge what will happen next. But a series of incidents create a domino effect leading to death and destruction that may never end.

The first third of One of Us I was mesmerised by. DiLouie creates a fascinating alternate timeline with the Plague as it is known acting in a similar but bigger way tot eh Thalidomide scandal of the 1960s but here the crux is with a nod to X-men that mutants are being created by this virus. We meet Enoch who looks like a wolfman, George otherwise known as Brain who looks like a beast but is the smartest person on Earth and Good with an upside-down face and an ability to finish any sentence. They’re a fascinating character you want to get to know. Teenagers in mind but with slowly developing skills and a realisation they’re not free. In the human community we met Amy who has a family secret she wants no one to know, Sally whose father uses the mutants to pick his crops and finds she thinks they are human and Jake the preacher’s son who finds a cause he wants to help. In a town full of long-standing fear and prejudice the young will find this is not a poplar course of action. We have a rising sense of tension.

There were some interesting ideas developing. Initially we get a sense of the moral panic teenagers often have about sex here has huge consequences and the US has changed with abortion being freely offered with people all worried they may have the genes that create what are cruelly referred to throughout as Creepers. The first third does a great job of setting up this world and we get to see the fracture lines getting ready to break. There are themes of people finding out how to rebel and the consequences of that for which teenage characters are well suited. But for me the second act seems to get much smaller in scope and while this story can be gritty and violent what we essentially have is a well-trodden morality play tale that cruelty creates cruelty. Those scenes are still very readable and the story combines horror and tragedy well but I had some issues with the wider approach for a book of the 21st century.

I don’t think the female characters in the book are well served by the storyline despite the initial focus on women’s rights raised in the book. One is doomed to be a tragic character where her purity and looks brings about destruction and another acts very strangely out of character halfway and gets sexually assaulted and her mother reacts quite coldly in a way that didn’t ring true beyond to progress the plot. On top of this we get regular references to Georgia’s racist past from Slave allegories in reference to the children farming cotton and even a Ku Kux Klan appearance. While I think this story is showing that these issues never go away just reinvent themselves when taking real issues of racism and having no major black characters in the book explaining their own experience bar some very minor side characters introduced in a couple of scenes simply for that purpose and for me this felt very hollow. All the big questions this book tries to raise it seems to then quietly drop for big action sequence or melodrama.

As such One of Us is an interesting read and has some very initially unusual ideas and approaches but it soon starts to run out of steam quite early on and defaults to the more obvious plot-points which I think make it overall more a lot less effective than it thinks it is. Worth a look.