H.P. Lovecraft said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Horror finds its roots in folklore, where cautionary tales are used to seed fear in the reader—to keep them from wandering off, or living too carelessly, or trusting too willingly. Over time, the villains of so many horror stories have shifted. Instead of monsters, ghouls, and the ethereal unknown, as of late horror has found fertile soil in the tangible. The Boogieman takes a backseat to structural monstrosities that seem to grow bigger with each day, and rather than allowing the unknown to be representative of societal dangers or woes, today we see these horrors addressed head-on. In her debut novel Lakewood, Megan Giddings paints a surreal and terrifying picture of a medical trial gone wrong, but grounds the story in the very real everyday horror of racial and economic inequity.
Lakewood opens with Lena Johnson, a young college student facing the reality of her family’s medical debt after the passing of her grandmother. Lena’s mother, Deziree, suffers from various ailments, none of which the doctors seem to have a handle on. As their debt continues to grow, their access to good healthcare professionals becomes more limited. When a letter arrives inviting Lena to participate in a secret research trial, complete with compensation and health benefits for her and her family, it feels too good to be true. Here we see Lena go unsure and uneasy about the prospect. Giddings plants the seeds of dread slowly and deliberately, lining the edges with humor as she goes. In the end Lena decides that “doing a research study didn’t sound any worse than the Craigslist ads she had been looking at—a secretary position for a notoriously terrible cable company, openings at a new, “innovative” maid service where you had to dress as a French maid and say your name was Simone at every house you cleaned.”
During Lena’s orientation to Lakewood, she is greeted by a heightened sense of normalcy. Welcome to Orientation is written in bubble letters. There is a box of bagels and small packets of cream cheese. The presenter says the study is for the greater good, that the United States is a symbol of goodwill— “You give of yourself to make your country a better place. You give of yourself to keep us safe.” As Lena is accepted into the study, meets other participants, and begins her life at Lakewood, there is a slow-burn tension of what is to come and what the study is really about. Giddings juxtaposes the dreamlike state of the trial—pills that alter mind and body, drops that change Lena’s eye color, isolation exercises in the woods—with the sharpened realism of the mundane, from humorously odd office culture, to texts between friends, to warming memories of her grandmother. The reader is at once close to Lena, understanding her wants and her needs as she moves deeper into Lakewood, and simultaneously thrown by the strangeness and the horror of tests. It is through deep connection to character that we suffer the greatest moments of fear. The novel is incredibly successful in posing questions regarding inequity and how historically and presently, inequity has and will continue to result in exploitation.
As Lena dives deeper into the study and is tested mentally, physically, and emotionally, she becomes curious about other research studies. What has happened? How have under-privileged communities been used, hurt, and exploited? How does she fit into that history? Above all, what is Lakewood truly after? As she befriends other participants, she is warned several times to keep her head down and stop asking questions. Charlie, the most vocal of her fellow participants, tells Lena that everyone has their reasons for being there. Like Lena, most participants involvement is driven by debt, healthcare, the promise of a new, previously unattainable path.
And this comes to the heart of the novel. The horrors of the trials aside, Giddings pulls back the curtain and fully explores the issue of inequity and the exploitation that imbalance can grant. During one questionnaire Lena is shown a video of a man strangling her—a moment she has no recollection of. She is reminded of a lesson from her grandmother where she told Lena to save her virginity for someone who respected her and her body. “Her grandmother had said it was better to love your body as much as possible before letting someone else have access to it.” Giddings embeds this memory, like many throughout the novel, in between survey questions meant for the study as if to illustrate that her grandmother had been preparing her all along for a society that would continuously devalue her humanity. The more Lena endures and uncovers, the more we question to whom the greater good applies. Could any scientific advancement be worth the damage caused to black and brown bodies? Should economic standing dictate your agency to your own body?
Arriving in an era where a harsh light has been cast upon the grave inequities of our country, Megan Giddings’ debut is at once imaginative and terrifying. It is both a product of our history and our present moment. The novel begs sobering questions: how much is it worth to put yourself and your body through unknown terror, and what if you have no other choice?
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Megan Giddings’ fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. She attended University of Michigan and earned her MFA from Indiana University. The opening chapters of Lakewood received a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for feminist fiction. She lives in Indiana.
