Lakewood by Megan Giddings is an American Horror Story

Before I begin my review, I’d like to thank Ms. Saunders for generously giving me this book. I wish I had taken better care of it. Without you I would never have encountered it, and it really expanded my horizons!

I’m not normally a fan of horror in fiction. Lakewood by Megan Giddings is the first horror/thriller novel I can recall reading. I don’t know how closely the book hews to the tropes of its genre or whether it’s a ‘proper’ thriller at all. It disappeared a few hours after I finished reading it, so I can’t exactly comb through it and pick out the most atmospheric quotes. Then again, disappearing books are pretty spooky.

The reviews I watched in advance for this book claimed it was terrifying. It was horror because it was real, because the US government really had exploited people for years in horrible projects like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Project Stargate. For the first half of the book, I was frozen in terror as Giddings patiently revealed the main character: Lena is a black millennial whose mother, Deziree, suffers debilitating migraines, and in order to pay the family’s medical debts she volunteers for a sketchy government experiment in the fictional Michigan town of Lakewood. In fact, the first half of Lakewood isn’t grotesque or ugly at all, merely thick with dread. I read it all in one sitting because I kept expecting something terrible to happen.

I sort of expected the horrible parts of the plot to be satisfying or to wrap up neatly or at least to explain what’s happening in the eponymous town. But unlike the creepy white observers whose omnipresence leads to some of Lakewood’s best scenes, Giddings isn’t concerned with the disgusting details of the experiment. Instead she focuses on its human costs; Lena, her mother and dead grandmother each have a mysterious tie to the US Government’s legacy of scientific exploitation, and only by understanding their history can they put their common demons to rest.

The world requires a book like this, and I require this book more than I like it. The Tuskegee syphilis study and other unethical experiments are real American horror stories. It makes perfect sense to retell it as a thriller. I just don’t understand thrillers, and now I can’t even find the goshdarn book!

I won’t forget it, though. The name “Lakewood” summons a chilling story from my own past.

A few years ago I spent a month at a German-immersion summer camp whose gift shop doesn’t sell postcards. Twenty years before the village opened in 1961, the Nazis had forced Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz to write to their families about how wonderful their new residence was. The letters’ authors were murdered and their addresses were collected for further atrocities. Because the name of the fictional location was so generic and idyllic-sounding, the founders of a wholesome little immersion program in Bemidji had accidentally chosen it for their flagship village. When a French village opened, then a Spanish one—there are twenty now—the creators copied and pasted the original title until the woods of northern Minnesota were dotted with identically-named projects.

That name? Waldsee.