October 2024

Chlorine
by Jade Song

I’m always looking for queer horror books that also include any sort of Asian or Asian American content, so when I saw this book come up on a friend’s social media, I seized the opportunity to read it by making it the choice for October’s Queer Horror Readalong. I had previously been tempted to find something more “Halloween” for this month’s pick, but this book just seemed so unusual and interesting.

I have very little interest in mermaids overall. When it comes to mythical or magical creatures, mermaids have always ranked pretty low on my list due to just general disinterest. I think a combination of the animated The Little Mermaid movie and my general fear of water just really turned me off the idea of them.

While I’m still not a mermaid fan overall, this book definitely presented these magical creatures in a very unique and original way that made this read both fascinating as well as disturbing.

Like most children in the first world, I grew up being forced into swimming lessons because apparently swimming is a “life skill”, no matter how much I resisted or complained. I’ve swum in a pool less than a handful of times over the last decade, and I’ve never been very good at it. For most things in my life, theory has always been stronger than execution.

But that chlorine smell is so strong and instantly takes me back to those childhood swimming lessons. Although the book itself doesn’t smell (although that would be awesome if that became a thing), the description of the chlorine smell and the swimming pool made all of those memories resurface - the tiny changing rooms, the painful suits and swim caps, the red rings around my eyes from my goggles, the cold and clammy tiled floor that was always so gross to walk on. It gave me this strange sensation while I was reading like I could actually feel and smell and hear what was happening around Ren, not just picture it in my mind. I felt immersed.

Spoiler Warning: The rest of the review contains details from the book some may consider spoilers.

Along with the freakishly realistic memories this book resurfaced for me about swimming as a child, Chlorine also raised a lot of strong feelings in me about the Asian immigrant experience. Although the details of Ren’s family and my own differ in many key ways (my family is Korean, hers is Chinese, for example) I felt a strong sense of validation and recognition when reading this book and reading the implicit racism and bias she and her mother faced due to their culture. I also really appreciated the way Song wrote about Ren’s own identity challenges and the way she had to constantly reconcile her Chinese identity with her new American one - it felt authentic, and there were small details sprinkled throughout the book (like Ren’s enjoyment of Chinese pop music and lack of knowledge for American pop-culture) that made me think “yes! that was me!” and feel acceptance. I felt seen while I was reading this book, not just as a queer teen who didn’t get what that meant, but also as a child of Asian immigrants trying to blend into a very white world.

The sapphic, teasing relationship between Ren and Cathy had me hooked. It was clear to me fairly early in the book how Cathy felt about Ren, and I was fascinated by Ren’s development as she grew older and became sexually active. Her relationship with a boy on her team spoke so clearly to me as a female teen trying to hide her queerness (and she doesn’t necessarily know it’s queerness she’s trying to hide), and it was depicted in such a realistic way from both Ren’s side and the boy’s. Cathy’s heterosexual relationship felt similar - a teen girl just desperately trying to keep up with her much cooler friend, doing whatever she could to fit in, no matter how miserable she was, how fake she was. Cathy’s letters to Ren were such a good insight into her side of the “relationship” between them, along with propelling the whole mystery of what happens to Ren, and as I said, it just felt genuine, like a teen girl just trying to be seen by somebody, anybody. The fact that their relationship from Ren’s point of view was so mysterious and unnamed, at times I couldn’t tell if she was just in denial, or if maybe she had ASD that made her so unaware of Cathy and other social cues, or if there was mental illness that played a factor (hence the obsessions). There was this semi-erotic buildup of the two of them finding each other and rediscovering each other, combined with the intimacy of swimming (bared skin, communal showering and changing, shaving parties, etc.), everything about the two of them felt so charged and I felt like I was on the tip of something and just constantly turning pages to try and reach it.

Ren’s relationship with her coach was also charged. So much of their relationship felt creepy, twisted, and inappropriate - I had moments where I wondered if my own bias created by true scandals of male coaches was influencing my perception. Nothing explicitly inappropriate ever seems to happen between them (at least, not in an overtly sexual way), which made me wonder if it was just so secretive that Ren can’t think of it, or if it’s so traumatic that Ren can’t even understand or remember it, or if anything is even happening between them at all. I mean, their relationship definitely crosses so many different lines and absolutely contributes to Ren’s declining mental health, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. It’s like, there’s no way he wasn’t doing other fucked up stuff to her too, right?

The body horror element of this book was painful - just the constant focus on Ren’s body, on Cathy’s body, and the other swimmers on the team, drove home just how much pressure is forced onto teens about their appearance and their weight. It’s an obsession by everybody, both individually and societally, and it just feels impossible to escape it. Athletes, whose success depends on their bodies, must feel so much of that pressure and judgment (I’m not an athlete, so I can only imagine what it must be like). Ren’s body is not only judged for its fitness as a swimmer, but also its subsequent lack of femininity - she can’t have both, and everybody seems to ultimately fault her for it. On top of that, Ren is internalizing her own body shame and displeasure at its appearance and function - having a mermaid tail would make her an elite swimmer as well as an ideal depiction of femininity (if we’re thinking Disney-style mermaids). The fact that her mermaid tail ends up destroying both of those images (just her image overall, really) is a grotesque, symbolic manifestation of this insane beauty standard. So many teens, whether it’s a teen athlete, a teen girl, a queer teen, or literally any teen, struggle with their self-esteem and cope through actions of self-harm. Cathy has food and Ren, and Ren has her physical pain - her training, her concussion, and her tail.

As a mythical creature, mermaids can be considered magical, ethereal, mysterious, and sexy. Ren embodies all of this, from her incredible swimming abilities to her various sexual encounters to her frequent stoicism and eventual disappearance. Parts of me hated her for being so difficult (I think she reminded me of me at times) and other parts of me were like, “oh yeah, if I were Cathy I’d be obsessed too. I get it.”.

This book feels like such a hidden gem that horror fans need to read.