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Cuckoo
Gregory Summers knows who he is. Greg is an ordinary man in a mundane job with a contented wife and a future snug enough to struggle for. Greg knows the answers to the questions.
Except, one day he doesn't. That day he returns home to discover that his wife no longer recognized him at all, that his wife is in fact married to another man called Greg Summers.
Perhaps it is an elaborate hoax, a conspiracy to unnerve and derange him. Yet that wouldn't account for the extraordinarily vivid flashbacks to his early years, or the stray memories that come from nowhere and belong to an entirely separate man. A man called Jameson.
One of these men is a lie, and neither wish it to be he.
On the run from a creature that cannot exist, his comfortable truths irrevocably shattered, Greg finds his knowledge of the world suddenly questionable. If he doesn't know himself, what can he trust himself to know?
Greg Summers and Richard Jameson are about to discover that the fight to survive is all in the mind.
- GenresHorror
CD-ROM
First published January 31, 2000
About the author
Richard Wright
28 books50 followersAn author of strange, dark fictions currently returned to Glasgow in Scotland after several years in India.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 20, 2012
Greg Summers is nothing special. Very little about his life could be classified as extraordinary. His job, while stable, isn't leading him on the path to fame and fortune. His marriage to his beautiful wife Jennifer is also stable but a little on the tame side. The only excitement he's been wringing from his existence is a torrid affair with the sultry Georgina. He knows it's wrong but as long as he can maintain his happily stable marriage and keep loving his wife, he feels he's doing ok.
Then things start to change and spiral out of control. He makes a reservation at a hotel with his mistress only to find that the name he gave the concierge isn't in the register. Surely some mistake? That in and of itself isn't so bad but it's when he returns home only to be confronted by the fact that his wife Jennifer doesn't recognize him and is in fact living with and married to another man by the EXACT same name as he that things start to go downhill, and fast. The man that claims to be Jennifer's true husband is anything but. It's something....other. His situation isn't helped when memories of a man name Jameson start to invade his psyche...and the results of these unwanted memories lead him to bouts of extreme agony. Greg Summers is hell bent on finding the answers and as he goes down the rabbit hole, he's not going to like what he finds.
"If I'm not me, then who the hell am I?"
That's a quote from Total Recall which happens to be based on 'We'll Remember It For You Wholesale' by the late, great Phillip K. Dick. Cuckoo is that type of story. It's a story about a man who's prodding along, doing the day to day, only to find out that his life may or may not be a complete fabrication. It also happens to be aptly named. Told through Greg's perspective, Wright brings the reader along on a wild ride into madness. Where does Greg Summers end and Richard Jameson start? Why can't he remember anything? Why is some malevolent outside focused on making him suffer? Is he going crazy or is he completely insane? Will someone PLEASE believe him?!? Because of the close perspective and Wright's lyrical writing style, you'll feel the ebb and flow of Greg Summer's psyche shattering as his questions only lead to more questions.
I'm not terrified by horror novels. I've been grossed out, disturbed, and disgusted by them, but never truly frightened. I wasn't 'scared' by Cuckoo but I will say that there was a certain creeping dread that I felt during certain passages of the book. There are several sequences when the anxiety Greg Summers feels reached off the page and ran its icy fingers down my back. Write is very good at sucking you into the story and making you feel the characters dread and confusion and fear.
Featuring disturbing imagery and the frantic thoughts of main character as he experiences them, Cuckoo is dark and sinister. There are no happy endings here. Write tortures his characters and he does it well. He's a great voice in the world of horror. He does get a little verbose at times and the ending goes into some weird territory but those are minor quibbles. The former is his style and the latter is oftentimes the nature of this type of horror story. Not everything is always clearly answered but that's ok. The story is satisfying and it's different.
Recommended.
Then things start to change and spiral out of control. He makes a reservation at a hotel with his mistress only to find that the name he gave the concierge isn't in the register. Surely some mistake? That in and of itself isn't so bad but it's when he returns home only to be confronted by the fact that his wife Jennifer doesn't recognize him and is in fact living with and married to another man by the EXACT same name as he that things start to go downhill, and fast. The man that claims to be Jennifer's true husband is anything but. It's something....other. His situation isn't helped when memories of a man name Jameson start to invade his psyche...and the results of these unwanted memories lead him to bouts of extreme agony. Greg Summers is hell bent on finding the answers and as he goes down the rabbit hole, he's not going to like what he finds.
"If I'm not me, then who the hell am I?"
That's a quote from Total Recall which happens to be based on 'We'll Remember It For You Wholesale' by the late, great Phillip K. Dick. Cuckoo is that type of story. It's a story about a man who's prodding along, doing the day to day, only to find out that his life may or may not be a complete fabrication. It also happens to be aptly named. Told through Greg's perspective, Wright brings the reader along on a wild ride into madness. Where does Greg Summers end and Richard Jameson start? Why can't he remember anything? Why is some malevolent outside focused on making him suffer? Is he going crazy or is he completely insane? Will someone PLEASE believe him?!? Because of the close perspective and Wright's lyrical writing style, you'll feel the ebb and flow of Greg Summer's psyche shattering as his questions only lead to more questions.
I'm not terrified by horror novels. I've been grossed out, disturbed, and disgusted by them, but never truly frightened. I wasn't 'scared' by Cuckoo but I will say that there was a certain creeping dread that I felt during certain passages of the book. There are several sequences when the anxiety Greg Summers feels reached off the page and ran its icy fingers down my back. Write is very good at sucking you into the story and making you feel the characters dread and confusion and fear.
Featuring disturbing imagery and the frantic thoughts of main character as he experiences them, Cuckoo is dark and sinister. There are no happy endings here. Write tortures his characters and he does it well. He's a great voice in the world of horror. He does get a little verbose at times and the ending goes into some weird territory but those are minor quibbles. The former is his style and the latter is oftentimes the nature of this type of horror story. Not everything is always clearly answered but that's ok. The story is satisfying and it's different.
Recommended.
January 10, 2012
When you pick up a book titled Cuckoo, unless you know before opening to page one that it's a horror novel, you are not likely expecting a darkly disturbing and mind-bending freakshow. Then again, maybe you are, and if you are then I'd have to say it's because you're familiar with Richard Wright's work.
Gregory Summers is a grade-A prick. He's married man with a loving wife at home, but he's compelled to cheat on her, and it's during one of his nights out with his mistress that his world is turned upside-down. He takes her to a hotel and finds there is no reservation under his usual fake name, or even his real name for that matter. Things get progressively stranger from there, because when he finally returns his home his wife is with another man--a man named Gregory Summers. It seems that everyone in the world is convinced that Gregory Summers is another man entirely, the very man who is now living his life, Stewart Jameson.
Actually, there is one person who seems to recognize Greg for who he really is, and that happens to be his mistress, who was with him the night things started going very, very wrong. With her, and the friendly hotel manager who finds himself compelled to believe Greg's fantastical story through a couple of key observances, Greg strives to find out the truth of who is targeting him and how they've managed to steal his life away from him.
This all might sound rather quaint by horror standards, less horrific and more Hitchcockian in tone perhaps, but the interludes that occur every few chapters or so really make the weird feel weirder and the dark feel darker. A man is encased in a tank of fluid that is eating away at him, and the pieces of him that are deteriorating are being consumed. Given the psychological nature of the story, it doesn't become terribly clear how these scenes are connected to the main storyline, but when they do it adds to the gruesomeness of the novel.
It took a while for me to get into this story. It might have been due to disliking the character of Greg and not sympathizing with him, but as I kept with it and the stakes became higher and the mystery starting to really ramp up, I found myself getting into more. The horrific elements came sporadically and suddenly, which offered a jarring effect as I read. Maybe intentional, maybe not, but I thought it was pretty effective either way. There was some passages that felt a bit drawn out, usually when there was a lull in the otherwise tense mood of the book, but the psychotropic elements of the story kept me engaged.
I'm not going to give anything away more than that, but I will say the ending wasn't as impactful as I'd expected, or rather my reaction was more ambivalent. I imagine readers will have varied opinions with that and the story as a whole. It's a creepy tale with a twist on the whole lost identity trope I found refreshingly original. Worth taking a chance on if you go for those kinds of psychological horror stories.
Gregory Summers is a grade-A prick. He's married man with a loving wife at home, but he's compelled to cheat on her, and it's during one of his nights out with his mistress that his world is turned upside-down. He takes her to a hotel and finds there is no reservation under his usual fake name, or even his real name for that matter. Things get progressively stranger from there, because when he finally returns his home his wife is with another man--a man named Gregory Summers. It seems that everyone in the world is convinced that Gregory Summers is another man entirely, the very man who is now living his life, Stewart Jameson.
Actually, there is one person who seems to recognize Greg for who he really is, and that happens to be his mistress, who was with him the night things started going very, very wrong. With her, and the friendly hotel manager who finds himself compelled to believe Greg's fantastical story through a couple of key observances, Greg strives to find out the truth of who is targeting him and how they've managed to steal his life away from him.
This all might sound rather quaint by horror standards, less horrific and more Hitchcockian in tone perhaps, but the interludes that occur every few chapters or so really make the weird feel weirder and the dark feel darker. A man is encased in a tank of fluid that is eating away at him, and the pieces of him that are deteriorating are being consumed. Given the psychological nature of the story, it doesn't become terribly clear how these scenes are connected to the main storyline, but when they do it adds to the gruesomeness of the novel.
It took a while for me to get into this story. It might have been due to disliking the character of Greg and not sympathizing with him, but as I kept with it and the stakes became higher and the mystery starting to really ramp up, I found myself getting into more. The horrific elements came sporadically and suddenly, which offered a jarring effect as I read. Maybe intentional, maybe not, but I thought it was pretty effective either way. There was some passages that felt a bit drawn out, usually when there was a lull in the otherwise tense mood of the book, but the psychotropic elements of the story kept me engaged.
I'm not going to give anything away more than that, but I will say the ending wasn't as impactful as I'd expected, or rather my reaction was more ambivalent. I imagine readers will have varied opinions with that and the story as a whole. It's a creepy tale with a twist on the whole lost identity trope I found refreshingly original. Worth taking a chance on if you go for those kinds of psychological horror stories.
June 19, 2012
Not my usual genre but was a book swap on holiday on Bali - only book in English I could find on the day. Well written and not totally immersed in sci-fi speak. Quite enjoyed it!
June 15, 2014
A fun horror story that kept me guessing, with just the right amount of violence and gore for my tastes.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews