You know when a book is quite odd, but all the better for it? That's something that I love about a good short novel too - the ability to get across a lot of strange information in a few hundred pages. And it's exactly what I got from The Seep, which not only deals with science fiction but also grief and identity.

What really struck me about this book were the pervasive themes of change and grief. I'm a cis woman, so I can only wait to be corrected if my interpretations are incorrect here (and please do correct me if I am making any incorrect assumptions).

Trina has fought hard to be comfortable in her own body, and assumes that her new life under the alien The Seep is a happy one, but when her wife Deeba decides to remove the painful memories of her own past and to be reborn as a baby in this utopian world (and asks Trina to be her carer and mother) Trina refuses. Instead of celebrating Deeba's decision and transformation, she instead reacts with grief and despair, because she has lost her wife, her partner, her lover and her companion.

Blaming The Seep - this apparently benevolent alien force who just wants its humans to be happy - for her own misery, Trina sets out to destroy it. The Seep is also quite a fascinating entity. In order to make humans happy, and to reduce conflict, it allows humans to cross boundaries of race, culture and image by changing their appearance wholly. But Trina, as a Black, trans, Native-American, with clear personal identities, is shocked to find a friend and performance artist, whom she always thought was Black, was actually a white man wearing the skin of his dead lover.

There are so many possible allegories and interpretations, from hiding identity behind the power of technology (ie the internet), to the grief associated with both losing and gaining an identity, to the need for culture and past experiences to shape who we are today. And, for a woman who has fought to change her physical appearance to match her identity long before The Seep arrived, Trina feels her own struggle, and her own personal identity being cheapened and eroded.

This is precisely what I love about short novels; somehow there is more to interpret and more to appreciate because the themes and issues are so much broader, but evoke so much feeling. There's also a lot here that is very vague, but I can cope with that.

*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I went into this knowing nothing about it other than it was something to do with an alien force and that it is weird. It definitely is that!

The idea of The Seep, the alien element that effectively makes humans immortal, connects everyone to this alien power and allows for fantastical transformations, is brilliant. This concept is the thing that I enjoyed most about the book. I also liked that the protagonist is transgender and although mentions her identity, the book does not make it a huge point of the book.

However, I found the plot to be non-existent. This is much more a book that explores a concept and leaves it at that, which is hit-or-miss personally. In this book, it didn’t work for me. The concept was strong and the tackling of real-life issues was interesting but the lack of plot left me feeling completely underwhelmed by the end.

2 out of 5 stars!

Grief is one of the most horrible emotions we will face in our lives. Death is complex and creates such a fundamental change as people we love are no longer there it can impact us in so many ways – anger, rash behaviour, or depression. Saying we have to move on isn’t like watching one President turn into another it’s trying to rebuild your entire world with some key parts of your life absent. In The Seep by Chana Porter we have one of the strangest but creative science fiction tales I’ve read in a while but one where grief for the past and moving on are key.

Trina and her girlfriend Deeba are having a dinner party when the world as they know it ends; in some ways thinking it was well overdue as we’re in such a bad place of hatred, global conflict and environmental collapse. But as often is the case the world continues. The Human race has been merged with an entity knows as The Seep – who pass into organisms by water or bodily fluids. Mentally The Seep promotes joy, peace and being chilled out but it also makes the world power – you can transform your appearance, enter high states of consciousness at will, never age or die unless you want to. The world knows peace, humans actually grasp the concept of shared empathy and moves from a capitalist economy to more communal style living. The world is …. relaxed. But Trina and Deeba are now married and in their fifties. Deeba is very swept up into the Seep community while Trina has held back. For a long time Deeba has been dealing with a pain in her life she no longer can handle and she announces she wishes to be effectively ‘reborn’ change state to that of a child and in the process lose all her memories. Trina is devastated and betrayed. Five years later she finally has to confront where her life is now going.

We tend to think of alien stories as either invasion (evil aliens) or helpful. I think The Seep is more ambivalent and is more a framing device for how Trina is coping now that the love of her life effectively no longer exists. The Seep has taken away all the usual distractions and pressures of life, so the community is puzzled – why is Trina not moving on? Effectively for those who fully embraced the Seep then painful memories are supposedly gone – everyone feels joy for Deeba starting over. Trina though has held back. As such when we meet Trina after Deeba’s decision she lives in a decaying messy apartment; barely working and at threat of a communal tenement evicting her. She is also furious that people are trying to help.

At this point we go a few days journey with Trina and this strange dreamy landscape. A land of bars that have talking bears working in them; nightclubs where all can share the same experience and coffee cups where once drank you can eat them. The plot is fairly simple – Trina meets a young man from a compound where The Seep was never used but he has rebelled and seeks a whole new life. She however is worried that he may eb under the spell of an ex-friend named Horizon who Trina is aware is constantly pretending to be someone he is not. This gives Trina impetus and a cause to focus on while also meaning The Seep itself has a chance to interact with her and challenge why she is acting this way.

The Seep feels a more conceptual story so those seeking either a huge adventure or a loo into the science of the Seep will be disappointed this is more a tale in the style of Jeff Vandermeer - a trip through the weirder side of life. But I loved the dreamlike flow of the story moving from key scenes to key scenes without too much in between. It reflects that under the Seep the little things aren’t important anymore but I think it’s a great device for challenging how humans and death interact. In the story we meet three characters all having trouble moving on – Trina who has lost her wife forever is really classic grief and importantly she is showing that while grief isn’t healthy it can still be a necessary part of humanity to go through to find out what we can do next with our lives that an immortal entity just can’t get their heads around – it what still makes us human. Horizon however has made himself into a deceased lover’s likeness – lost himself in the process and as the tale develops and is ever more throwing himself into the Seep for his own dangerous ends. Finally, we meet YD a bar owner and friend of Trina who is very old and yet continually worried over where Trina is heading. Someone who is holding back on death because she is scared for someone else. This tale makes each face their fears and for me is the real heart and highlight of the story.

The Seep is ambitious, and I think that is always to be praised. It possibly is trying to do too much for the length it is (one key character vanishes – although we meet them again in a bonus short story in this edition) but I really enjoyed the emotional overload it accomplished. This was like a frenetic punk song full of energy and yet also emotional pain. It washes over you fast but leaves echoes that haunt you for a while. Well worth a look.

The Seep is something of a strange book, a story that centres on one woman's journey through a strange new future, but really takes a look at human nature, at what people would be like if all of their dreams and desires were catered to, and asks readers to recognise the flaws in our world today through that lens.

The story sees a world where humans made contact with a sentient species called The Seep, a species that holds no physical form itself, but by bonding to us, to humans and animals, and seemingly any object, they're able to not only communicate with us and experience the universe from our perspective, but can allow humans to experience anything they want to.

We follow Trina, a woman whose life is altered by the Seep, though not necessarily for the better. Even early on we get the sense that whilst those around her have embraced the Seep, allowed themselves to fall in love with the new type of lifestyle it allows, to give themselves over to a life where the pursuit of pleasure is the main driving force, she's not completely sold on the whole thing. Over the course of her story we see this shift even further when her wife, Deeba, chooses to use the body altering abilities of the Seep to let her regress into a child, to allow her to essentially be born again and experience life fresh and new, without any memory of who she used to be. This leaves Trina alone in a pit of depression and pain, in a world where such thoughts and feelings are supposed to have been eliminated.

Whilst the narrative seems to make this loss of Deeba the main focal point of Trina's dislike for the Seep, of her feelings of isolation and pain, I saw things slightly differently. You see, Trina is a trans woman. This doesn't really come up much in the story, because it's not really that relevant to her journey or experience. This isn't a story about being trans, she's simply just a woman who is trans on this journey. But, there is something that happens fairly early on that stood out like a beacon to me, and I think is the real underlying reason that Trina has problems with the Seep.

When talking to a friend of hers, years after the Seep came to Earth, she discovers that the face he wears, the person she's know for years, isn't his real face; that it is the face of a lost lover of his. When Trina learns that this means the man before her wasn't born a person of colour, that he's essential changed races, it upsets her on a fairly deep level. It's here that he makes a flippant comment that she must have used the Seep to allow her to have transitioned in some way, and seemingly compares the two things. This obviously gets to Trina, but doesn't get given much time in the book because it's very quickly after this that Deeba chooses to become a child again, and that becomes Trina's main focus.

But, here's what I picked up, the thing that I think shapes a huge part of Trina as a character. This new world created by the Seep allows people to alter themselves seemingly at will, letting them turn themselves into babies, different people, and even animals; and it's all treated completely normal. It's looked at as fine and acceptable because its all part of this huge human wide experience of being allowed to do and feel whatever makes you happy. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone it seems to all be fair game. But I don't think Trina completely sees it this way.

Now, I'm drawing on my own experiences here, of my own journey as a trans woman; but I think the Seep really bothers Trina because until it came and changed the world she had to fight every single day to be herself. Transitioning has often been sensationalised in the press, and there are a lot of misconceptions about it out there, but it's about being who you really are, about being the person you know you are on the inside but that no one else can see.

Transition is a really hard journey, and you have to fight for it every step of the way. You have people who tell you you're wrong when you first come out, people who'll try to brush away your feelings by telling you you're confused or mistaken. They'll insist that you're not trans, you just must be gay, or that maybe you could just wear women's clothing at home on the weekends. You get told that you're a fetishist, getting some kind of sexual thrill out of it, and that it's not a real, valid thing to want to change your body to reflect who you are. You'll be judged by friends, family, colleagues, strangers, everyone you meet. You'll lose people. You'll have to fight with doctors who try to dismiss your feelings, be forced to go to therapy to prove your own thoughts and feelings are real, often with invasive and degrading questions thrown at you. You'll have to go on years long waiting lists for treatments, or be forced to pay huge amounts out of pocket. And even if you get through all of that and finally get a chance to be you, you get demonised in the media, campaigned against by bigots, and will feel like a target every time you step outside your home.

I've lived through that, I think most trans people have. To be trans is to constantly fight to be seen as who you are, to be accepted as a real, valid person, and to not be dismissed as something less than human. But then the Seep comes along and suddenly everyone can alter themselves, everyone can change the way they look, the type of person they are. Suddenly being trans is nothing out of the ordinary, because anyone can be anything, and all that fighting and all that pain you've been through amount to nothing as those people who once judged you and ridiculed you, and made your life hell are giving themselves different colour skin, or antlers, or changing the colour of their eyes. And I think that is the real reason why Trina has a problem with the Seep.

I might be wrong about this, it's just my interpretation, but this is a story about a trans woman finding a world where anyone can change and be anything difficult, written by a trans person, so I think that there might be something to it. It's not just a story about someone having to come to terms with loss, or about finding their place in an ever changing and shifting world, but a story about coming to terms with all that internalised pain and torture you've had to go through and learning to let it all go.

Trina's journey will probably mean something very different to people who read this and aren't part of the trans community, but I don't think that they'll have a worse experience with the book because of it. It's still a story about learning to cope with grief, about learning to see the wonder and beauty in the world, and it presents readers with this wonderfully bizarre kind of utopia that I think we all kind of want our world to be; a place where anger and hate get left behind, where happiness and the pursuit of it are the main driving forces in the world.

The Seep is a story that will mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me I saw it as a story about hope, about fighting through your pain and depression and finding the things in the world that bring you joy, that make your life feel happy, and fighting for that with everything you have. It's a book that spoke to me about the amazing power of humanity, of the strength we have inside us, and the hope of a better tomorrow.

This arc was kindly provided by Titan Books, via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

TW: racism, transphobia, depression, suicidal thoughts, drug and alcohol abuse, grief & death

3.5 stars

I needed a bit of time to think about this book. When I first finished it, I found it to be strange and I rated it averagely with 3 stars. It isn't a negative rating by any means, I just thought it wasn't my type of book. However, as the days went by my mind kept coming back to this story, to Trina and her grief.

The Seep is a speculative novella that begins with an alien invasion though not as one would imagine it. It's a "soft invasion" by The Seep and everything becomes connected with each other. The Seep's only purpose is to understand humans and to make them happy. The world as we know it with its societal rules, economy, morals, it becomes redundant.

Trina, our main character, and her wife Deeba cheerfully adapt to this new reality where everything is possible. One day, Deeba realizes she wants to be reborn and start over in this world of The Seep, without the traumas of her childhood. As Deeba moves on, Trina is left to her grief.

As the story evolves, The Seep provides the reader with difficult conversations about what holds a society together, what it means to be human, our mortality, and the meaning of life. For Trina who has lived the before and the after, a life with and without The Seep, it's an internal struggle in search of a purpose. After the loss of her wife, Trina has no idea how to live for herself in a world where nothing is as valued as before. Or where everything is valued, though it amounts to nothing.

It was interesting to see this dystopian perspective to a world where there are no social barriers, no worries over a mortgage or a student loan. It's a world where people just do whatever they want, where everyone is connected even to Nature itself. A world where you can change your appearance or become a baby again.

You close the pages with permanent questions and recurring internal discussions. While it does not have a satisfying conclusion to our inquiries, it is undoubtedly an impactful book.

Trigger warnings: violence, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, racism, grief, death

This is one of those books that I'm struggling to review. I really liked it. It was interesting, the worldbuilding was fascinating and very well-developed in only 200 or so pages. But it was also so strange that most of my favourite parts are spoilers. The Seep is a character driven piece, a kind of existential journey for our main character Trina (a butch middle-aged transwoman who I absolutely adore). If you're looking for high action, this might not be for you, but I found myself absolutely glued to Trina's story.

Set a few decades into the future, this book is nonetheless an unrecognisable world because of the titular The Seep. The Seep are an invasion force like none other. No *fighting* or *violence* of course. Just a slow, creeping influence until humans aren't willing to live without them. There's no scarcity, no illness and violence like war has been eradicated. The Seep has given humans the perfect quality of life. It also allows humans to choose to be reborn, which is exactly what Trina's beloved wife Deeba chooses to do. What follows is a story of Trina's grief and loss, a quest for revenge and to protect a stranger that she'd stumbled across one day.

You'll fall in love with Trina, like I did, and feel her emotions viscerally through Chana Porter's incredible prose. It's a fascinating challenge on the idea of utopia, and how we are shaped as people through our negative experiences as well as our positive ones. To me it felt like a celebration of individuality, and a celebration of struggles too - it made me feel proud of what I've survived in my life and how that has made me who I am. The ending was a little confusing to me, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it, and highly recommend this to anyone who likes sci-fi and spec-fic. I'll absolutely be looking out for more of Chana Porter's work.

DRC provided by Titan Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Representation: trans lesbian Native American Jewish protagonist, Black Japanese gay deuteragonist, queer tritagonists.

Content Warning: transphobia, racism, suicide, alcoholism, death.

The Seep by Chana Porter is a marvellous tale of human existence, narrated through a science-fiction lens.

The Seep, an alien entity, peacefully invades Earth trough water and bodily fluids, a big part of the world is contaminated by them. The human connected to The Seep are left with the ability to only feel joy, love and peace and morph however they please.

The fifty-year-old Trina and her wife Deeba blissfully spend years under The Seep’s influence, doing everything they can think of, until Deeba’s last wish becomes more and more a topic of dispute between the spouses.

After her wife eventually leaves her to become a child again, to be parented again and lose all those scars that marked her life, Trina is depressed. She wallows in her grief while the gardens and the house fall in disarray and her neighbours complaint. A community member is sent to verbally warn her about how her actions, or better, inactions, have been affecting the community. She takes her medicine bag and decides to leave it all behind.

This decision will take her on a quest both physical and emotional.

Something I often found myself thinking during my reading experience was what I would do if I were in that world. Would I give in to The Seep and join their blissful and worriless way of living? Or would I rather live my life through the hardships in store for me? And while I would love to undertake Deeba’s same choice, I am not sure I would be able to leave everything else and everyone behind. Moreover, I found quite upsetting what Deeba asked of Trina. I thought that asking her to be her parent was somewhat insensitive.

To conclude, I really liked this book. It is wonderfully crafted and such a pleasurable read, but because of its beauty I almost regret its length.

A short story from the boy’s point of view was also included in my review copy. I thought it was a nice addition to the book. It expanded on the way of life The Seep contributed in creating.

This was such a weird tale and I absolutely loved it! It tells the story of Trina, a trans woman and her wife, Deeba. Following the arrival of an alien species, death becomes obsolete and body modifications the norm. Deeba decides to become a baby again with the assistance of the Seep and Trina must live with the consequences. This is a gorgeous exploration of what true love means and whether happiness is possible when there is no hardship. In such a short book, Chana Porter creates a really evocative narrative full of weird imagery and bizarre situations while still, at its heart, it is a discussion about what is important to us and the ways in which the people we love can affect us so deeply. This is not a book for everyone, but for me, it was pretty perfect!
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I'm finding it hard to sum up my thoughts on The Seep - my opinions about and relationship with it changed as the narrative did, and the experience of reading the first and second halves of the book felt quite distinct in some ways. I also forgot that this edition had a further short story at the end, and so was taken completely by surprise by the ending.
However, The Seep contained some really interesting ideas, and some resonant meditations on the human condition, and grief in particular. I found myself quite affected by some sections - whereas I initially found the switch from realism to surreal and back again quite jarring, this only heightened the emotional impact.
The book didn't always hit the mark - there were some aspects which I would have liked to have seen developed further, as many loose ends were left hanging (although the new short story at the end did alleviate some of this), and greater investigation of the world building would have been interesting to me.
That said, I can see myself returning to The Seep again, and getting even more from it on the re-read. It was an enthralling and mind-bending reading experience.

The Seep is a weird and wonderful science fiction novel about the softest alien invasion ever, but brings up questions of consent, grief, free will, and what makes us human. I absolutely loved Trina as a character and really appreciated seeing her work through her grief over the loss of her wife and her clinging to the old days.

The Seep feels like a fresh and new alien invasion story, peppered with both sorrow and humor, and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend this highly to anyone who loves Jeff VanderMeer's weirder sci-fi.

It has been a few days now since I read The Seep and, in all honesty, I still don’t know exactly how I feel about it. It was a well-written book, and I did, in some part, like it (3 stars is a testament to that). But otherwise? I got nothing.

The Seep imagines an alien lifeforce called The Seep, which sort of invades earth, and really just wants to make humans happy, to be helpful. While being a little creepy, to be sure, because this involves such things as taking other people’s faces, never growing old, or turning yourself back into a child, if one so wished. The latter of which being exactly what our main character’s wife has just done.

One thing I liked a lot about this book was that it really was just the sort of story you could see being told about a cishet white man, but none of the characters were cishet white men. If this sounds an odd way to phrase it, well, it’s more about seeing characters who often get pushed to the side in these sorts of things front and centre. And zero fuss made over any of it.

As for the story itself, however, that’s where I’m a little… unsure, let’s say. It’s one of those ones I rated for the writing rather than the story. I neither loved it nor hated it. I’m not even at all sure I could say I properly liked it, that’s how undecided I am on how I felt. Don’t get me wrong — it wasn’t bad. The average rating and positive reviews will attest to that. I’m just not sure it was the book for me.

But don’t let my indecision put you off this book. Something that’s not my cup of tea may very well be yours, so if this sounds like it might interest you, just ignore me and pick it up anyway.