Book Report: The Seep

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Book Report: The Seep by Chana Porter

Synopsis

The Seep is an alien invasion story— but that isn't what the story is about. A bodiless alien entity called The Seep invades the planet by infiltrating water supplies. Through contact with liquid, humans can commune with it. It acts like a psychedelic drug, if psychedelic drugs made you feel happy in exchange for learning about humanity.

"The Seep loved giving you everything you wanted, in exchange for information about being human."

The Seep creates a utopia, and with Seeptech, anything is possible. But the real story is that of Trina FastHorse Goldberg Oneka, a transgender woman who has thrived under The Seep with her wife of 25 years, Deeba. One day, Deeba decides to become a baby again and start life anew, something that Seeptech makes possible. But this leaves Trina alone. Devastated, she becomes an alcoholic and lets her life fall to ruin until a chance encounter with a boy from the Compound— a place that rejects The Seep and is entirely isolated from the rest of the world —and decides that she should be his guide through this new world.

"The boy from the bubble and the woman who refused to move on."

When the boy is taken under the wing of Trina's former friend and more recent enemy, Horizon Line, she decides to go on a quest to save the boy from the influence of both Horizon Line and The Seep. And in that quest, she starts to save herself. The Seep is an alien invasion story— but that isn't what the story is about. It's a story of loss, grief, healing, and overall, letting go.

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Plot Summary - Spoilers!

Part One - The Softest Invasion

The story starts the night before the end of the world— the night before the alien entity known as The Seep invades Earth. Trina and Deeba do the only thing they can think to do when tomorrow holds such uncertainty— they hold a dinner party.

Skipping forward twenty-five years, the invasion of Earth by The Seep did not end the world, but it did end life as it was known. The Seep created a utopia where capitalism, war, poverty, and all the negative things in society are erased. The Seep gives humans everything they could ever want. Humans can connect to The Seep and become its symbionts by consuming it through fluids. This connection has a psychedelic effect, allowing people to feel more joyful and at peace than ever before. The Seep also brought with it Seeptech. With this technology, anything is possible.

Our protagonist is Trina, a transgender woman living in the new world with her wife, Deeba. Trina was an artist before The Seep, and after its invasion she found some small fame in her career. But eventually, she grew bored with it and the pretentiousness around it, and went back to school to become a doctor. She needs to feel like she is doing something useful, which a lot of her friends don't understand. Why would you need to feel useful to society when you could do anything you wanted?

At a dinner party at a friend's house, it's apparent that Trina has become disenchanted with The Seep. She turns down seeped drinks, not wanting to connect with the alien entity. Trina thinks that art isn't as good as it used to be— it doesn't stand on its own, it only has meaning when viewed through lenses of The Seep. She shares this sentiment with her friends, but again, they don't understand. To them, The Seep is wonderful.

Trina steps out for some air and is joined by one of her oldest friends, a performance artist named Horizon Line. He confides in her that the face he has worn for as long as she has known him is not his own, but a face of a boyfriend long dead. Trina is appalled by this, especially when she finds out that under that brown face, Horizon Line is a white guy. She tells him how racist he's being, and he is offended by this. He compares what he did to Trina's transition, and this is where their friendship ends. Trina storms out, collects Deeba, and leaves.

Deeba has dropped hints before, but the next morning she tells Trina, in no uncertain terms, that she wants to be turned into a baby and start life anew with none of the hurt she had in this life. Trina is understandably very upset about this. Deeba says she doesn't want to leave Trina, but that's exactly what she's doing whether she means to or not. She's leaving Trina and erasing the life they had together. They spend their last days together arguing about it, but no matter what she says, Trina can't change Deeba's mind. In the end, Trina doesn't even go to Deeba's transformation ceremony, which Trina considers to be a funeral. Before Deeba leaves for good, she tells Trina:

"Go figure out who you are without me."

Part Two - So, Your True Love Has Become a Baby

The story skips forward five years, and Trina has not gotten over Deeba's passing. Her house and garden have fallen into such disarray that a member of the community confronts her on behalf of the neighborhood with complaints about her negligence. If she can't take care of her home, she will lose it and it will be given to someone who will take care of it. This situation overwhelms Trina, and she decides she can't be in her house with all those memories anymore. She leaves the house, packing a supply of gum and a gun in her bag. She decides that when she finishes all the gum, she'll use the gun to end her own life.

While passing through the park on the way to the Shtetl— a restaurant Trina frequents —a young man calls out to her asking if she knows of a place he can stay that doesn't take credit. She gives him some suggestions for local communes, then realizes that he must have come from the Compound, a place untouched by The Seep and isolated from the rest of the world. She notices his pamphlet— a piece of seep literature that changes its text based on what you ask it —reads "So, you've been ejected from the Compound..." Trina invites him along to the Shtetl, which doesn't take credit, but he turns her down, saying he is looking for something other than kindness. Trina suggests a commune called Instructions if he is looking for somewhere unkind.

After they part ways, Trina starts to feel guilty about sending him to Instructions, and decides to track the kid down to give him some better advice. She starts to get excited about talking to someone from The Compound. But when she gets to Instructions, the kid has already left. She finds his discarded pamphlet and takes it with her to return to him when she finds him again.

Trina goes to the Shtetl, which is run by an extremely old woman named YD who is literally falling apart. As a doctor, Trina routinely patches her up with her Seep wand, this time reattaching toes. Trina refers to YD as 'momma,' but she is probably more of an adoptive figure since it's mentioned at the beginning of the book that Trina's mother killed herself before The Seep invaded in anticipation of the end of the world.

While at the Shtetl, Trina spots the Compound kid in the alley. But before she can get to him, Horizon Line approaches him, still wearing the face of a dead man. He takes the kid under his wing, and Trina is furious, wanting to be the one to guide this kid, and not allow him to fall under the influence of jerks like Horizon Line. She is now determined to save this kid from both Horizon Line and The Seep. With a little research, she finds out that Horizon Line will be performing at one of her old favourite venues, the Go-Go. She thinks about the gun in her bag, and about using it on Horizon Line. Before she leaves the Shtetl, she asks YD when she is going to die, and YD assures her that she won't be dying anytime soon. Trina starts to realize that YD is staying alive just for her sake.

At the Go-Go a few hours before Horizon Line's performance, Trina finds her friend from her artist days, Bartleby, and asks him to sneak her into Horizon Line's show. This is when she finds out she has been on a 'do not admit' list for Horizon Line's shows for the past five years. Bartleby won't stop her from sneaking in though.

Part 3 - You Can (Never) Go Home Again

Trina gets into Horizon Line's concert, and strange things start happening to the audience. Five people start speaking to her in unison as The Seep, as if they had been taken over. Trina asks her pamphlet why it is doing this to these people, but the pamphlet— The Seep —reveals that Horizon Line has harnessed some of The Seep for his own nefarious purposes. Noticing that there are flakes of some substance falling from the ceiling, Trina realizes that Horizon Line is dosing the audience— without their knowledge or consent —with this tainted Seep.

On the stage is Horizon Line with the Compound kid. Horizon Line makes a show of giving the kid his first dose of The Seep. Trina gets on stage and is greeted by Horizon Line as an old friend. She pulls her gun on him and tells him he can't keep doing this, that he has to let these people go. He just keeps smiling, and Trina pulls the trigger. In that instant, they are pulled back to the scene from the garden, five years prior. Horizon Line mentions their last conversation, and tells her that he understands now what she was so mad about back then. He admits that he was wrong, but despite all the talk, he still wore a stolen face until the end. She doesn't feel much satisfaction from killing him, even though she thinks he deserved it.

"No one ever dies, she now knew, they just became something else."

The sprinkler system in the Go-Go turns on, pulling Trina from the vision. She goes to the Compound boy, who is surrounded by people acting possessed, grabs hold of him, and begs The Seep to help her. Suddenly, she is in another vision. It's a talk show with The Seep as the host and the audience is different versions of Deeba in different clothes. The Seep interviews her about her life, and about what she had done that night, and tries to get to the core of what Trina's problem is with The Seep.

"You tried to kill Horizon Line, but you were really shooting at the Seep, at change, at everything he is and you're not."

Trina watches Deeba turn into a baby, and is sad about it, but lets herself experience the feeling without torturing herself over it, knowing that eventually, the feeling will pass, and eventually she will move on. The Seep offers to take the memories away, because Trina is still so sad. But Trina refuses, saying that her memories are who she is, and if The Seep takes them away, it takes away Trina, too.

The next vision is of a hallway in the hospital Trina worked at. Peering into a doorway off the hall, Trina sees the interior of her house, and recognizes that there is nothing there for her anymore. She moves on to the next door, which opens into the Shtetl, showing a scene of YD in pain as her body breaks down. Another door shows the moment she met the Compound boy, and another door goes back to the Go-Go, where the audience is still erratic and tearing each other apart. Trina knows that the doors will go on forever. She goes back to the Horizon Line show, and wakes up outside the Go-Go, where emergency workers are helping evacuated members of the audience. Trina spots the Compound boy nearby, and has her speech ready, but she decides it isn't up to her to save him. And she realizes that maybe, he was the one who saved her. Maybe she could give her speech to herself and take her own advice. Trina realizes that its time to go home.

Trina returns to the Shtetl and tells YD she doesn't have to keep holding onto this life just for Trina's sake. Recognizing that Trina will now be okay on her own, YD agrees that it is time for her to move on. A funeral is held for YD, where she dies and her essence is collected. She will be reborn.

"It was brave and beautiful to go back to the beginning. Trina wasn't ready yet. But she had plenty of time."

In the end, Trina returns to the house she once shared with Deeba. She starts the process of cleaning it up, and the process of moving on.

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Thoughts - Spoilers!

When I picked up The Seep, I thought it was going to be a cool alien invasion story. And while the world-building of a post-invasion society was really cool, I was totally unprepared for the story to be a heartbreaking narrative about loss, grief, and letting go. Trina's story is so real. Her inability to let go of Deeba for years after her transformation is tragic, and her journey to accepting her loss and letting go is beautifully bittersweet in a way that was both relatable and encouraging.

I thought that the story would wind up with Trina going to the Compound and was surprised that it didn't. Trina's disenchantment with The Seep in the beginning of the book, combined with her interest in the boy from the Compound lead me to predict that Trina would end up travelling to the Compound. I thought the Compound boy would be a bigger character, that this would be the story of "The boy from the bubble and the woman who refused to move on." What is neat is that Trina seemed to think this too when she set out to save the boy. But in the end, she realized that saving herself was enough.

Trina being transgender added another level to this story. It isn't a story about being transgender or becoming happy with who you are or anything you might expect from a transgender story. Because it isn't a transgender story. The protagonist just happens to be transgender. But Trina's experience as a trans person does add to the story in an important way— it explains the root of her dislike of The Seep and the people who get body modifications via Seeptech. Trina had transitioned the hard way, before The Seep and the technology that came with it.

"But Trina had labored for this body! She'd fought and kicked and clawed to have her insides match her outsides, and now people changed their faces as easily as getting a haircut."

This gives her attitude about The Seep and current society much more weight and legitimacy than just 'art isn't what it used to be,' which is the example she used when trying to explain to her friends why The Seep wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It's a great example of how her identity and lived experiences influence her world view, and creates a more complex conflict between Trina and The Seep's utopia.

In the end, this story is so much smaller and more contained than you would think from an alien invasion story. But it's one of those 'less is more' type of stories. I think that if this was a big journey about Trina travelling to the Compound and learning a whole other way of life and learning to finally process her grief before going home again, the story wouldn't have hit as hard. With the smaller setting and just a handful of locations and characters, the story focuses more on Trina's process of learning to let go. I like how Trina's quest to save the Compound boy isn't even completed, that she realizes in the end that it isn't up to her to save him. I like that the boy unknowingly saved her, because through her quest to try and save him, she grew and changed. I liked that she got to go home again.

This book is short and sweet but hits deep, and it has some amazingly intriguing world-building to back it up. It has taken me half a month just to write about it because I was not ready to be emotionally knocked flat by it. But this is a fantastic novella, and definitely a new favourite of mine.

"Like so many of the things that she used to care about, they were lost for good. And that was fine."