Lakewood

Lakewood is Megan Giddings’s debut novel and it does not waste time announcing what kind of book it is going to be. Lena Johnson, a young Black woman, drops out of college after her grandmother dies, mostly because the medical bills have piled up and her mother is sick. She takes a research job in a small Michigan town called Lakewood, where the pay is good and the only catch is that she cannot tell anyone what she is actually doing. Of course the catch turns out to be much bigger than that.

Giddings writes about medical experimentation on Black bodies in a way that feels grounded in real history without ever turning into a lecture. The shadow of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee study sits over the whole novel, but Lakewood is its own story, with its own pace and its own slow horror. The experiments themselves are described in quick, clinical fragments. What is left out is sometimes more disturbing than what is shown.

The book is short, which works in its favor. Lena’s voice carries you through and the tension stays tight. There are moments of dark humor too, especially in her phone calls with her mother, who has no idea what her daughter has gotten into. Some readers will find the ending unsettlingly open. That feels intentional, since real cases like the ones Giddings draws from rarely have neat endings either.

For readers who liked Get Out as a film or Octavia Butler’s Kindred for the way it uses speculative fiction to talk about race in America, Lakewood is a strong, uncomfortable, necessary read.