Reviewed by Jacquelyn Tolksdorf
As the book introduces us to Kercy — a wheelchair-bound teen surrounded by her wealthy but dysfunctional parents in an isolated Canadian cottage it winds its way from in a ‘close encounter’ thriller that bends into a Sci-Fi epic of alien experiments and violation. Kercy is visited by subterranean amphibious creatures in her bedroom. When she wakes up the next day bleeding her mother just shrugs it off as menstruation. The next day her father disappears on the lake. Compounding a severe sexual trauma she must stow away in her psyche so she can process her father’s disappearance. Purchase Here.
Ironically as Kercy grows stronger physically of her disability and mentally into academia – she pursues a PhD; in Anthropology seeking the understanding of how humans behave. And after way into her adulthood she returns to the cabin after her mother’s death with her boyfriend to have memories and revolutions “flood” back to her.
And as the title suggests, as more revelations come to Kercy – will she assimilate with the beings from her haunting past and join them in the bay by the cabin?
The conclusion of ASSIMILATION by Lonnie Busch is a haunting, ambiguous ending that merges the novel’s themes of transformation, identity, and connection between human…and alien life. It suggests that assimilation is not conquest but evolution: a merging of species, consciousness, and identity, blurring the line between human and alien, science and myth, self and other.
In essence, ASSIMILATION closes on the idea that survival—and perhaps salvation—lies in surrendering the illusion of human dominance and embracing connection, however terrifying or unfamiliar it may be. The novel intertwines themes of alien contact, bodily transformation, parental betrayal, and identity. It reads as both a coming-of-age horror story and a meditation on what it means to be human—to evolve, assimilate, and survive when one’s very nature is in question.