Calla Henkel, “Four Terrible Parents,” 2026

Calla Henkel’s debut novel, Other People’s Clothes (2021), was an inspired exploration of genre, combining coming-of-age novel with the now-familiar 21st-century Berlin novel with pulp melodrama. The 2024 follow up, Scrap, was a sinuous journey across interlocking identities and destinies that had something of Ari Aster and of the telenovela in its fantastical and suspenseful narrative. In her new book, Four Terrible Parents, which was published in June, Henkel continues her dialogue with genre – in this case integrating tropes from the detective novel in a story of a blended family that doesn’t always blend smoothly. The narrative begins in the mind of a police detective named Royce, and immediately the reader is thrown into narrative suspense. There’s talk of a “missing girl.” The cliffhangers begin the moment the reader arrives at the cliff. After this short less-than-a-page vignette, we move to the narrative of the main character, Valentine, and her long-time collaborator, Raul, who comprise the fading electro-clash duo SEZME and find themselves trapped in a tour that is rapidly spiraling into farce. After a particularly painful cancelled show in Prague, Val calls Raul to announce that she wants to break up the band. Unlike some melancholic or bitter splits, Raul is only too happy to have quits called for him as he looks forward to a new life with his banker partner Banner at his swish loft in New York. But fate, and Henkel, have other ideas.

As Val is self-soothing with vending machine wine in the wake of her disintegrated tour, she tunes into a dystopian game show in which punters bid for the contents of unclaimed storage lockers. Immersed in comfort-trash viewing, Val notices something strange: property last seen in the custody of her father, including her old keyboards, is being sized up for value by a contestant. This is how she learns that her estranged father is dead. After a few snap decisions, the narrative shifts across the Atlantic to a small town in South Carolina called Elkton, where Val grew up – and where, by coincidence, Raul’s partner Banner also did. As the characters converge on Elkton, Val’s on-again-off-again from Berlin, Linh, re-enters her life. Linh is a theater-maker from Berlin, the child of Vietnamese parents who has an apparently thriving career and promising relationship with a socially concerned local named Bianca. Val suddenly finds herself inheriting a decrepit hotel as part of her father’s bequests. Thus invested, she decides it is time to settle down once and for all, to create a family with Linh and Raul and Banner. The hotel presents exactly the kind of fixer-upper opportunity that Banner has long been dreaming of. On top of the renovation project, Val decides she wants a baby, and Linh and Raul agree to commit energy and biology to make it all a reality. Perhaps the band breaking up was exactly what this group of aging millennials need to finally begin the lives they never knew they wanted …

Well, it wouldn’t be a Calla Henkel novel without dramatic twists and turns, and Four Terrible Parents has plenty to offer. Some are more improbable than others – none are exactly probable, but Henkel’s works operate in a kind of Nietzschean Beyond Mad and Plausible that distills the intensity, drama, and wackiness of the genres her narratives reference yet also provides them with a cool, contemporary sheen that allows the reader both the lurid thrills of genre fiction and the narrative satisfaction of high-minded literary diegetic gamery. There are readers who will have a hard time with this aspect of the novel, but if you’re looking for anguished realism, there’s a range of 19th-century literature waiting for you. Henkel’s writing is more concerned with the big questions of life, death, family, and their meaning, coupled with an almost biblical fascination with justice and fate. How better to explore these subjects, then, than through the lens of queer family dynamics?

“Four Terrible Parents,” packed with a story.

A number of novels and artworks have appeared in recent years featuring queer parenting as a central theme. Among notable titles are Claire Lynch’s A Family Matter (2025), Kate Davies’s Nuclear Family (2024), This Love (2025) by Lotte Jeffs, and Detransition, Baby (2021) by Torrey Peters. Each of these titles deals with the subject in distinctive ways. Lynch’s case is an evocative epic vision of family secrets across temporalities. Davies’s and Jeffs’s stories take a number of detours but ultimately center a hopeful vision. Henkel’s book is perhaps closest to Peters’s complex and often dark narrative. Many of the themes explored by Peters inform Henkel’s book, not least ambient trans- and homophobia, and Henkel’s capacity for social analysis serves her story well. The novel nicely punctures, especially through the character of Banner, many of the corporate-Pride-era talismans of queer kin-making. In a media structure still overwhelmingly dominated by depictions of heterosexual families, the willingness, even the imperative, to self-stereotype can feel almost inescapable. As characters wrestle with questions such as these, the novel reaches its greatest achievements in characterization, and this is in part due to Henkel’s capacity to work within genre and subvert it. Queer readers will likely be heartened to see that the warts-and-all examination of the shortcomings of “terrible parenting” extends to the (ostensibly) heterosexual parents who precede Val, Raul, Linh, and Banner. There are Raul’s parents, political doyens of the Minnesota Democratic Party elite who epitomize the kind of hollow discursive liberalism that created space for the Redditor Revolution we’re currently experiencing. Banner’s blue-collar family is congenial enough by South Carolina standards, but their impulse for keeping up appearances is an outgrowth of the father, Ranger – the book is truly replete with “only in America” names – walking away one day and never looking back. Val’s parents are mostly off-screen, but Henkel narrates their poisonous marital tensions and the homophobia of her father in episodes throughout the book. Linh comes from a more functional family, in their memory it is an “immensely happy” one, but their parents’ early deaths underwrite Linh’s relationship with their punctilious and calculating sister, which is far from healthy.

Linh is a pivotal character in the book for a number of reasons. Some, being spoiler-related, I won’t get into here, but let’s just say they have the proverbial lot going on. For example, Linh seems happy enough with the life they have built in Germany, and so the dramatic rupture they choose – ditching Bianca, relocating to a largely hostile portion of the United States, and, of course, choosing parenting at all – presses at the edges of the extended plausibility that defines Henkel’s work. Here again, it is clear that Henkel is working in the genre tradition – the treacherous sibling dynamic familiar from soap operas – but often when reading Linh’s sections, I found myself repeatedly screaming internally JUST MOVE BACK TO BERLIN! THEY OFFER EXCELLENT EARLY LIFE SUPPORT, SURELY YOU KNOW THIS! This sense of bad decision-making is, undeniably, par for the course in a book about bad parents. It is exactly the kind of bad decision “bad” parents make, but especially regarding Linh, I felt over and over again that they were getting the short ends of various sticks. This “long-suffering” quality is perhaps explicable given the history they share with Val, but I felt Linh’s inner life could have done with more exposition over the course of the book.

As a novel, Four Terrible Parents has many strengths; notably, reserves of narrative drive. And, Henkel is good with comedy, in particular the knockabout farce that is the Wedding Day, complete with escapades with a turkey baster. But the laughs come less frequently as the book’s narrative climax arrives. Val’s travails in achieving pregnancy come laced with tragedy, and even once our four parents surmount biological and logistical hurdles to achieve successful conception, gestation, and delivery, matters don’t get any easier. Without spoilers, it should suffice to say that when things go Big Wrong, the novel’s real horror blossoms. It is here that perhaps my greatest reservations about the novel arose. Henkel has a tendency to internally editorialize at certain points. One example will stand for several: As the chaos deepens to engulf the family – beset as they are by internal tragedy and an attendant media circus – the narrator asks rhetorically, “How much sadness could a family handle?” The answer, of course, is “more.” A Calla Henkel narrator of all people should know this. Some infelicities in the prose also cropped up in ways I found distracting; for example, twice a lunch order is subjected to the verb “rectify;” a different circumstance is described as being “now well known at this point.” Also worth noting is that each chapter begins with the name of a character whose perspective will ostensibly be privileged in that section of the book. While some readers may find this a helpful organizing principle, I found it a superfluity, as reading the chapters without the names at the beginning wouldn’t have made a real difference for me, especially as the novel is narrated from the third-person perspective. Such signposting isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, but when characters’ narratives are so imbricated within each other, it struck me as more handholding than necessary. Perhaps these are an aesthete’s quibbles about an otherwise engrossing narrative, but once you have the reader engrossed, hiccups like these do become distracting, especially when treating a subject explored in prose as crystalline as Torrey Peters’s, the inevitable point of comparison. If you’re inclined to allow a degree of stylistic latitude in pursuit of narrative apotheosis, however, Four Terrible Parents offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the things that can go wrong in families, and a surprisingly sweet glimpse of the remedies that can salve, if not solve, them.

Calla Henkel, Four Terrible Parents, John Murray, 2026, 352 pages.

William Kherbek is the writer of several works of fiction, including Ecology of Secrets, ULTRALIFE, Twenty Terrifying Tales from our Technofeudal Tomorrow, and Fail Worse, all published by Arcadia Missa, as well as New Adventures and Best Practices, published by Flat i and Moist Books respectively. Kherbek’s art journalism has appeared in numerous publications including Flash Art, Burlington Contemporary, Sleek, Ocula, and Spike, among other titles. His collected art writings are published as Entropia by Abstract Supply.

Image credit: 1., 2. Courtesy of Calla Henkel