VENUS, VANISHING...queer love in late Weimar-era Berlin

VENUS, VANISHING
REBECCA BIRRELL
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A blisteringly passionate and page-turning story of desire, art, and the stories lost to the darkness of history—for readers of Sarah Waters, Yael van der Wouden, and Alice Winn

Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge.

But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape.

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My Review: The relationship between a young striving creative and an older patron is fraught with tension. One way that plays out is the power play of status: "you need me to give you work, you pay me in humiliation," as in this story.

Hannah knows she is an artist, knows she has talent, knows she can't keep tailoring forever...knows she can't marry the older man who wants to buy her from her father with her mother's practically minded support or she will vanish to be replaced by no one she recognizes as herself. An age-old dilemma for women, exacerbated by Hannah's Jewishness thus ever-increasing vulnerability in late-Weimar Republic Germany. Elke, an Aryan to her manicured fingertips, takes Hannah under her protection with all the complexity of emotion that entails.

Hannah has a man, Saul, in similar circumstances of economic and social struggle as hers who provides guidance through Berlin's maze of modern art cliques, whose influence sets in train the developments for Elke and her circle to become famous in art circles (how titillating for older, bored wives!) in Hannah's risqué portraits of them...under an unambiguously Aryan male name. Elke sells the idea to Hannah as a way to be seen, and to be sold, in a world of increasing antisemitism as well as entrenched unchallenged misogyny.

History having already happened we know what Hannah and Saul have in store. Author Birrell is an art historian whose interests are in women and/or queer artists and their struggles to make art under the circumstances they find themselves. Hannah, Elke, Saul are all composites of artists and patrons whoes lives Author Birrell came to know in the course of her professional research. It was a surprise to me how deft the prose was for a debut, until I learned the author is not a debut writer but a debut novelist. I was deeply gruntled by Author Birrell's sumptuous and immersive evocations of Elke's world, of Hannah's art and specific paintings; it felt as though I should be able to see them on museum websites, buy a monograph about them, order a biography of her. That's a fantastic ability to have for a writer, that craft trick of making the craft feel as though it's entirely about something else. I was convinced I was reading non-fiction when art was our topic, still enjoying the story at other times. Tough to pull that off.

What I found less convincing was the ending Author Birrell crafted, as it felt to me not in keeping with the looming threats so carefully evoked. It was a niggle only; I was kind of dreading what I was sure was coming. A sentimental chunk of me was pleased she chose to do better by her characters than reality would have but it was a cheat in another sense.

I was repulsed by unworthy-of-her Elke's control of Hannah, and of her revolting freely expressed anti-semitism. Really I just disliked Elke and her ilk; the bored useless privileged "cultured elite." I grow less and less tolerant of bored people. There's a lot of work to do in the world, pick something and just go do it and make some effort to improve life for someone not you.

Ahem. My puritan ancestors speak.

Anyway, now you know why I didn't offer all five stars. On prose alone, it deserved it. Prose is not the sole axis of my own judgment. By every axis of judgment I hope this lovely artwork will land on your TBR.

LIARS IN PARADISE, Olesya Lyuzna's1920s queer-led mystery series gets its book 2

LIARS IN PARADISE
OLESYA LYUZNA
The Mysterious Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: With five days to clear her partner’s name after a horrific crime, private detective Ginny Dugan infiltrates a cultish secret society on Long Island’s Gold Coast in this champagne-soaked followup to Glitter in the Dark.

New York City, 1925. A night of high-stakes gambling at the Empire Club ends in gunfire and Jack Crawford is found at the center of the carnage—covered in blood, gun in hand. The club’s ruthless owner offers Jack an ultimatum: find the real shooters within five days, or die for their crimes.

Ginny Dugan hasn’t known Jack long, but as his partner in their detective agency, she needs to believe she’s trusted the right man this time. Their only lead is Lila, the sole survivor of the massacre. They follow her to a queer dance hall in Glen Cove, a Long Island Gold Coast town whose glittering summer estates now stand empty in the November chill. Among those who knew Lila, one name keeps surfacing: Echelon, a seductive society where fortune is promised to those who surrender everything. Convinced the answers they seek lie within, Ginny and Jack infiltrate its ranks, where they encounter silent masked attendants, serpents sliding over bare skin, and members who seem to know more than they should—especially about Jack.

As the body count climbs and Jack’s past resurfaces in unsettling ways, Ginny begins to doubt her instincts, her partner, even her own reality. Maybe she was never in control. Maybe she was brought here to play someone else’s game.

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My Review: Author Lyuzna's previous book Glitter in the Dark gets a sequel. I was delighted to hearit was coming, I missed the wonderful immersion in the slightly-too-full hot tub of Lyuzna's 1920s glamour

People who want, who yearn for something are the ones easiest to manipulate. Show them a path that guides them through the yearning process and you've got 'em in your conytol. There's always something left behind in achieving a goal. That something is...useful...to someone who wants to control the yearner for fun and profit. And that something needs receipts to be truly, enduringly useful, as well as backed up by demonstrated willingness to use it to harm others (but never me, says the voice of hubris very quietly).

Ginny does not believe any secret is worth dying for, it's what makes her such an effective investigator. She's taken Jack on as her...partner, possibly maybe in more than one sense of the word, this is still in flux...knowing there are secrets in his past, though not what precisely they are. She's confronted with them after she foils a knife attack on a stranger.

Are you feelin' the vibe here? We're in a melodrama. We're heading into the choppy waters off the rocky coast leading to Safe Harbor; our vessel is a bit too small to plow through the waves, maybe the wind's shifting to lift spray into our eyes, where are those damn life jackets anyway? It's a familiar setting in general, but the specifics are what burnish the brasses.

Jack's darkish past is tied to the Big Bad of this story, Dickie Stryker. He's a very familiar character in the twenty-first century: charismatic cult leader, prosperity gospel pusher, blackmailer extraordinaire. Jack's entanglement with him is the ostrich-sized chicken that came home to roost. Ginny's own secrets, the woman who got away for example, are unsurprisingly going to need some dealing with as the waves get fiercer smashing against the rocks outside Safe Harbor. Dickie knows a lot, doesn't have a second's heitation about using what he knows to force Ginny and Jack to deal with his problem or face their vessel being holed (Jack's impending murder) in the heaving story-seas.

Overheated? Yes. Fun? Yep!

It's well-constructed as a mystery. I found not plot holes that didn't feel like secret doors to future installments in the series. I thoroughly enjoyed the bisexual representation...something I don't see too much of in mysteryworld...and appreciated Ginny being drawn as a woman very much in charge of her fate in a time period where that was believable but still very difficult. (Not that it's ever been easy.) It makes the Jazz Age setting have greater depth to see these glistening highlights against the dark, terrible background of Power being flexed.

Echelon, our nexus of Power, is appallingly familiar to readers in 2026. If you read this story and still need a map drawn of how the hideous cult of Power we're watching unravel in 2026, you're probably best suited to religious stories and should not be reading my reviews. It's very much a tropical island transferred to Glen Cove (a lovely place that deserves better). As Author Lyuzna builds out the ugly way the Echelon cultists dig the canals leading to Safe Harbor only through dangerous territiry, the twist and doublebacks and unexpected locks that impede the trip become more and more baroque. The slang of the era is lots of fun to read, making this world feel Other and lived in at the same time. It's a storytelling technique I always like to see. Firefly and Battlestar Galactica and Riddley Walker and A Clockwork Orange have all used the same idea; all are celebrated as successful on a storytelling basis at least in part because the creators were attentive to the details at this high of a level.

I'm not all the way convinced the more melodramatic flourishes are necessarily a good ide in a series. Cecil's knife attack tying back only coincidentally to Jack's secret past is my best not-spoilery examplee (it's literally the beginning of the story). It feels forced; it's there that I suspect the bridge to the period setting could let the author down a bit. This exact storytelling trope is torally of the period we're within. A lot of less talented authors might run with the faux-Golden Age-ness of the story with an intrusive framing device. Author Lyuzna leaves the frame in 2026, tells the story that could best happen in the Jazz Age with a modern societal lens but does not force the action to conform with 2026's expectations. The consequences, the need to obey older cultural norms, are still present.

But there's always a course between the rocks, up the canal, into Safe Harbor at last. Makes for an exciting journey.

A QUEER CASE: The Selby Bigge Mysteries #1, debut mystery in a queer-centered 1920s series

A QUEER CASE: The Selby Bigge Mysteries #1
ROBERT HOLTOM
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping 1920s-set whodunnit, this debut features a queer sleuth who must solve a murder in a mansion on London’s Hampstead Heath without revealing his sexuality, lest he be arrested as a criminal.

The Selby Bigge mysteries series debut, it will leave readers eager for the next installment. Perfect for fans of Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey novels.

London, 1929.

Selby Bigge is a bank clerk by day and a denizen of the capital’s queer underworld by night, but he yearns for a life that will take him away from his ledgers, loveless trysts and dreary bedsit in in which his every move is scrutinised by a nosy landlady. So when he meets Patrick, son of knight of the realm and banking millionaire Sir Lionel Duker, he is delighted to find himself catapulted into a world of dinners at The Ritz and birthday parties at his new friend’s family mansion on Hampstead Heath.

But money, it seems, can’t buy happiness. Sir Lionel is being slandered in the press, his new young wife Lucinda is being harassed by an embittered journalist and Patrick is worried he’ll lose his inheritance to his gold-digging stepmother. And when someone is found strangled on the billiards room floor after a party it doesn’t take long for Selby to realise everyone has a motive for murder.

Can Selby uncover the truth while keeping his own secrets buried?

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My Review: Snobbery is its own worst enemy. Think Saltburn or The Line of Beauty. It never works for long, this charade. You inevitably out yourself one way or another, just like trying to pass as straight when you're not.

"Perverts are prone to all sorts of criminality, especially homicidal mania."
Quite right, I didn't say. There was nothing I enjoyed more after a nice bit of sodomy than a spot of killing.

I felt very squicked out by the period-appropriate homophobia. I expect I was supposed to; but I never quite cottoned on to whether the story was aware of its snobbery in a positive or negative social light. I can see a young gay man delighting in his beauty's ability to open doors of privilege, but few enough are the cases where that works out to the long-term benefit of the youth...think of Jed Johnson and Joe Dallesandro versus Scott Thorson and (for a straight example) Kato Kaelin. Is Selby one of the former two, or among the legions represented by the latter two?

I don't know, but more to the point I don't think Author Holtom knows. If I was meant to pick up on intentional ambiguity, I didn't; it felt more like simple not having thought it through. (A very snobby side note: "me" and "I" are not interchangeable unless the point is to make the character misusing them sound...out of their depth.)

So, kudos for research: the atmo is great, and very much matches what I, a seasoned reader of "Golden Age" (how fraught is that term!) mysteries expect; the snarky little cameo by Dame Agatha in her best self-puncturing Ariadne Oliver vein; Theo/Theodora's delightfully spiky trans rep in this Magnus Hirschfeld-informed era and milieu.

Fewer plaudits for not deciding, then going all in on, an idea of Selby's aims by trying to join this bunch of dreadful snobs, he said snobbishly. There are pacing decisions I didn't entirely vibe with, some scenes of country-house life that overstayed my patience; that's just my taste, though, as others might batten on it. I want to be very clear with modern M/M readers: no joy for y'all here. Period-appropriate zipper-welded-shut longing.

And if Theo/dora does not feature more prominently in the next one, I am firing up my voodoo-dolly creation skills and coming after all y'all who made this series. Individually.

ARCADIA, rare intersex representation & THE WASTELAND, London life of gay poet/literary ikon T.S. Eliot

THE WASTELAND
HARPER JAMESON
Level 4 Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The extraordinary career and devastating life of T.S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot is a hollow man trapped in a dreary world. He works at a bank, a slave to the clock, the same routine, day after day. While London’s elite enjoy a Great Gatsby lifestyle and poets like Robert Frost are rock stars, attracting thousands of fans to each reading, Mr. Eliot walks past life, peering at it through cracks or around corners. Only in his imagination does the world drip with color.

Then one day he comes across Jack, an out and proud gay man being badly beaten, and something compels him to intervene. Life will never be the same.

Jack introduces Mr. Eliot to the gay underground of early twentieth-century London and to feelings Mr. Eliot had crammed down and locked away. And with freedom comes poetry. Extraordinary poetry that takes London by storm. But as Mr. Eliot’s fame increases, pressure for conformity does as well. Religious intolerance, fascism’s increasingly popular message of traditional values, and the allure of untold success present him with a decision that could have devastating consequences.

The Wasteland is the untold story of T.S. Eliot, his secret struggle with being gay, the people left in the wake of his meteoric career trajectory, and the madness that helped produce his greatest work.

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My Review: Sadness. Grey, enveloping sadness. That's the take-away I had from this technically adept reinvention of poet T.S Eliot's early-1920s life in London.

Even if there were no light on the bank, Mr. Eliot would still know it was there. It's always there, waiting to welcome him with open arms, more than willing to take more tocks from his clock.

–and–

"We return you now to our regular broadcast," the announcer drones.

"Clair de Lune." Claude Debussy. Relaxation. Baloney.

Baloney indeed, and more than just that in a penitential dry sandwich consumed in a lonely penitentiary. With the aplomb of a dab hand at this fantastical-reimaging stuff, Eliot's life is peopled with the souls embodied and conjured on a magical-realist visit with the great poet. We even see him conjuring Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock (whose peaches are uneaten and coffee spoons resolutely empty) on the day he learns his new crush, Jack, is no longer with the bank. But Mr. Eliot is in for a major surprise in this case....

...as are the readers of this historical fantasia on themes of gay men's circumscribed lives. Mr. Eliot, for I cannot bear to call him Tom, is a creative and passionate soul in the body of a Puritan. He is deformed and damaged by a world he despises as he obeys it. Mr. Eliot will get his revenge. He blares forth a trumpet of poetic passion that has stood its ground atop English-language poetry. Its creator is given, here, by Author Jameson, a life that commingles reality and fantasy as only a poet could merit, warrant, summon forth from beyond the grave's creative silence.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCADIA
EMMANUELLE BAYAMACK-TAM (tr. Ruth Diver)
Seven Stories Press
$13.96 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

25% OFF DIRECT PURCHASES OF #WITMONTH TITLES HERE: https://sevenstories.com/blogs/385-celebrate-women-in-translation-month-2025

The Publisher Says: An English-language debut that reveals and subverts contemporary conceptions of normative sexuality, capitalist culture, and environmental degradation.

Winner, Prix du Livre Inter, 2019

Farah moves into Liberty House–an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature–at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune’s spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, looks, or ability. On her fifteenth birthday, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to question the confines of gender, and the hypocritical principles those within and outside the confraternity live by. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What is it to be part of a community? What is the endgame for a utopia that exists alongside refugees seeking shelter by the millions and in a society moving ever farther away from nature and its protections. As Liberty House devolves into a dystopia amidst charges of sexual abuse, it starts to look a lot like the larger world, confused in its fears and selfish hedonism.

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam delivers a magisterial novel, a scathing critique of innocence in the contemporary world.

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My Review: Really, really squicked out by what I see as a borderline-coercive sexual relationship between a fifteen-year-old who's just discovered they're intersex and the much-older leader of the cult that they and their family now belong to. I took a long break from the read because I was not sure I wanted to finish this entire story. It brought up my mother's sexually abusive power-plays against me. That was not comfortable at all.

So I'm unusually alert to sexual undertones in relationships between kids and adults. I felt Arcady, the cult/commune leader, was less grooming Farah than responding to Farah's burgeoning sense of themself as a sexual, intersex person. While that doesn't lessen my personal discomfort with Arcady's power imbalance with Farah, it does show that Author Bayamack-Tam possesses a clear sense of the need to keep the power dynamic in balance. Add to that Farah's rare and possibly genetically-heritable anatomical anomaly resulting in an indeterminate sex and gender presentation.

Prime candidate for a charismatic cult leader's sexual manipulation. Which, it must be said, is present; but the clear and repeated caveat from older Arcady is that they reach maturity before he will sexually engage with them. Farah, quite understandably, is not willing to wait some indeterminate amount of time for someone not her to decide they're capable of offering informed consent and, mirabile dictu, pushes the schedule to meet their burgeoning sexual desires.

Totally understand that. But great-grandfather does not think with a teen's hormones, and holds Arcady to a higher standard. But anyway, this was not anything Farah regrets or has doubts about; and again, the stage was set for this to be as unrevolting as possible because we know what Farah is thinking and feeling.

I've gone on about the subject and left out the nudist free-spirit grandmother, the cypher parents who really are affectless, the communards whose existence is merely suggested not explored in even the slightest depth...in general, this is a decent novel by a hippie-wannabe, a French-lady Brautigan, with an agenda and an axe being ground noisily in the background. Also a fun story to read.