DAVID R. SLAYTON'S PAGE: Adam Binder series, 3 & 4...DEADBEAT DRUID; REDNECK REVENANT

DEADBEAT DRUID (Adam Binder #3)
DAVID R. SLAYTON
Blackstone Publishing Inc. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The living cannot be allowed to infect the dead.

Adam Binder has lost what matters most to him. Having finally learned the true identity of the warlock preying on his family, what was supposed to be a final confrontation with the fiend instead became a trap that sent Vic into the realm of the dead, where none living are meant to be. Bound by debt, oath, and love, Adam blazes his own trail into the underworld to get Vic back and to end the threat of the warlock once and for all.

But the road to hell is paved with more than good intentions. Demons are hungry and ghosts are relentless. What awaits Adam in the underworld is nothing he is prepared to face. If that weren’t enough, Adam has one more thing he must do if he and Vic are to return to world of the living: find the lost heart of Death herself.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: More wasted time with Vic, exploring this weird new "guys are hot" idea he's having, and Adam (the hot guy) separated.

This is really pissing me off. Are you trying to have your queer cake and still eat the straight-people-squeamish market?

This story, obviously, made me really mad. I thought Adam had really gotten his head around how Robert (né Bobby) was doing what he could to be in Adam's life. I though the Elven thing with Adam would go somewhere. So far we're just wandering around keeping these newly-in-love guys apart for no obvious reason. Then...surprise! There's a twist that really, really, really ramped up my annoyance because it's a total rug-pull.

I got as far as three stars because there's still some chance this could all be redeemed in book four; its existence, and my receipt of the DRC for it, are really the only reason I finished this book after checking it out.

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

REDNECK REVENANT (Adam Binder #4)
DAVID R. SLAYTON
Blackstone Publishing, Inc. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 papernback, available nowbr />
Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling author David R. Slayton, Redneck Revenant is an exciting new chapter in the Adam Binder series.

Adam Binder’s life has never been better. Sure, he has no money, no car, no home to call his own, and he’s worried about creating a future with his boyfriend Vic, but he’s closer to his family than ever before. He’s also Page to the Elven Court of Swords, and that appointment is not without its perks—like the invisible sword strapped to his back.

But on Halloween night, Adam’s life takes a disturbing turn. Annie, his brother’s long-lost wife, turns up on her husband’s doorstep alive and well, with no memory of her death. But is it really Annie, or a Trojan horse from some new magical enemy?

To uncover the truth, Adam will need help from those he loves most—as well as a couple of friends at Rogue Community College. As he navigates a perilous maze of magical politics and battles terrifying creatures from beyond the known realms, Adam will discover a secret darker and more unsettling than anything he could have imagined.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh sure. Why not go into the straight people's traumadrama?

I'm glad to say I wrapped up my reading experience with some sustained Vic-and-Adam time, at least, seeing the way I've been cheated of it for most of the series. I'll give Adam and Vic my biggest props for, when they have page time to do it, really digging in to their love as a source of sustenance, frustration, irritation, and happiness...just like the real thing. It's also heartwarming that they're still, well, underclass guys not magically somehow without financial worries or suddenly imbued with a frictionless path forward. The way they handle being in therapy...! Big ups!

So what's this crap with Bobby's Annie coming back from the dead for another bite of the apple? It's not a twist I saw coming; so good for that; but it's not a relationship I care about, so I'm out.

This is obviously the start of the Rogue College books that I won't be reading. It's clear that most people do not share my sense of "this ain't what I want" so go! go! go! Author Slayton. Succeed and bring joy.

Not to me, sad to say.

DAVID R. SLAYTON'S PAGE: Adam Binder series, 1 & 2...WHITE TRASH WARLOCK; TRAILER PARK TRICKSTER

WHITE TRASH WARLOCK (Adam Binder #1)
DAVID R. SLAYTON
Blackstone Publishing Inc. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Guthrie was a good place to be from, but it wasn’t a great place to live, not when you were like Adam, in all the ways Adam was like Adam.

Adam Binder hasn’t spoken to his brother in years, not since Bobby had him committed to a psych ward for hearing voices. When a murderous spirit possesses Bobby’s wife and disrupts the perfect life he’s built away from Oklahoma, he’s forced to ask for his little brother’s help. Adam is happy to escape the trailer park and get the chance to say I told you so, but he arrives in Denver to find the local magicians dead.

It isn’t long before Adam is the spirit’s next target. To survive the confrontation, he’ll have to risk bargaining with powers he’d rather avoid, including his first love, the elf who broke his heart.

The Binder brothers don’t realize that they’re unwitting pawns in a game played by immortals. Death herself wants the spirit’s head, and she’s willing to destroy their family to reap it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kinda like Harry Dresden and October Daye had a gay son.

Brothers Adam and Robert (Bobby growing up) have a troubled, lower-class upbringing in common. They're as different as chalk and cheese, with Robert running as far and as fast from his background as he can; Adam, well...he wasn't given the luxury of that choice. Robert even had him slung into the psych ward because he was "hearing voices."

It never occurred to Robert they were real.

As this story opens, the brothers are reconnecting (not very willingly) because Robert's had to confront the "hearing voices" he so thoroughly denied was reality, was not hallucination.

"People aren't less just because they don't live the way you do."
"I didn't say that," Robert said.
"You think it," Adam said. "You think we're all trash because we don't have nice cars and ugly houses. Life isn't just about money."

I squirmed for Bobby-that-was; I was just as accused as he was. I'd want my weirdo little brother who "hears things" to get fixed, to be normal, just like Robert does...just like Bobby did. In spite of the fact Robert needs Adam's "weirdness" to cope with his own wife's, um, unusual (murderous, possessed) behavior with that weirdness. Adam should be able to help, right? Well, yeah, there's a lot under the bridge between them, they're ultimately branches from the same unhappy, unloving mother and runaway father, so Adam will help:

He thought back on all the clear signs that Annie loved Bobby... If Adam had that, he wouldn't make the guy his second priority. He'd—well, he didn't really know what he'd do with a guy in the long term. He'd be like the dog who finally caught the car.

It's worth noting that Adam isn't worried about being gay, hiding being gay, or denying he is who he is. Big bonus points. No, he doesn't know what he'd do with a guy, long term; but not because he's a guy but because Adam's never been able to do more than scratch out day-to-day survival. Poverty has no sexual preferences. He's been locked up and treated for schizophrenia (those voices now acknowledged as real by Robert) for long enough that the idea of a forever (or more than a night) with a guy he loves is far out of his reach.

But once upon a time, before the hospital, there was a certain someone; an elf, one who lives in Denver among his kind, so there's a good personal reason to help Robert in spite of Bobby's long-ago betrayal....

It's a joy to go here with a QUILTBAG sibling, one struggling with anger, one whose "voices" are real but give him only the most limited abilities that he now has to level up to help Robert. And maybe their vanished bastard-wizard father can finally be found. But about that love long gone...well, now he's gone and hooked himself to this cop who was about to be offed, and now they're...it's getting...the situation is...

...complicated. Like the story itself. But all in a good way, honest. Vic the cop and Adam the low-power witch and Robert the rotten brother with real, honest motives, are all learning as they go, are discovering they're in a very different situation than the one they saw themselves as being in.

And that's why it's a series.

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

TRAILER PARK TRICKSTER (Adam Binder #2)
DAVID R. SLAYTON
Blackstone Publishing Inc. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: They are my harvest, and I will reap them all.

Returning to Guthrie, Oklahoma, Adam Binder once again finds himself in the path of deadly magic when a dark druid begins to prey on members of Adam’s family. It all seems linked to the death of Adam’s father many years ago—a man who may have somehow survived as a warlock.

Watched by the police, separated from the man who may be the love of his life, compelled to seek the truth about his connection to the druid, Adam learns more about his family and its troubled history than he ever bargained for, and finally comes face to face with the warlock he has vowed to stop.

Meanwhile, beyond the Veil of the mortal world, Argent the Queen of Swords and Vic Martinez undertake a dangerous journey to a secret meeting of the Council of Races . . . where the sea elves are calling for the destruction of humanity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I understand why it needed to be this way, but Vic and Adam spending the whole book apart was really a bummer. After what happened in the first book, these guys have a metric love-ton of baggage to unpack. But the main arc of the series, the murders of Adam's family members, needs to take first priority, naturally.

I'm still grumpy about it. I reminded myself quite sternly several times, "It's a series, chill out! We'll get there!" And still the grump continued, casting a foggy pall over the whole read.

It's also a widge weird that our low-powered hero doesn't need to prove himself against the phenomenally powerful elves more than he does. They sort-of accept him at his word that he has these powers but they're more-or-less psychic ones so of course they aren't much stacked up against elven world-altering ones...and no one checks...? Much more space goes into dealing with Vic's utterly altered status...not only is he now emotionally connected to a man for the first time in his life, he's become a Reaper (this is what it sounds like), and the man he feels intense love for is not around to help him work any of it out!

Well, it's book two in a series. There are things to do, and plot points that must be accomplished; if you want a relationship novel, go get one. This is a gay urban romantasy, so it serves different masters. When we're building a magical world, we must do that first so the characters have a solid playhouse to do their various things within that make story-sense.

...and I still want the couple to do some talking...these are guys, I remind myself, they'd rather be tortured than talk about their feelings. They're also, unlike 90% (unverified statistic) of gay love stories, working class, so big points for that. I'm picking nits in my cavils. I'm aware of problems because I'm unsatisfied with the lack of communication between the main couple even though it's down to temporary story circumstances.

As a dual-reality story, the series is as much fun as that ever is. Y'all urban-fantasy lovers are going to feel right at home. As a romance/romantasy, this entry in the series is wanting, but the framework is really solid for that to change. As a book-two, the ending...a serious cliffhanger...will require you to have book three on tap or you (and the author) risk losing momentum.

That really would be a shame.

¡HOLA PAPÍ!, memoir in essays of an accidental queer sage

¡HOLA PAPÍ!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons
JOHN PAUL BRAMMER
Simon & Schuster
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From popular LGBTQ advice columnist and writer John Paul Brammer comes a hilarious, heartwarming memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey growing up as a queer, mixed-race kid in America’s heartland to becoming the “Chicano Carrie Bradshaw” of his generation.

The first time someone called John Paul (JP) Brammer “Papi” was on the popular gay hookup app Grindr. At first, it was flattering; JP took this as white-guy speak for “hey, handsome.” Who doesn’t want to be called handsome? But then it happened again and again...and again, leaving JP wondering: Who the hell is Papi?

What started as a racialized moniker given to him on a hookup app soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column “¡Hola Papi!,” launching his career as the Cheryl Strayed for young queer people everywhere—and some straight people too. JP had his doubts at first—what advice could he really offer while he himself stumbled through his early 20s? Sometimes the best advice to dole outcomes from looking within, which is what JP has done in his column and book—and readers have flocked to him for honest, heartfelt wisdom, and of course, a few laughs.

In ¡Hola Papi!, JP shares his story of growing up biracial and in the closet in America’s heartland, while attempting to answer some of life’s toughest questions: How do I let go of the past? How do I become the person I want to be? Is there such a thing as being too gay? Should I hook up with my grade school bully now that he’s out of the closet? Questions we’ve all asked ourselves, surely.

¡Hola Papi! is for anyone—gay, straight, and everything in between—who has ever taken stock of their unique place in the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are a lot of quotable quotes and pithy aperçus in this book:

We can't change the events of our lives. They happen, and there they are. But the lines we draw to connect those events, the shapes we make and the conclusions we reach, those come from us. They are our design.
–and–
But one thing I’ve learned, and I’ve learned it more solidly than maybe I’ve learned anything else, is that humans are incapable of looking at anything clearly. Even the facts of our own lives—we can only hold a few at any given time, and they shift, they slip through our fingers, they rearrange themselves into new shapes and conspire to tell a different story.
–and–
I thought of myself more as “a person with unique difficulty accessing heterosexuality.”

See? I defy you not to lard these into your next all-gay klatsch and smile becomingly modestly as everyone tells you how wise you are. (Don't front...you know that's exactly what you thought as you read them.)

But as a story of JP Brammer's life the structure is wanting, and I wanted. I didn't reject the advice-column bits. I didn't resent their presence or simply find their simplicity simplistic. There is virtue in simplicity! Matisse was certainly correct, quoted in the "How to Describe a Dick" chapter, "First you have to forget all the {advice/memoir tales} that have been {written} before." And that is a tall, skinny, mushroom-headed problem. (This was occasioned by a question lobbed at Brammer, "how can I go on when I'm so obviously a failure?") Again, to quote but this time Brammer himself, with a freeze-framed penis before him, "I stared at it blankly. It stared back." (Which reminds me, go watch The Boys season 3, episode 1. Haw.) But that dick, the one JP Brammer needed to describe? He needed to describe it for work and where there's work there's deadlines and one of those was barrelling down on him. The dick in question, paused on his screen, needed to be described for the porn-ad website...one of those with glitzy photos and ads for things the guys doing the sex acts unquestionably do not need to concern themselves with...that needed clicks. That his words needed to elicit, because this isn't one of the dirty-boy blogs where the scenes are still-framed on, um, action shots shall we say.

This exisential crisis..."what the hell is there to say about this tediously same-ol' same-ol' goverment issue genital organ?"...is resolved, of course, though honestly it's by no means certain that his inspired choice made it onto that site. It's really not an area in which I have a lot of interest or expertise, those teasy-squeezy parts of the porn world. "All or nothing" is more my motto but at sixty-plus I'm just not, erm, titillated by suchlike carryin' on as in days of yore.

(Okay, I think Rob's already bored reading this so I can safely add "it says here.")

The issue for me in this read isn't the framing device or the chatty tone or the unabashed goofiness. It's the way it doesn't make *a*book* but a collection of columns. While there is charm in that, it's not what I expected when I was told that it was a memoir. I got the message from the subtitle, which is perfect..."How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons"...but it doesn't make a memoir. The Lambda Literary folk didn't just make up the category it was nominated within...the marketing stresses memoir. Advice, yes; essay, certainly; gay, goodness me yes! Not memoir.

So readers are cautioned to adjust expectations going in to the fun, the roller-coaster of emotions, the single-mindedly survival focused, read. I'll say this for Author Brammer: He knows the structure of an anecdote, the precise emotional trajectory of a story, like the veins on...um...well, he knows what he's up to.

There is no way I can get off this horse (!) without sounding double-entendre-y as hell. Go on and buy it.