WE ARE THE CRISIS, Convergence Saga #2 after NO GODS, NO MONSTERS

WE ARE THE CRISIS
CADWELL TURNBULL (Convergence Saga #2)
Blackstone Publishing
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In We Are the Crisis—the second book in the Convergence Saga from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull—humans and monsters come into conflict in a magical and dangerous world as civil rights collide with preternatural forces.

In this highly anticipated sequel, set a few years after No Gods, No Monsters, humanity continues to grapple with the revelation that supernatural beings exist. A werewolf pack investigates the strange disappearances of former members and ends up unraveling a greater conspiracy, while back on St. Thomas, a hurricane approaches and a political debate over monster’s rights ignites tensions in the local community.

Meanwhile, New Era—a pro-monster activist group—works to build a network between monsters and humans, but their mission is threatened by hate crimes perpetrated by a human-supremacist group known as the Black Hand. And beneath it all two ancient orders escalate their conflict, revealing dangerous secrets about the gods and the very origins of magic in the universe.

Told backward and forward in time as events escalate and unravel, We Are the Crisis is a brilliant contemporary fantasy that takes readers on an immersive and thrilling journey.

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My Review: I think this series of novels that discuss the sources of Otherness and the artificiality of the idea of a permanent identity deserves all the praise I can heap on it. Using modern culture's delight in cryptids and monsters as real entities, Author Turnbull offers a wise and inclusive look at how identity can be imposed from outside and then used to oppress and persecute the recipient of that imposed "self". Horror fiction is supposed to scare us with the monsters, not FOR them. This subversion of the literary status quo is ideally suited to slide in under the resistant person's radar and make them think again about what a monster is, and who decides what that identity means. This is something that has needed doing since the days of myth...Beowulf is, at the end of the day, about a mother seeking vengeance for the harm done to her child...and what could be more subversive than that?

The very concept of debating rights is absurd on its face. You don't grant rights. Rights are, then they get denied by the controlling elites to serve their own purposes. Granting rights is best framed as removing impediments unjustly placed in the path of those attempting to exercise their natural rights. When that fact comes dangerously close to becoming part of the great mass of people's consciousness, a crisis must be manufactured to distract and re-Other the group that is deemed undesirable by the controlling elites.

The existence of Others is necessary for the forces of control to make the eternally useful and rouinely succesful lie of Us-vs-Them work to absorb the mass of humanity in fighting against those who have the most in common with them so the controlling elites don't have to worry about how they can keep their power, privilege, and prestige intact against the outrage and hatred of those they oppress to serve them, not their own needs.

Political fiction done so well that, unless you already knew it was political, you wouldn't know. For that reason, I encourage you to gift it to your videogame addicted teen boy. Anything we can do to wedge his mind open a wee tiny bit for non-authoritarian thoughts to enter is good.

THE KINGDOM OF SAND, older isn't always wiser

THE KINGDOM OF SAND
ANDREW HOLLERAN
FSG
$18.00 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

The Publisher Says: One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.

The Kingdom of Sand is a poignant tale of desire and dread—Andrew Holleran’s first new book in sixteen years. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents—during the height of the AIDS epidemic—and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.

At the heart of the novel is the story of his friendship with Earl, whom he met cruising at the local boat ramp. For the last twenty years, he has been visiting Earl to watch classic films together and critique the neighbors. Earl is the only person in town with whom he can truly be himself. Now Earl’s health is failing, and our increasingly misanthropic narrator must contend with the fact that once Earl dies, he will be completely alone. He distracts himself with sexual encounters at the video porn store and visits to Walgreens. All the while, he shares reflections on illness and death that are at once funny and heartbreaking.

Holleran’s first novel, Dancer from the Dance, is widely regarded as a classic work of gay literature. The Kingdom of Sand displays all of Holleran’s considerable gifts; it’s an elegy to sex and a stunningly honest exploration of loneliness and the endless need for human connection, especially as we count down our days.

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My Review: I'm getting older. No, let's not be American about it: I'm old. Stories are very comforting when they tell you about yourself as you'd like to be. They're less comforting when they hold a mirror to ourselves as we are.
This isn't a comforting story for me to read.

Dancer from the Dance was the roadmap for how I wanted to be in the 1970s: Rooms full of men fucking each other's brains out? Parties with mind-altering substances galore?! Sign me up! I'm ready to start this kind of life! This book, not so much.

Mostly because illness, isolation, and the slightly tedious repetitiveness of sex are my reality, and aren't very interesting to me unless they're freshly observed. Let's be honest, what's ever going to make this stuff fresh to those within it? It is not, as far as I can see, possible to make excitement and anticipation from the routine, mundane, quotidian life of Getting Old. Bearing in mind as I do daily that getting old is a privilege denied to most people, it is a curiously samey process. I'm aware that there are people aging vigorously and pursuing, in their seventies, activity levels I never attained. I'm also aware that I am stunningly lucky not to be dead or permanently cognitively impaired after January 2023's strokes. I don't mean there's only one way to get old: I mean getting old, no matter which way you slice it, has certain common themes that don't rev my readerly engine above idle speed.

I looked over what I've just written, thought "this doesn't sound like a four-star review," and called my Young Gentleman Caller to read it to him. Thank goodness I did! After A Long Silence, he finally said, "Tedious repetitiveness? Thanks a lot." Explaining to him what I actually meant, aside from reassuring his bruised feelings about my real opinion of his prowess, clarified the subject that's bothered me about the book since I read it.

Holleran's over a decade older than I am. As I read about the life he was describing, I thought about the sameness of the unnamed PoV character's life as repetitive, even...perhaps especially...his unchanged relationship to sex. The expectation of desire for the same kind of sex into one's older age isn't a sign of vigor to me, but a sign of arrested adolescence. The concerns about isolation, in that context, also read as adolesent fears of not being Hot, of never finding friends/boyfriends/partners when it feels like everyone around you has them, in general of FOMO.

Seriously? You're still on about this? is what I'd say to this guy if I met him. I don't want an orgy or a three-way anymore, I want to spend that hour and a half in the more rewarding, interesting leisurely touching, stroking, and communing with Rob, the man I know and want to know better. That's a whole different experience from cruising the porn store as does our aging Casanova. Part of that is, again, down to my good luck. There is someone in my life who elicits these feelings from me, and is willing to reciprocate them. That's what I thought Earl meant to our PoV character, whose lack of a name feels to me like a reinforcement of this guy's utter and complete adolescent narcissism. "Only I am Real, everyone else is an extra in the movie of my life." And this is in spite of the fact that PoVman is basically spending the whole of his time in this book narrating Earl's decline and fall into the Endless!

Oh dear, again I'm veering into the not-highly-rating territory.

This is why I've had such trouble reviewing the book. It's a much better literary experience than I'm making it sound like. Look at the thoughts it's causing me to examine! Look at the depth of attention it summons out of me! I'm having interesting, important conversations with my Young Gentleman Caller because I need his help to process my feelings about the read.

Author Holleran is a fine wordsmith, with an opera librettist's ear for sentences that sing in my ear:

I believed somehow in the absurd idea that if you ate right you could live indefinitely. Even when, a decade after my mother‘s death, I began getting skin cancers, all I could think of was: how could this be? Given all the broccoli I’ve eaten? It must be loneliness, I concluded, the lack of a person to live for other than myself, since we are also told that health is psychosomatic.
–and–
The town to which Earl and my father retired was not one of those artificial communities created for people in the last stage of life with which Florida is associated. But it had its share of the elderly. It was good to be reminded by the Regular of another stage of life, especially when I stopped off at the post office on my way home from his shack. The people moving slowly toward the post office on walkers when I went to get the mail induced both pity and admiration; pity for their condition, admiration for their determination to keep going.
–and–
The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoined , I don’t know; when I asked my friend, he said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

There's a lot of this kind of thoughtful, careful observation in the book. Given the gargantuan tragedy and Black-Death-level reaping of the men in his generation's cohort, observing is safer than involving. The porn store isn't a casual or haphazard choice for the narrator's sex life. The reporting of life is safer than the living of it:

One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.
–and–
Leaving Florida, nevertheless, I always felt regret; though when I found myself back in New York my mother's voice on the telephone seemed so shrunken and small, I vowed that I would never waste time in that town again. How could I? I was not responsible for her happiness; she wanted me to live, and life was wasted every day I was there. Look how the noiseless spider, the relentless metronome, the secret thief, had staked their claim on even these two people, these once glamorous parents who had turned into a pair of country mice.
–and–
Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, "You are a separate person, you know," but I felt I wasn't. I couldn't get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.
–and–
I see in the distance on streets I don’t usually take, merely because I can see the glow of blue and green lights, the two most satisfying Christmas colors, no doubt because they are so melancholy.

I didn't find my life changed by this book but I did find in it much to interrogate, about myself, my present, my past; and that's a very rare thing for a book to do in a world of escapism and avoidance of the depths of experience. That Author Holleran did this while using surfaces and appearances and absences made it impressive to me on a literary level while keeping me at a greater distance from PoVman's life than I'd require to give the book my highest accolades.

Make no mistake, this is a good book. It's not great, but it's good, and I hope you'll read it one day soon.

Maybe borrow it from the library, though.

A FRACTURED INFINITY, the depths and lengths a man will travel for his true love & OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE, Pakistani gay coming-of-age family saga

OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE
TAYMOUR SOOMRO
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A charged, hypnotic debut novel about a boy's life-changing summer in rural Pakistan: a story of fathers, sons, and the consequences of desire.

At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate in upcountry, Pakistan. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family—to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive.

Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants: the people, who revere and revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro's Other Names for Love is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country's troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.

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

My Review: What there is to say about fathers and their gay sons...well, that's just an ocean of story without any limits that I'm aware of. Fathers and sons...disappointments...sadness and silence, rage and screaming...all and none and more. It's a relationship most sons have, even if sometimes it's a relationship with an absence or a cipher. It's always going to resonate with fathers because of the terror of being inadequate, as their own fathers were, and with sons for the same reason.

This short, powerful read is the kind of take on the evergreen that leaves the reader not sure where his sympathies lie. Rafik is not really sure what the hell to do with Fahad; and equally, Fahad is not sure how to take Rafik's overbearing attempts to induct him into a life and lifestyle inimical to him. Not solely heterosexuality...the powerful political and economic family that Rafik comes from and wants to perpetuate.

I don't suppose anyone reading this is surprised that this is the crux of the story.

What transpires, and how we respond to it, is all down to the manner in which this eternal and evergreen tale is told. I wasn't always sure I liked the third-person narrator's abrupt shifts from Rafik's to Fahad's point of view. It's effective, in the sense that it conveys the broken relationship and poor communication between father and son. It's not always pleasant, though. It can feel jarring, and while I accept that was Author Soomro's intent, it's not always a positive service to the story.

What the family saga, no matter how compact one makes it, always does is spread the emotional focus of a story. Mousey, Rafik's cousin and rival for control over their feudal family estate, is limned deftly in relatively few words. His presence is more air than flesh...and then Ali, the local of Rafik's family estate, the one whom he entrusts with manning-up his fey son, is from the moment he appears a fleshly figure, outlined in the light of young love and intense desire. And, like those things, as fleetingly there but always, always part of one's mind, heart, body.

The beautiful as well as beastly problems of family, then, are our roadmap. And their inevitable end. There's no one gets out of this family alive, my father once said to me; I've never been sure if it was humor, threat, or sad truth he spoke. And so it is with all families. I'm totally sure the events of this novel...and its multivarious progenitors, from Lawrence's Sons and Lovers back to Balzac's Sarrasine...took place in slightly different form somewhere, sometime. The gift Author Soomro offers us is that he found the uniquely, specifically Pakistani iteration of this deviant's tale, and deftly turned it into the Platonic solid of the story.

While the son never has a father he can relate to, he never gives his father any kind of solidity by denying him a future. A lot of what Rafik can't reconcile himself to is the way the world changes, has changed. It's a grandparent's trick, to turn that terror of loss into an anchor of immanence. Rafik and Fahad don't ever see the world through the same lenses. (Where did those glasses come from?) They, like real fathers and sons, never wonder "what can I do?" but bemoan "what could I have done?"

A story of great affecting power, told elegantly, with honest sadness and truthful anger. Sounds like a great way to spend a winter's afternoon reading.

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

A FRACTURED INFINITY
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link; any website that will not even allow you to search for its products without enabling cookies is not going to get redirects from me)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling race across the multiverse to save the infinite Earths—and the love of your life—from total destruction for fans of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Time Traveller's Wife and Rick and Morty.

Film-maker Hayes Figueiredo is struggling to finish the documentary of his heart when handsome physicist Yusuf Hassan shows up, claiming Hayes is the key to understanding the Envisioner—a mysterious device that can predict the future.

Hayes is taken to a top-secret research facility where he discovers his alternate self from an alternate universe created the Envisioner and sent it to his reality. Hayes studies footage of the other him, he discovers a self he doesn’t recognize, angry and obsessive, and footage of Yusuf...as his husband.

As Hayes finds himself falling for Yusuf, he studies the parallel universe and imagines the perfect life they will live together. But their lives are inextricably linked to the other reality, and when that couple's story ends in tragedy Hayes realises he must do anything he can to save Yusuf's life. Because there are infinite realities, but only one Yusuf.

With the fate of countless realities and his heart in his hands, Hayes leads Yusuf on the run, tumbling through a kaleidoscope of universes trying to save it all. But even escaping into infinity, Hayes is running out of space—soon he will have to decide how much he’s willing to pay to save the love of his life.

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

My Review: Likeable people can be reprehensible. Gay men who will do literally...literally...anything for the men they love can be villains. Because, you realize as Hayes perpetrates some truly terrible actions while retaining the same charm and winning ways as led you to invest in him from the beginning, the world doesn't have that many univalent monsters.

What I love best about stories with flawed protagonists is how relatable they are. We're all flawed. And Hayes, he's flawed enough to make him a menace, what he does...causes...to be the engine of this exciting and action-heavy multiverse thriller. Being awakened to an undreamt-of reality, to be chucked into a world that one never once thought might be real, to have the shocking and sudden revelation that someone until now a stranger is, in fact, The One...that's just the first few pages! This script is gonna keep the butts in the seats with no popcirn trips for sure!

Well...okay, that's a small exaggeration. It's not quite that action-packed but it sure as hell feels as though it is. The strangeness of a filmmaker being the one and only person who could resolve the problem of how to use, whether to believe, a fortune-telling device was, honestly, short-changed. It's a point raised, dealt with by saying, "yep that's how it is" and we're off to the races! In fact, there is a lot of the world-building that is treated in this "just the facts, ma'am" laconic way and then it's Gospel.

You did notice the absence of a fifth star...now you know (most of) why.

The merry chase that Hayes and Yusuf, the inamorato, go on across the dimensions is like reading a spec script from a super-excitable young person with not clue one what "budget" means. What makes that fun is the budget is your mind's dopamine-reward system. What makes that sometimes wearing is the film metaphor is the spine of the book...it is literally holding every scene in the story up, leading them together, and the casting of the characters is exactly that: Casting. It's going to be a rough ride for some. I am one. But the roughnss of the ride isn't a deal-breaker because the way this sled handles is *chef's kiss*

Think of Boston. English people, think of Oxford. Got the picture set? Now...change the color of the streetlights and make the roofs green. That's the experience of traveling in Hayes's multiverse...it really is his, he (one of him) is the inventor of the device that enables all this traveling that we're here talking about. And that Hayes, whom the characters we're following most closely refer to as "Figueiredo" to be clear that they mean the evil SOB who wants (for perfectly understandable reasons) to blow the multiverse up one strand at a time, even he isn't a caricature. Insane. Lost to Humanity. But not ever a risible over-the-top cartoon villain.

But those green-roofed mercury-vapor-lit alt-timelines are real, and he's made it impossible for "our" Hayes and Yusuf not to know, and deal with knowing, what it costs to stay alive in a truly random quantumverse. It changes a person to realize what carnage they've left in their wake through this one "wild and precious life" that Mary Oliver so beautifully committed poetry to describe. Now...think about this...there's a lot more than one, and you now know because you can't not know exactly what carnage you've left behind in it all.

It's damned hard to believe this is Author Tavares's first novel. The economy with which he built the pyre of stakes for each strand of the multiverse...and the aplomb with which he lights the stakes into an inferno of loss and rage and gut-hollowing sadness...usually come to a later-career novelist. It takes time to build faith and willingness to go all in and all out at the looming obstacles armed only with one's talent. Yet here he is, attempting and succeeding first time out.

So maybe a few details fell under the table. A last serving of your favorite dish disappeared and you don't have a dog to blame. Big fat deal! You're in great hands as a truth gets told you: Gay men love hard, care deeply, and fight dirty to protect their man.

Even when it's not pretty.

This is what I look for. It's what I want more of. And it's only his first novel! What a great way to celebrate a new year: Read a high-delivery first novel.

A MINOR CHORUS, chorus yes but not a minor one & HUGS AND CUDDLES, the most amusingly inapt title of 2022

A MINOR CHORUS
BILLY-RAY BELCOURT
W.W. Norton
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

ONE OF NBC'S BEST LGBTQ BOOKS OF 2022!

The Publisher Says: A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief.

In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

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

My Review: When one reads the book description, there's very little doubt that most of us will be reading this as autofiction...as Billy-Ray Belcourt using the antique roman à clef to give us the keys to the kingdom. But that's never said anywhere. It's not part of the interviews I've read or listened to. I think, in fact, that's a quiet and much-thought-over means of demonstrating how identities are forced on us. Are forced by us, the readers of a novel, onto the author of the novel.

Indigeniety is an indignity of an identity. "Indigenous" is a label of Otherness, much as is "Queer" or "Gay" or "Two-Spirit." Labels are the source of stories, though, and the world's words were invented to make stories so us gossipy apes could make Othering a thing. Assigned by others, Othering is a burden many of us bear and many of us bear multiple ways. We aren't, as it unfolds, allowed much in the way of access to the main character's self-ness; he's collecting data, having copious amounts of sex, and eliciting intimacy from people still carrying horrible scars from being abandoned as children, being addicted to substances, being belittled and having their characters besmirched for queerness or Indigeniety. Or both. No one in this mill-race of ideas and images is in sharp focus. It's that fact that ate a star off my rating...if I have only misty-edged portraits to look at instead of vibrant, violent even, alive people, I respond without the visceral burst of passion I seek in novel-reading as I read their stories.

Author Belcourt being a tyro novelist, and his profession being a poet, this is completely understandable as a technique. It felt chosen, selected for its effect, not as though he simply didn't know how to do any different. That's why that fourth star is still there. I'm forgiving of first-novel mistakes or overreaches but I note them and grade my responses accordingly. I did not get that "oops" sensation from these memory-speaking characters, despite the fact that I wanted to know more about them. More was not to be offered. That is, as I realized, part of the point: What the reader wants is what the colonial master wants, more! more! always more! where Author Belcourt isn't offering it.

There is, then, a subtlety of reflection in this examination of the gulfs between striving and surviving; between surviving and thriving. The novel's structure and style are offers of mirror time. See what this world's demands cost? The price that some must pay while most will never even realize it's exacted on their behalf?

It's a delight of a read. It speaks its truth honestly and makes its voice honey-sweet.

But it is here to tear the tape off your eyes and yank the sock from your mouth.

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

HUGS AND CUDDLES
JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL (tr. Edgar Garbelotto)
Two Lines Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After abandoning his traditional life in a deteriorating Porto Alegre, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles zealously recommits himself to a man he calls “the engineer”, a childhood friend with whom he shared a pivotal sexual encounter. Many years have passed since their prepubescent wrestling; everywhere around them is a nation in decline. Representatives of the Brazilian state—everyone from government officials to the impoverished—endlessly harass passers-by for donations to “the cause,” even as a mysterious plague rages. Never mind that. Our insatiable narrator, driven to discover his true self through increasingly transgressive sexual urges, is on an epic journey through the shadows of this dysfunctional yet polite society.

The resulting novel is the late João Gilberto Noll’s most radical statement: A Book of Revelations-grade voyage to the end of gender and the outermost reaches of sexual and artistic expression. Nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Hugs and Cuddles is an unapologetically explicit fable of fluidity that takes readers from decaying city centers to the dark corridors of a mysterious submarine to a miserable hovel in the rainforest, where, at long last, our narrator finds peace.

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

My Review: Remember when I reviewed Quiet Creature on the Corner back in 2016? It's the very first Noll story to appear in English. It contained non-consensual heterosex, and it gave me a definite dirty-old-man vibe. That is to say, the book's for a dirty old man not that I'm one!

Buckle up for this tale, ye of little sexcapade tolerance.

There is nothing for it but to say it: Noll's got the one-handed reader squarely in his sights from giddy-up to whoa. If you can think of a way to think about sex, it's in this book. I'm not at that stage of life anymore, but let me tell you it's a heavy breather's dream book.

There is a salad dressing of family secrets, of loyalty given but not reciprocated, reciprocated but betrayed, of gender identities as traps and prisons and comforting hiding places...it's a story that never settles into one groove. There are half a dozen grooves. They each matter, and in the end, each contains a clue to the preoccupations of Author Noll's writing: Honesty and clarity are only so useful in this life but a well-crafted line of bullshit can guide, sustain, and reward you.

The style of the book should be no issue to those who read Milkman or Poguemahone. It's a long, divagating paragraph of startling complexity. Yet the burden of the lyric is simple, that being centered on sex as activity is only fun if you play with sex as biology defines it. The way in and the way out of a soul is the same as it is for a body.

If the roman-fleuve formal technique were somehow packed tight into this book's sausage-casing of 240 pages, it would resemble the scope and the effect of the paragraph as we move from a submarine to a rural shack, from the kind of sex that lives in your memory to the kind you'd pay money to forget. There's not one page not steeped in sex, whether actual sexual activity or contemplating it.

All of which, most curiously, is the opposite of erotically thrilling to me. I quickly discounted the erotic tone of the writer's discussion of personhood, belonging, and power dynamics. It became for me a kind of background, a soundtrack...the sounds!...and thus led me to the sad, wistful realization that Author Noll was always questing, Quixote-like, for the one greatest possible reward of sex: Connection. Giving your sexual energy to someone in return for their emotional vulnerability isn't routinely rewarded. It felt to me that, through this entire read, I was hearing a longing tone and a sad wistful sigh as another orgasm rocked the narrator.

It is, in the end, a sad acknowledgment of the "eternal hell of libido" as the organzing principle of a life. Fascinating, strong meat yet savory in its easy-goes-down tartare preparation. Definitely a worthy addition to your shelf.

OUTSIDE, Ragnar Jónasson's non-Dark Iceland thriller & DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST, 1920s London noir about lost innocence

OUTSIDE
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Four friends. One night. Not everyone will come out alive . . .

When a deadly snowstorm strikes the Icelandic highlands, four friends seek shelter in a small, abandoned hunting lodge.

It is in the middle of nowhere and there's no way of communicating with the outside world.

They are isolated, but they are not alone . . .

As the night darkens, and fears intensify, an old tragedy gradually surfaces - one that forever changed the course of their friendship.

Those dark memories could hold the key to the mystery the friends now find themselves in.

And whether they will survive until morning . . .

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

My Review: Short, intense, and darkly atmospheric novella by one of Iceland's most valuable exports.

This honestly feels like a climactic scene from a longer novel that Ragnar didn't think was working, but it was just too darn good to let go to waste. We join the dramatis personae in medias res, we experience the building tension of a climax, and then...that was it...? Abrupt ending that doesn't do a lot of explaining, at least to me. It makes the whole exercise of reading the book just a bit frustrating to invest in the idea of this kind of pressure-cooker plot and then...stop.

I think everyone over 21 knows that we're defined by our worst moments, our biggest lapses of judgment. (If there are kids in your life, you *really* know this!) And we all know there are people in our lives whose place is more theirs by habit than by any desire on your, often nor their, part. People change and when we're young we think that won't matter. It's only as the weight of coping with our own lives becomes more and more demanding that we realize the weight of carrying someone whose place in our life is no longer a good investment of our energy.

The problem for me, in reading this chilling short take, is that these emotions are so common to all adults that to see them turned into a justification for chillingly, cruelly premeditated murder is asking me to go a bit farther than I'm generally prepared to go. The murderer in this piece is so coldly obsessed with a terrible event that no other thing can be allowed to enter their mental sphere.

Sociopaths aren't delightful company, and the ugliness of the murderer's interior is too much the focus of the story for me to get anything I wanted in the way of understanding out of the read. I left as revolted as I entered, and that's not a good reult for me.

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

DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST
MARTIN CATHCART FRODEN
Freight Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.59 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping historical noir set during the amphetamine-fuelled craze for velodrome racing which took London by storm in the late 1920s.

Into this world stumbles Paul, a bewildered Scottish farmboy running away from home. Powerfully built with a fierce passion for cycling, he is taken under the wing of Silas, a local loan shark, and from there enters a world he is ill-equipped to survive.

As the races get harder, the bets get larger, and the terrifying Mr Morton starts to take an interest in Paul's career. For fans of Peaky Blinders and Brighton Rock, Devil Take the Hindmost is a thrilling ride through a historical London that is rarely visited.

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

My Review: So, you've read the synopsis. You've seen the way the parade's headed. And, you clever thing, you've seen my rating. Why isn't it up to a four?

Because it was a very good story that didn't need to make Silas, the intermediary between the owner and the athlete, have a queer passion for the athlete to make its point.

It's not like it never happens. There's an entire subsection of M/M romances based around this plot. But those are *reciprocated* queer feelings. These, with the best will in the world, are not. I hasten to say this isn't ever promised to us. It's never even said out loud in the story's description. It's still there, though, one gets the little tickle behind the eyeballs that means either excess pollen or gay subtext is in the blurb's air.

Then we get to the story itself. To the author's credit there isn't a lot of dishonesty in the presentation of the gay subtext. It's there, it's known...just nothing comes of it. So, though I found this oft-told tale well done, and the author's gift for dialogue pretty darn decent, this story suffers from the same thing that My Policeman suffered from: Yes, in the 2010s; not so much in the 2020s.

What led to a whole star-and-a-half going back onto the rating is the way the athlete, a raw innocent from the nowhere that was Scotland in the 1920s, simply doesn't care about the man who's in love with him being a man. I mean, it's not for him, but it's also not a problem because they're really good friends and that's what he values the most. The ending, which did not surprise me one bit, did satisfy me. I was completely comfortable with the way Author Froden sent these characters off into the world to meet their destinies. Why? Because, in every case, there was a powerful sense of each one grabbing the power to *create* that ending. Win, lose, or draw, each characted earned their destiny.

Nothing whatever wrong with a revenge story, in my book at least.

THE PLOTTERS, Korean alt-Seoul murderfest & DEATH ON THE PIER, debut QUILTBAG mystery set in the Golden Age

DEATH ON THE PIER
JAMIE WEST
Brabinger Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.52 (?!) Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A murder mystery playwright turns real-life detective when, during one of his plays, an actress is shot and killed, while an unsuspecting audience watches on.

This theatrical murder mystery debut from Jamie West introduces Bertie Carroll, one of the most successful playwrights of the 1930s, and his old school friend Chief Detective Inspector Hugh Chapman. Together they team up to see if they can solve the mystery.

During the performance, the audience watches former Hollywood star, Celia Hamilton, as she is shot onstage, unaware that a real murder is taking place. It’s only when the curtain falls that the cast realise that something has gone horribly wrong.

Did someone swap the bullets in the prop gun for real ones, without anyone noticing? The actress who fired the gun doesn't seem to have any reason for wanting her dead, but is she hiding something?

Together, Bertie and Hugh must unravel the clues as they interview their suspects. As they do, their own friendship is rekindled. But is there something from their own past that needs to be uncovered? Why did Hugh want to meet up after all these years apart?

The story is set in and around The Palace Pier Theatre in Brighton, which no longer exists. This "lost" theatre has been lovingly recreated in the pages of this book.

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

My Review: I do love Golden Age mysteries. This one, a modern author's take on one of the best tropes for a murder mystery set in 1933 I know of, satisfied me in almost all ways.

The play as the scene of a crime trope is one I genuinely love. All Star Cast, a Golden-Age mystery I read via the Internet Archive, uses the same plot with a few embellishments that, frankly, this book didn't need and doesn't miss. I was enchanted by Bertie, our PoV character, being so absolutely down-to-Earth and commonsensical...I think playwrights absolutely must be both those things or they simply can not do the complex and complicated job of telling a story while moving people around the stage without feeling clanky-creaky-affected. There's so much of that delight present here, even in the descriptions of the action.

What I also loved was Hugh's evident pleasure in Bertie's company. He's a senior policeman...he knows what's at stake in dropping as many hairpins as he does for Bertie to notice! But he still does it, and he still affords Bertie's insights and insider knowledge of the play (which he wrote) and the players (with whom he's acquainted) and theater's many strange, invisible-to-outsiders customs and crotchets that explain how the murder was accomplished.

I believe with all my heart that we'll see these two together in some fashion at a later date. (Especially after Hugh engineers that swim. He clearly wanted a look!)

Why the murder was accomplished, now, that was pure Golden Age stuff. I thought there was nothing left to surprise me in Mysteryland...but there certainly was. The motive for the murder was straight out of Ngaio Marsh! I loved it, because I was reading (by that time) as though I was in 1933. It's just delightful to get that level of buy-in out of an old, tired grouch like me. And to have a real Golden Age detective who is One of Us, a Friend of Dorothy's, a queer gent...appropriately discreet but unmistakably gay, as minor character Teddy proves in his bluff, blokey-jokey way.

I so delighted in this experience. The author's evident love for theater, and his perfectly achieved evocation of a theater in Brighton long gone, came clearly through. It felt as though I was not only in that vanished theater, but in 1933, and among actors exactly like the ones in the story. Murder at the Matinee can't come early enough in 2023 for me!

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

THE PLOTTERS
KIM UN-SU (tr. Sora Kim-Russell)
Doubleday & Co.
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the novelist dubbed "the Korean Henning Mankell" (The Guardian) comes a fantastical crime novel set in an alternate Seoul where assassination guilds compete for market dominance. Perfect for fans of Han Kang and Patrick deWitt.

Behind every assassination, there is an anonymous mastermind—a plotter—working in the shadows. Plotters quietly dictate the moves of the city's most dangerous criminals, but their existence is little more than legend. Just who are the plotters? And more important, what do they want?

Reseng is an assassin. Raised by a cantankerous killer named Old Raccoon in the crime headquarters "The Library," Reseng never questioned anything: where to go, who to kill, or why his home was filled with books that no one ever read. But one day, Reseng steps out of line on a job, toppling a set of carefully calibrated plans. And when he uncovers an extraordinary scheme set into motion by an eccentric trio of young women—a convenience store clerk, her wheelchair-bound sister, and a cross-eyed librarian—Reseng will have to decide if he will remain a pawn or finally take control of the plot.

Crackling with action and filled with unforgettable characters, The Plotters is a deeply entertaining thriller that soars with the soul, wit, and lyricism of real literary craft.

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

My Review: Oh, you're gonna love this:

As if it wasn’t ironic enough that the country’s top assassination provider was brazenly running his business in a building owned by an international insurance company; the same assassination provider was also simultaneously managing a bodyguard firm and a security firm. But just as a vaccine company facing bankruptcy will ultimately survive not by making the world's greatest vaccine but, rather, the world's worst virus, so, too, did bodyguard and security firms need the world's most evil terrorists in order to prosper, not the greatest security experts. That was capitalism, Hanja understood how the world could curl around and bite its own tail like the uroboros serpent. And he knew how to translate that into business and extract the maximum revenue. There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parceled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace. A business like that would never go under.

–and–

“People think villains like me are going to hell. But that’s not true. Villains are already in hell. Living every moment in darkness without so much as a single ray of light in your heart, that’s hell. Shivering in terror, wondering when you’ll become a target when the assassins will appear. True hell is living in a constant state of fear without even knowing that you’re in hell.”

Witty, trenchant, and true. I would go so far as to say tendentious. The wonder of meeting Reseng is that his existence is so extreme, committing murders for a living, and yet so extremely simple. Show up at this place at that time and do your job...kill. Like working at a meat-packing plant or a fish cannery. People aren't in any significant way more important than cattle or catfish. In this hypercapitalist alt-Seoul, there's little enough difference paid to any even notional difference between them, when it comes to one of the Plotters making a meticulous and scrupulously untraceable plan to off the person they're being paid to murder.

Make no mistake, these are murders, and they are violent. Author Kim does not stint on the violence. What makes it different from all those ghastly Stieg Larsson clones is that it's not sexual violence. There's a modicum of sex, and even a brief interlude where Reseng, having gotten himself in the crosshairs of nasty competing assassins because his boss (and sole parent figure since he was orphaned) is getting shoved out of the business, explores domesticity. It's...bizarre. To him as well, which is why it doesn't last.

The whole novel unfolds at the strangest pace. If you've watched Squid Game or Parasite, you'll see it here: the off-kilter way pacing is handled for us calibrated to US norms. It serves the plot in all of these cases, and it makes this story's universe really *feel* genuine, lived-in, and solid. I think that's a major plus compared to most of the violent thrillers I've read.

What caused me to give the read four stars in place of another half was, in fact, the mismatch between the violence of Reseng's profession, his philosophical musings about it (I chose one illustrating what I'm talking about above), and the cool remove of his actions and reactions. These things don't work together as well as it seems to me others believe they do. It's like watching a Godard film with a boy you want to bonk and then not getting any after you've invested unrecoverable hours trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

For all that, this here's a terrific entertaining read. Alienation, outrage, warped filial devotion, blood and gore...all present and accounted for. It's a weird trip and I'm glad I took it.

DEAD LETTERS FROM PARADISE, lesbian sleuth in 1960s North Carolina & MY POLICEMAN, well-matched book and film...you can find both at Amazon!

DEAD LETTERS FROM PARADISE
ANN McMAN
Bywater Books
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: April 1960.

Gunsmoke is the most popular show on TV. Elvis Presley tops the Billboard charts. A charismatic young senator named John F. Kennedy is running for president. And, in North Carolina, four young Black men sit down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and demand service. Enter Esther Jane (EJ) Cloud, a forty-something spinster who manages the Dead Letter Office at the Winston-Salem post office. EJ leads a quiet life in her Old Salem ancestral home and spends her free time volunteering in the town’s 18th-century hortus medicus.

One sunny Spring morning, EJ’s simple life is turned upside down when the town’s master gardener unceremoniously hands her a packet of handwritten letters that have all been addressed to a nonexistent person at the garden and expects EJ to “tend to them.” This simple act sets in motion a chain of events that will lead EJ on a life-altering quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious letter writer—and into a surprising head-on confrontation with the harsh realities of the racial injustice that is as deeply rooted in the life of her community as the ancient herbs cultivated in the Moravian garden.

When EJ is forced to read the letters to look for clues about the anonymous sender, what she discovers are lyrical tales of a forbidden passion that threaten to unravel the simple contours of her unexamined life. EJ’s official quest soon morphs into a journey of self-discovery as she becomes more deeply enmeshed in the fate of the mysterious letter writer, “Dorothea.” Her surprising accomplice in solving the mystery of the letters becomes one, Harrie Hart: a savvy, street smart ten-year-old, wielding an eye patch and a limitless supply of aphorisms. Together, Harrie and EJ make seminal pilgrimages to the tiny town of Paradise to try and uncover the identity of the mercurial sender and, ultimately, learn a better way to navigate the changing world around them.

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

My Review: I love Ann McMan's way of approaching a story. I understood I was reading about a closeted-even-from-herself lesbian instantly, from the moment EJ was introduced to me. I had a lesbian couple as "grandmothers" of a sort, best friends of my mother's for decades. They were Southern ladies, they were clearly a couple, and it...just didn't matter. They came to our house for Thanksgiving. They were constantly in our conversations about family, and had one name between them: "Sara-Lucy" since their names were Sara and Lucy; we just didn't need to say "and" because they were always a unit to all of us.

EJ and her friends were the kind of people, then, that I grew up knowing and loving. I strongly suspect Author McMan had someone(s) similar to my belovèd Sara-Lucy in her young queer life. She loves EJ as much as the child Harrie, EJ's shadow-cum-sidekick, does. Fay Marian is my nominee for that treasured role...the Moravian Herb Garden is such a perfectly chosen project for a group of lesbians to choose as a social hub.

What made the story itself, the dead letters that EJ receives to unite with their intended recipient or reunite with their sender (both unknown at the start), so beautifully chosen was the way Author McMan used these artifacts of thwarted love and strangled passion to bring EJ into a fuller understanding of Life as she *could* live it. She is living, no really she's just spending her one life unsatisfyingly, incompletely, almost entirely in the Dead Letter Office. As great a contrast as you can imagine is the child Harrie, so curious and open, so wise and still so innocent. She is a character I simply wanted to hug every time she came on the page.

I'd've rated the book a full five stars had I not felt that the period-appropriate race relations issues been less integral to the story than it was used as a grace note within the story. The issue isn't meant to be foregrounded...so the smart money says don't use it. In the present moment, the in-between handling of it comes across more as a detraction from than a point in favor of the read.

Still leads me straight (!) to Ann McMan's extensive backlist. I want more and I mean to have it. Thanks to my dear old reading buddy whose nudge pointed me in this direction. You're the best, Sister Woman.

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

MY POLICEMAN
BETHAN ROBERTS
Penguin Books
$17.00 trade paper, if Mr. Styles's face from the film being on the book is an added bonus

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Now a motion picture starring Harry Styles and Emma Corrin, an exquisitely told, tragic tale of thwarted love.

It is in 1950's Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim, gently guiding her through the water in the shadow of the city's famous pier and Marion is smitten—determined her love alone will be enough for them both. A few years later near the Brighton Museum, Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted, and opens Tom's eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world of art, travel, and beauty. Tom is their policeman, and in this age it is safer for him to marry Marion and meet Patrick in secret. The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.

In this evocative portrait of midcentury England, Bethan Roberts reimagines the real life relationship the novelist E. M. Forster had with a policeman, Bob Buckingham, and his wife. My Policeman is a deeply heartfelt story of love's passionate endurance, and the devastation wrought by a repressive society.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY LIVE AND DIE ON OUR PATRONAGE.

My Review: This is a fictionalized version of the actual lived life of EM Forster, his policeman lover Robert Buckingham, and his lover's wife May.

This is also gay trauma porn, a film starring a straight(ish) actor in a gay(ish) role AGAIN, and an accurate presentation of the ways and means used by gay men in the past to muddle through this rough thing we call Life. I had a gay uncle in Buckingham's generation, so I've heard the stories firsthand.

I'm not going to tiptoe around the fact that this book was written more than a decade ago, which means the cultural landscape was quite different. This true story, only lightly fictionalized, has lost none of its power to move someone whose desire is to be let in on the hard, terrible work of loving someone more than they love you back, and the horrible, disfiguring things that jealousy can lead a person to do. I was appalled by Marion's actions in the book, which were NOT the actions of May Buckingham. I truly understand why Author Roberts chose to make this shift, though. The story's drama would've been more literary fiction-lite without it. As it is, this read is much more like sudsy, beautiful Ethan Frome in its impact.

I'm also not going to tiptoe around the fact that Mr. Styles, whose public presentation of self leads me to think this story's lineaments resonated on a deeply personal level with him, is still publicly straight and playing a role where the character's only assuming the mask of straightness where his heart and his cock are engaged elsewhere. Same old, same old...but let me say this now: He does a damned fine job of playing Tom, and he deserves credit for doing the job at all. We're sliding into another darker age for QUILTBAG people, it seems, after some modest gains were made. Mr. Styles's metrosexual-shading-into-heteroflexible persona is very risky, and he doesn't seem to shy away from it as hard as, say, Tom Hanks did after Philadelphia thirty years ago.

The book will be overshadowed by the film for many reasons. Not the least of them is that the film has pretty people who enacted simulated sex for our collective titillation. (Something Mr. Styles does with, erm, style and verve.) That is not, to be blunt, a terrible loss. This book is nicely written, tells an involving story, but it disappeared for most of a decade without leaving a ripple...for a reason.

Because when you're in love with someone for the first time, their name is enough. Just seeing my hand form Tom's name was enough. Almost.

–and–

In those days it was rare, wasn't it, Patrick, for Tom's voice to become what you might call serious; there was always a lot of up-and-down in it, a delicacy, almost a musicality (no doubt that's how you heard it), as thought you couldn't quite believe anything he said. Over the years, his voice lost some of its musicality, partly, I think, in reaction to what happened to you; but even now, occasionally, it's like there's a laugh behind his words, just waiting to sneak out.

–and–

I'd almost forgotten the joy of waking up and, before you've even opened your eyes, knowing by the shape of the mattress beneath you, by the warmth of the sheets, that he's still there.

Nice lines, precise observations, a deft touch in siting them within the storyverse. Nothing at all wrong, or even clumsy, in any of it; take my word for it, were Bethan Roberts to have dropped a clanger I'd've gleefully snipped it out and plopped it here, dripping venom and blood, for your (oh okay, my) delectation. I'm a grouchy old curmudgeon who wanted to dislike this book, and couldn't. I also wanted to dislike Mr. Styles playing Tom, and couldn't. I'm in the nasty, frustrating position of needing to praise, however grudgingly, the film and the book, the actor and the characters, that I wanted to bash.

The film, out on 4 November 2022 via Prime Video, is very much worth your time. The book is as well...buy it if the Kindle edition is on sale, or borrow it from your library if not. Reading the book first will not damage your appreciation for the film nor will seeing the film first make you wonder where the hell they dug that story out of the book from in the first place.

I just wanted excellent, not very good, so I'm out of sorts. That is, however, my issue and not the book or its film's problem.

FRACTURE, Holocaust gay love affair & BEFORE ALL THE WORLD, gay Jew and his Black lover in Depression-era Philadelphia

BEFORE ALL THE WORLD
MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Picador's trade paper edition out 10 October 2023 for $19.00

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Read Jean Hets's review here!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.

"ikh gleyb nit az di gantze velt iz kheyshekh."
"I do not believe that all the world is darkness."

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles—fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep—a Black man from the Seventh Ward, a fellow traveler of Red Emma’s, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.

Lion is haunted by memories of life before, in Zatelsk, where everyone in his village, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

Then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. And surrounding Gittl are malokhim, the spirits of her siblings.

Flowing and churning and seething with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way ahead, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

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

My Review: I fear what I am about to say will doom a very fine read in too many of y'all's eyes: This isn't a standard-English-only novel. The characters sometimes speak Yiddish, sometimes speak as though mentally translating Yiddish into English on the fly, and all of it at the author's preferred energetic pace. The best I can say about those whose reading doesn't often stretch to variants of English is, there are very helpful footnotes.

Oh well. I had to say it despite the fact that most of y'all just clicked over to I Can Has Cheezburger? for a chuckle or two.

If you're still here, let me assure you that there's a lot to love about this story. Leyb/Lion, a gay Jew, is really and truly alive for me; his on-again, off-again love for the surprising Charles, a Black labor-organizing socialist-sympathizing Yiddish-speaking multihyphenate whose precarious identities are beautifully balanced. Their love story, to my gay eye vanishingly light on sex, is only one of the story's love stories. Gittl, a poet/seer of angels, is Leyb/Lion's nowsister who was presumed killed in a Red Army pogrom he avoided by being thrown out of Zatelsk for his faggoty ways. She shows up in Philadelphia, mirabile dictu, and is fêted by the middle-class Jewish community led by a soi-disant Baroness there as a harbinger of socialist paradise...despite almost dying at the hands of the "socialist" Soviets. This lionization ends when Gittl and Charles, um, well.

How this dissonant collection of adherents and believers and practitioners harmonizes their modes of being, their inner identities, and their actions is as one would expect: inconsistently and imperfectly and, all too often, inconsiderately. Every adult has learned to accept that others love in their own ways, or has been carted off to a safe place with lots of lovely pills to manage the aftermath of refusing the lesson. Leyb/Lion and Charles with their utterly amazing intersections of identity are, to no one's surprise, among the most wounded. Charles's belief in the socialist revolution survives the movement's apathy towards acknowledging the hideous harm caused by slavery, and its continuing horrors and cruelties. Leyb/Lion's gayness, well...Jews weren't mad for it then, though I understand there are more accepting branches of Judaism in modern times, and have no reluctance about letting him know he's less than, lower down in their esteem because of it. Gittl's a woman. What else needs be said, that fully explains the horrors she has and will endure before, during, and likely after amerike, philadelphiye, the doctor who slurmed out (of) his amerikanische, tooth jutting mouth the horrible, cruel orders to sedate her...are all in Life's past. It is this dissonance, however, that shaved a half-star off my rating. I wasn't as convinced as I thought the author expected me to be that these people would enact the steps they danced to. I was close to believing it for Gittl and less so for Leyb/Lion; Charles, the man made of and for Love, perhaps least of all. It wasn't an existential, "what are you even talking about?" level of dissonance but a quietly uneasy mental drumbeat of "...really...?" throughout the read.

“What will you do before all the world?”

That is the heart of the novel; that is the wisdom the reader is offered by the read. It's not clear to me that the characters *answer* this question. It is clear to me that they live in its words, that they think inside the whorls of that question mark and fall onto the finality of the period at its base.

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

FRACTURE
ELYSE HOFFMAN
Project 613 Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-wrenching WW2 story of forbidden love and torn allegiances.

Franz Keidel is a monsterous SS soldier: loyal, hateful, and devoted to Hitler. With a cold heart, he hunts down his Führer’s enemies, but one fateful mission will fracture his shield of ice.

While hunting for Jews, Franz stumbles across a familiar face: Amos Auman, his childhood friend. Amos is the only source of joy in Franz’s life, but he is also a Jew. Unable to bring himself to kill his friend, Franz vows to protect Amos from his fellow Nazis.

As Franz spends more time with Amos, bringing him food and books, he falls in love with his kind-hearted friend. How could he fall in love with a man, a Jew? How can he continue to hate Jews when a Jew has thawed his icy heart?

And what will Franz do if he has to choose between Amos and his loyalty to Hitler? What choices does he have when he is already beyond redemption?

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

My Review: I think a lot of us in the QUILTBAG community have forgotten, or at least not paid much attention to, the fact that Jews who were gay during the Nazi era were doubly endangered by their identities (where do y'all imagine the pink triangle symbol still widely used in our community came from if not a repurposing of a hate symbol?). It's simple, really, to focus on the six-million-dead mantra; there's no such count, either kept or kept alive in the public's awareness, for QUILTBAG or other victims of the eugenic nightmare of Nazi Germany and its eager hench-rats all over conquered Europe.

Amos is doubly blessed, then, as a gay Jew...two targets on his thin shoulders. Franz, abused and brutalized all childhood long, found such refuge as was possible with Amos and his family. But events conspire to separate the boys, as is usual in life. What counts for more with Franz than any memories of happiness is the community and sense of belonging that he finds in the hate-filled and -fueled ideological mob of brutes and bastards that replicate his abusive family...from the inside this time, as he gets to be the abuser instead of the abused.

Meeting fugitive Jew Amos again, knowing it's his friend Amos, and being in the position of power over Amos instead of dependent on him, his family, for such kindness as he ever knew, enables Franz to find a way through the maze of rage and pain he's carried inside for his whole life. He chooses, in a split second, a course of honor and love when he has accepted the course of hatred and violence that come naturally to him. To all humans, really. His decision to lie in order to save Amos's life is the crack in his armor that will lead him to accept the truth about himself and thus about his world. He loves Amos as a friend, he desires Amos as a lover, and he must then reject the lies and distortions he's been embracing as fundamental to his sense of himself to be the self who deserves Amos's return of love.

The first-kiss scene between the young men was very moving.

That might have made the inevitable ending more saddening, more painfully awfully real. One knows this can't, outside the realm of fairy tale, end in Happily Ever After. But the actual events are a gut-punch of reality after a honeymoon of discovery and love. (Side note: The Epilogue wasn't successful to me. It's a full-star deduction for silliness.)

But the four-star rating above should tell you what you need to know about my opinion of the story. It's a shame nothing made by human hands can be perfect, or at least not often, but perfect is the enemy of good. This is a good story told well. If it didn't actually, factually happen this way somewhere, I'll be surprised. And that ain't nothin' in my reading life.

RED RIGHT HAND, Lovecraftian urban-fantasy violence by one pissed-off woman & TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE, Alexander + Hephaestion in the Underworld

TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE
WILLIAM L.J. GALAINI (The Patron Saints of Hell #1)
Evolved Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: While the First World War rages on Earth's surface, Hephaestion discovers the ideal opportunity to rescue his general, king, and soulmate Alexander the Great from the lowest ring of Hell. The problem? No one’s ever dared such a feat before, and only a madman would try.

As Hephaestion descends into the pit of eternal torment, he discovers unlikely accomplices willing to assist his impossible plan…but complications and subterfuge leave Hephaestion and his allies scrambling for footholds in a world governed by demons, devils, and opportunists. Soon the fires of Hades are the least of his worries as he must outrun, outgun, and outmaneuver beasts and monsters hell-bent on his destruction.

With a cast of unexpected characters from civilizations long buried and historical figures you only thought you knew, Hephaestion must answer the true question of his quest: What does it mean to be known, to be remembered...and perhaps, to be human?

Loyalty, commitment, and love ignore the bounds of death and time in an adventure that explores culture, history, and obsession through the lens of a man who defies reason.

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

My Review: Spooktober starts with a crashing, steam-billowing bittersweet battle-heavy CRASH. Hell, where Alexander of Macedon, genocidal psychopathic horndog, has been spending his afterlife, is gonna have to give him up...Hephaestion, Alexander's earthly lover, best friend, confidant, and now rescuer, has had entirely enough of hanging around in Purgatory waiting for Alexander's sins to be expiated and for him to join up with the patient, still-loving man whose death precipitated Alexander's own.

But you, O Reader, already know...be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be "Yes."

Hephaestion's decision, now that the whole planet's gone mental and tossed itself a mechanized slaughter in the form of the Great War (as WWI was known then...really, it's obvious that our name for it is a retronym if one gives it even a minute's actual thought), is worthy of some demented I Love Lucy-in-Hell weirdness...dead bodies as disguises, inevitable exposure, meeting a new, improved Scooby-group. But it takes us quite a while to get to this point...we're in Hell, not Purgatory, but nowhere near finding Alexander.

The action is, while magisterially slow, quite well-thought-out, and Hephaestion's motives for his quest elicit a lot of push-back from many sources both helping and hindering him. (All the Jesuits in History ending up in Hell was one of my happiest reading-life moments. I love, love, love the little easter-egg moments Author Galaini chucks into this stew!) One character in particular, Yitz the Jew, was perilously close to a stereotype. I got the impression, fortunately, that the author was actually aiming for archetype and, being in Purgatory, then Hell, wasn't saying this is how Jews are but this is how Jews are seen as part of the horribleness of Hell.

The truly delightful conception of the Afterlife as a place where there are all periods of History and all levels of technology intermingling, to be like Doctor Who's episode where Winston Churchill is Caesar and Morris Minors fly through the air under giant balloons was designed: Wrongness, but playfully presented, is still wrongness and still evokes unease. As the struggle to reach his belovèd Alexander continues, Hephaestion remains obsessed with achieving his millennia-held goal of reuniting with him. All around him are people warning, hinting, offering other views. Blinders on, Hephaestion pursues his goal.

And achieves it.

This is not The Song of Achilles. There is no beautiful ending for anyone in Hell. And, as Hephaestion finally achieves his reunion, the full and terrible truth of the answer to a prayer being "Yes" is, at last, borne in upon him.

That is why I gave the story four stars in spite of its too-slow-for-me pace, in spite of its occasionally unpleasant characterizations, in spite of its flaws whatever they might be to you or me. The love one bears for the heart's own darling is not always the feeling the heart's own darling deserves.

A bitter dreg to drink. A truly powerfully importantly real, urgent Truth. Falling in love is not always, or even all that often, the happy end.

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

RED RIGHT HAND
LEVI BLACK (Mythos War #1)
Tor Books
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Charlie Tristan Moore isn’t a hero. She’s a survivor. Already wrestling with the demons of her past, she finds herself tested as never before when she arrives home one night to find herself under attack by three monstrous skinhounds straight out of a nightmare. Just as hope seems lost, she is saved by a sinister Man in Black, dressed in a long, dark coat that seems to possess a life of its own and wielding a black-bladed sword in his grisly red right hand.

But her rescue comes at a cost. The Man in Black, a diabolical Elder God, demands she become his Acolyte and embrace a dark magick she never knew she possessed. To ensure her obedience, he takes her friend and possible love, Daniel, in thrall as a hostage. Now she must join The Man in Black in his crusade to track down and destroy his fellow Elder Gods, supposedly to save humanity from being devoured for all eternity.

But is The Man in Black truly the lesser of two evils–or a menace far more treacherous than the eldritch horrors she’s battling in his name?
Red Right Hand is the first book in the fantastically creepy Mythos War series by Levi Black.

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

My Review: Nyarlathotep! The Crawling Chaos!! I am so so sold on this read. People using ol' H.P.'s stuff in ways that'd probably make him scowl and whine? Bonus points! And Charlie Tristan Moore is someone who would make ol' H.P.'s hackles rise. A woman, a mutt, a person without a pedigree? *gasp* Bring it, say I, and fling it on his grave.

So in this trilogy-starting story, Charlie (our narrator) meets with some really scary, very weird...dog-things...inside her front door as she stumbles in drunk from a binge trying to drink a boy she liked off her mind. The action, in other words, is reported in first person and starts from the get-go, never slacks, and keeps getting higher and higher stakes riveted to it.

What works best about this is that Charlie (Charlotte, really) Tristan Moore's learning what the ruddy hell's going on at the same time we are. She's not narrating from either the Afterlife or a cozy chair in front of a fire, a brandy balloon a-swirl in her hands, relating her youthful wild adventures.

What slightly less impressed me was Charlie Tristan Moore's gradually revealed psych history...it was all a bit too pat, and too obviously engineered to make her the proper tool for Nyarlathotep. It led to the feeling that she was a created tool instead of what I understood her to be, a fortuitously shaped stick that Nyarlathotep found here in ordinary reality and co-opted for his use. If the former is the case, then what the heck would an entity that could exert its will so powerfully *need* with a hench-rat?

Well, no matter, what kept me happily reading was the pace of events once the Man in Black gets his hooks into her and sets her her tasks. I was in the mood for horror, it's Spooktober, we've got truly awful people trying to screw up reality even more than they've managed to do in the past six years...gimme the fake kind, with excitement but no danger, please. This first-of-three violent, gory supernatural-horror-defeating stories filled the bill admirably, used the Lovecraft Universe very creditably while still ringing changes on the themes so they didn't feel leaden and overburdened with MEANING. This is never easy. Author Levi did it well. I know I've slammed those dragon-tattoo books for their repugnant sexual violence against women before. It's not a subject I invite into my entertainment these days.

What made me respond differently to this story is that the violence of Charlie Tristan Moore's past is not presented pruriently, is not downplayed in its effects on her and her life as I felt was the case in those Swedish stories. As she puts herself into terrible situations to serve a man and his needs in this story, Charlie's furiously ragingly hating him, and expressly making herself remember why what happened to her is making Nyarlathotep's abuse of her worse.

It felt, then, for once like her pain was her enemy not her secret power.

And she still succeeds, she still lives, she still has Love to save. It worked for me. If Spooktober's going to mean something to you, try slotting this read into it.

THE SLEEPING CAR PORTER, Black Queer Canadian historical novel & CABIN COMMOTION, a fun romantic read

THE SLEEPING CAR PORTER
SUZETTE MAYR
Coach House Books
$17.95 (US) trade paper, available now

SHORTLISTED for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award!

CONGRATULATIONS to Coach House Books & Suzette Mayr for THE SLEEPING CAR PORTER, a #queer #Black & #Canadian being THE WINNER OF THE 2022 Giller Prize! Watch the shining moment here.

The author's search for models among people who don't necessarily want to be used as models, from Lit Hub.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair

The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.

Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.”

On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.

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

My Review: The burden of racism lands without rhyme or reason. In no way does R.T. Baxter, dentist in training, want to believe he needs to be "George" to the oblivious white people his job as a porter on this particular cross-Canada trip from Montreal to Vancouver. They call him George anyway; he knows better than to correct them. And he knows that he's retaining a degree of his selfhood by allowing them to use a name that isn't connected to his self. It's not his self the oblivious don't see. It's not his self the crude jeer at, demean, demand from. It's George, the porter.

The beginning of the book makes you, a twenty-first century reader, ill with the shame of being a witness to a man's humiliation at the whims of people no better and mostly significantly worse than he is. There's a repugnant attempt at sexual assault; there's a nasty trick played regarding a tip; most of all, Baxter...George, really...is w-bombed by one of the continent's most repulsive specimens of whiteness. And you're only on your first leg of the trip, Reader! BaxterGeorge is so very not on his first, fourth, fifteenth even. And the hits keep comin' with the company's Bartlebys announcing he has new demerits. New ways to risk losing this job that could, if he just makes himself stick the landing enough...enough more...times, get him closer to the goal of becoming a dentist.

What transpires in this 1929-set tale of oblivious, privileged people behaving as badly as they are capable of without tipping too far into actual malice...even their obliviousness is used to shield them from the reality of those who serve them!...is seen through the stream of Baxter's desperately fatigued consciousness. His never-ending round of service isn't met with thanks, gratitude, or praise; just with demands for more. His brain serves up the memories of men he's cared for, he's served in the manner he's happy to serve them. He can't always connect the "reality" outside himself with the needs and wants of the young man he really is. He doesn't have a second to himself to dive back into The Scarab from Jupiter, for heaven's sake, even though a landslide trapped them...train-them, keep up!...in a pass and the Egyptologists are just finding out where on Jupiter they've been taken by their captors. Esme, little newly orphaned scrap of flesh that attached itself to him to escape a Gorgonops of a granny, won't let him go long enough to keep Pulp and Paper, those pompous bombastic business travelers, keep them from complaining about his unconscionable lack of information as to why the railroad allowed their train to be delayed by an Act of God, and then there's Mad Mary making all the sorts of noises as only his conductor-queen self can about Baxter also watching over Templeton's sleepers-only car...but in Baxter's car the Doctor's having A Crisis over his David, his colleague David, being arrested and, well, couldn't Baxter...you know...stay?

It's a sadly unchanging situation. People who, themselves, want and need are instead wanted and needed at, and only the right ones get those needs met. What Baxter gives up in his one wild and precious life is meant to be an investment in a better personal as well as social tomorrow as a dentist caring for needful peoples' teeth. What happens to him in the meantime is the out-of-body experience of sleep deprivation, the absolute and utter abnegation of meeting the needs of people who can't so much as bother to learn, still less use, your name, the all-consuming pandering demanded by those whose lives are built on shoals of "I PAID FOR THIS" without ever seeing the vast deeps of suffering the shoals stand in.

Capitalism is cruel, and the comfortably fixed for money like it that way. There's nothing wrong with the system, says the pale faces and pink gums of the privileged. Look, I tipped George, didn't I?

Simultaneously moving, infuriating, beautiful, and deadly, this is a superb choice for the Giller Prize.

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

CABIN COMMOTION
BRINA BRADY
non-affiliate Amazon link
$4.99 available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: High-paid escort Marcus graduates college and he’s ready to leave The Manor. Working for pimp Kalepo for four years, Marcus believes there’s no way out without paying a fatal price. When Kalepo ends Marcus’s apartment lease and moves him into his home as his full time escort without his permission, Marcus leaves California on a train to New York City and a bus to a rented Vermont cabin for one month to hide from Kalepo and to think about his future.

Playboy Blaze is the son of Sal Bossio, a New York City Italian mobster. His father orders him to his Vermont cabin for one month while he settles mob business. Blaze hires a rent boy for one month, but unexpected events occur and he finds himself alone in Vermont. When he reaches his cabin, he finds a stranger sleeping in his bed. The gorgeous gingered-haired man could be a hitman sent by his father’s enemies.

Two lonely men solve the cabin commotion by sharing the only bed in the cabin during their sex fest, saving hidden pasts and tough decisions until the month ends.

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

My Review: One of those "join my mailing list, get a free book," come-ons that worked out just fine. It's a meet-cute, with a slutty edge to it, kind of story about how hard it is to break the habits of a lifetime's training and trust people, talk to people, who stay long enough to listen to you.

Marcus's parents aren't. They left him with a nasty uncle whose rage at him for being a faggot (a word we see a lot in this short book) led to his living the life of a highly paid escort. I mean, it's good to earn your keep by using the weapon that got you chucked out, right? Talk about lemonade from lemons!

The life of a seriously pricey escort isn't materially deprived. Marcus still feels abandoned, feels rejected, and then feels everything in the world reorient itself when he meets Blaze (and Blaze's anger issues). Blaze's dad is a mafioso, and is perfectly aware that his son's a hothead who gives men head. Yeah, so? My son, my priority, not you and your stupid issues.

Well, it's a romance, you know we're gettin' our HEA. You also know we're gettin' our drawers warmed up, some smexytimes and a little helping of spanking kink along the way. These guys don't waste a lot of time fully clothed. Their sex wasn't fresh or new to me, but it wasn't rote or mechanical. I believed these two characters would have this sex. And I believed they'd have these exact, precise miscommunication problems, one prideful and arrogant (Blaze) and the other wary and untrusting (Marcus). What I didn't expect was that Blaze's Pop would adopt Marcus with such tenderness. He genuinely sounds pissed off when Blaze acts the dickhead and drives Marcus away. He even gives Marcus the plan to make Blaze pay for it by igniting his jealousy via a fake date!

Anyway, a free treat for signing up on Author Brina's newsletter list made this a just-fine Sunday afternoon-passing story of young, horny hotties finding out early that the family you give yourself is worth fighting for.