GADARENE by Tina Anderson & C. B. Potts (EM Novels 2008)
Tina Anderson kindly provided me with a review copy of this, her latest publication, and I thought I'd better sneak it in before I really get rolling on the London stuff.
This actually fits in fairly nicely with the urban fantasy angle I've been working, since she and co-author C. B. Potts do an excellent job of evoking horror in the squalid streets, tenements, and sewers of the 19th century Manhattan slum, Five Points. It's a relatively rare setting for fiction of any sort, therefore relatively unfamiliar and possibly disorienting, but they bring it to life in something I envisioned as an animated charcoal sketch in my mind, and they seem to know their way around it well enough to guide the reader through it with clarity and confidence.
Galen is a low-level Irish gangster, a young, cheap knife-for-hire, just released from prison. He reunites with Wira, his soul-mate, a mostly-male hermaphrodite who transgenders as a woman. It soon turns out that they're not only united by love, but more powerfully by the haunting past that brought them together. They first encountered each other in the captivity of a wealthy, predatory pederast (almost like something from an Andrew Vachss novel), whom they helped each other to escape. Whether that haunting is psychological or literally supernatural, it's horrible and gruesome, and it ends in bloodshed, explosions, and an almost apocalyptic torrent of rats fleeing the sewers.
Tina's right that I'm not exactly the target audience for "gay romance horror," but the gay romance aspect here meshes so finely with the other aspects of the characters and story that I think this could appeal more broadly than that genre specification might suggest. As a violent criminal and a gay man, Galen reminded me, in a good way, of the kind of character you often find in Jean Genet's novels. For that matter, gay characters and relationships will hardly be unfamiliar to any fan of hardboiled and noir fiction. I'd encourage anyone who's interested, but hesitant because of the gay thing, not to let that put them off, but to give this a try. And if that aspect does appeal to you, this has been getting rave reviews on GLBT and yaoi fan sites:
10 comments:
Your blog is great. I'm looking forward to see what happens with your London tangent (esp how you get on with Stewart Home's parody/détournement of pulp).
Unfortunatly I keep getting lost. I write down a number of titles to check out and then forget what they're about. Could you recommend a groovy castle-themed supernatural pulp for me. A strange request maybe, as there's so many of them, but for some reason that's what I've got a hankering for and was hoping your nose for trash could lead me to something good.
Thanks,
Oliver.
Thanks Oliver! Most Groovy Age "supernatural pulp" that's "castle themed" was packaged as gothic romance--sometimes misleadingly so, as the romance aspect was sometimes not as pronounced as the packaging implied. I'm afraid nothing particular comes to mind as something I'd especially recommend. You might want to type "castle" into my blogger search bar and see if anything catches your fancy. There's plenty of stuff I like that's been set in castles, but not enough that I'd call it "castle-themed."
Great. Just what this site needs, more gay themed postings. Geeze.
Great. Just what this site needs, another anonymous whiner. Feel free to take your "wide stance" elsewhere, Larry.
I'm not "Larry". Just a straight guy who's not into gay stuff. I don't have anything against gay culture, it's just not my thing.
I will take your advice and not visit here anymore though. This site has really gone down hill over the last few years. I'm glad it wasn't nominated for any Rondo's. Goodbye.
Alas, poor Larry, we knew him well.
Sorry. As the straight woman whose book you just review, I deeply apologize for offending any more anonymice, and their heterosexual sensibilities. :(
Hey, how about some more dead chicks and Nazi gorillas! :)
I just deleted a nasty response I wrote to anonymous, because that's not the tone I want attaching to this post. It's sad, really, that someone would even make an issue of this. I don't even know what "gay themed postings" that guy has in mind, besides this and a meager handful of fumetti ones. He's really got issues if he's so sensitive that those seem like a lot to him. Suffice it to say, good riddance to a bigot.
I think it was those scary fumetto posts that Jaako did, which featured teh-ghey. It obviously ruined the blog for anonymouse. That, or they stirred feelings in him he just wasn't prepared to deal with.
^_^
I think it was the combo of two gay posts in a row (mine and Curt's)that broke the camel's back. Ok, so my post only had a couple of pics that could be considered gay-ish, but that was probably enough for poor I'm-not-Larry.
The closet gay theory seems a bit far-fetched, though. I mean, ten years ago I would've probably reacted the same way he did. But fumetti changed that all, and thus made me a better man :)
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