Good Reads For The GLBT Community
If good reading is your thing you will be most intrigued with Blair Mastbaum, author of Clay’s Way: A Novel and Christopher Rice, author of A Density Of Souls, The Snow Garden: A Novel and Light Before Day. I have recently finished all of these pieces during the Christmas period and I am very impressed and eager to read more by both of these authors who give Gay Literature a whole new platform.
via http://amazon.com
Clay’s Way:
A wannabe punk rocker who writes bad haiku poetry, 15-year-old Sam is fed up with his middleclass parents, his geeky best friend, and his inability to do the raddest skateboard tricks. Then he meets Clay. Mistaking lust for fate, Sam becomes obsessed with the 17-year-old surferboy, whose island cool masks an internal conflict even darker than Sam’s. Directing his furious energy toward winning Clay’s heart, Sam goes on a reckless odyssey to become everything Clay seems to be. Through hurricanes, car accidents, teenage parties, and monster waves they ricochet off each other until, on a remote beach, in the flickering light of torches and campfires, the violence and tumult of Clay and Sam’s dynamic propels them both through the hardest decisions and obstacles of their young lives.
Set against the dazzling backdrop of Hawaii’s Oahu and Kauai islands, Clay’s Way seethes with the energy and the hormonally charged nihilism of its characters. Twenty-four-year-old first-time novelist Blair Mastbaum has written a startlingly authentic account of 21st-century teens, careening toward adulthood, devoid of guidance, fueled by alcohol, drugs, and rage.
A Density Of Souls:
Take the sensuous, fecund New Orleans setting, add a generous helping of tangled Southern family history, and season liberally with a sensitive teenage boy rejected by his friends and frightened of his own homoerotic impulses and you wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the novel containing all of the above was written by someone named Rice. But a few paragraphs into the first page, it’s clear that Anne Rice’s son’s first novel isn’t about vampires or witches and does not otherwise read like one of her exceedingly popular books. The only family resemblance is in the setting, the sexual orientation of the lovingly described male characters, and the scent of overripe magnolias.
There’s murder, suicide, and madness at the heart of this rather clumsy coming-of-age story, which focuses on the youthful friendship of Stephen Conlin, Meredith Ducote, Greg Darby, and Brandon Charbonnet. This friendship is destroyed by a sexual incident that takes place just before the foursome enters Cannon, an exclusive prep school. There, Stephen is ostracized by his former friends, now the most popular kids on campus, who’d just as soon forget their own complicity in the event. Envy, passion, and rage drive the narrative, but the emotions are as juvenile as the characters, and the long passages depicting the rituals and cruelties of high school, from pep rallies to football games, slow down the pace without really illuminating character or motivation. The novel reads like a roman à clef. Rice might have been wiser to tell someone else’s story rather than his own.
Snow Garden: A Novel:
It’s the beginning semester at Atherton College, a private, posh, and richly endowed school where a cross-section of freshman are getting their first taste of freedom from adults. Eighteen-year-old Randall is in the middle of an affair with his male, middle-aged, and married professor. He’s desperate that his best friend Kathryn Barker, also a freshman, doesn’t find out about the relationship because he wants to keep her respect and friendship.
Kathryn’s friendship is the least of his problems when his professor’s wife dies, the toxicology report showing a high level of alcohol and narcotics. Randall learns that the professor was involved with another woman who also died in a similar manner. With the help of a friend, Randall investigates the matter but he stirs up secrets that are better left buried for everyone’s sake.
THE SNOW GARDEN is gothic in content and tone, a dark picture of the lengths people go to so they can hide their true selves. Just about every character in this novel is wearing a mask, but it is up to the audience to decide whether it is to fool others or themselves. Christopher Rice, author of A DENSITY OF SOULS, is a talented, creative, and intellectual writer who knows how to lay bare the truth about human nature.
Light Before Day:
Twenty-six-year-old journalist Adam Murphy is trying desperately to recover from a life fuelled by cocaine and alcohol. Haunted by the violent death of his alcoholic mother, Adam traverses the streets of West Hollywood, temptation always just a hairs breadth away. Having obtained a job working for a local gay lifestyle magazine, he tries to talk the owner into publishing some of his more hard-hitting stories, one of which is an inquiry into the apparent suicide of a supposedly straight marine pilot. The editor, however, is convinced that a gay man’s lifestyle doesn’t include much “beyond his pecks and his underwear.”
But Adam refuses to give up, and is determined to find out the real truth behind the young man’s death. When Corey, his new lover inexplicably disappears from his apartment leaving behind his car keys, his cell phone, and a rancid carton of milk, Adam’s suspicion is aroused. Could Cory’s disappearance be somehow linked to the suicide of the marine pilot? The puzzle becomes even more complex when a crystal-meth addicted friend of Adam’s tells him that one night while walking the streets of West Hollywood, he witnessed the pilot up to some suspicious business.
In West Hollywood where expediency rules the day, and the emphasis on youth and beauty is often misplaced, older, wealthy men are seen to take advantage of younger, wide-eyed and innocent boys. Young guys from the country who move to LA in their twenties to leave their difficult histories behind, fall under the spell of predatory men and often start to do vile things. Particularly despicable and depraved is an Internet, satellite based pedophile ring, which Chris learns may have involved Corey. But in what way is Corey connected? And is Corey even alive?
Chris, with the help of his new employer, James Wilton – a notoriously curmudgeonly mystery writer with his own battle scars – travels from the suburban landscape of Oceanside to the wild valleys of Central California where he races against time to put the disparate pieces of the puzzle together and hopefully find Corey. Here he encounters Caroline Hughes, a forceful young surgical resident, who has been scouring the back lots of central California, seeking out a serial killer with almost legendary mystique who she thinks is responsible for her mother’s death.
Caroline is convinced that her mother had witnessed something evil taking place, especially as her charred body was found next to a burnt out trailer masquerading as a crystal meth laboratory. Chris is also haunted by the fact that the main player in porn video involving underage boys bares a striking resemblance to him. Did he do something he shouldn’t have when blacking-out on one of his drug-fuelled binges? Sometimes Chris wonders if his mission to protect people from the truth has left them defenseless and vulnerable. And he’s constantly accused of bleeding judgments – “leaving a trail of them wherever he goes, perhaps he’ll even drown in them someday.”
What is so mesmerizing about this novel is the total immersion in the culture of crystal meth, with author Christopher Rice, vividly bringing to life the effects this terrible drug has on both the mind and the body. His ability weave a narrative that connects the drug to the problems of pedophilia, is generally inventive and cleverly done.
Light and Day is a complicated slice of drama, with plot threads and characters that weave in and out of the narrative with a full-on and sometimes-violent intensity. An angst-ridden twenty-something man is hopelessly in love and ardently obsessed, but he’s tormented by his past and also by obtaining the truth; a woman’s interminable quest to find a killer, and who resorts to kidnapping and torture to achieve her ends; and a group of wealthy, technologically savvy men who take advantage of innocent young boys, while desperately trying to avert being caught.
The cast of characters is almost Dickensian in size and scope and they are written with particular attention to their connections to the darker side of the human heart. This is the perfect formula for a labyrinthine Southern California mystery that is at once, challenging thematically, but also distinctively and uniquely satisfying.
