Laugh a line gay comedy-adventure ... with camels

Knights Press has been gone for a long time, and that's a shame, because they had access to a stable of writers whose work was very different from the norm of what was going through GMP, Alyson and so on, at the time. Back in the 1980s there were loads of small gay publishers, and always plenty of good reads, even great reads, coming along. That's all changed ... and I would say the world is a poorer place because of it. (If you're interested in this, I have a link for you now, and also, I just forwarded this same link over to Mel Keegan, and got a ping back. MK will be blogging about this tomorrow.) I haven't even been able to find out when Knights Press closed, but I think it would be about ten years ago, just before GMP was sold off.

Writer Daniel McVay is also very difficult to track down. He wrote several books, most of them out of print, one apparently still available (Fete and The Legend of Jasper Kell are available secondhand; The Vanilla Kid is still in print.) Of McVay books, the only one I've read is The Baggy Kneed Camel Blues ... and I keep telling myself to get the others, because if they're as good as this one --!


Once in a long long while you find a novel that's not just funny, it's flat-out hilarious. This is one of them. The whole book reads like a stand-up comedy routine, and you'll laugh out loud in places. The book is also very easy to read. You can almost read it in an afternoon, not because it's short but because it's ... easy. In fact, Baggy Kneed... is over 200pp, and it's a good "act" to be able to continue the joke through a whole book, and still be funny at the end.

The storyline follows the development of young Tad, who’s early twenties and looking to escape from what he thinks of as a suffocating job in a dead-end place. Having saved for a trip, he lands in the Spanish city of Barcelona ... but he’s dragged his feet too much on the way there and has run out of money long before he could reach his actual original destination, which was Morocco.

The book opens with Tad killing time and trying to get his act together in Barcelona ... and then, as a cruise ship arrives, he meets a girl called Stacy and catches a glimpse of a Viking God in human form, Gunther. Tad is very gay, which doesn’t bother Stacy. Stacy is one of those fast-mouthed, exuberant young women who could be compensating for being physically tiny by having a huge personality. She's bright, quick-witted and funny -- but author McVay was walking a tightrope with this character.

Stacy’s the kind of character who makes a story start by providing the grit in the oyster that turns into the pearl; she’s also the kind of character that can get annoying if she’s not handled right. Daniel McVay does a very good job of keeping the exuberant Stacy on a leash -- giving her enough rope to let her get Tad moving, get the story going, but not letting her cross the line and become annoying.

Tad, meanwhile is a curious character: young, bright, gay, smart, but he has a kind of "Walter Mitty" complex, where he has a hard time controlling his imagination, and his daydreams can be more real than reality. Anything and everything can spark runaway daydreams, and his fantasies go careening off by themselves like runaway trucks. This provides a lot of the comedy material, and is really where Baggy Kneed... is, in my experience, unique. I can’t recall another novel that ever used this device. Certainly not a gay one.

Then Tad actually meets Gunther, the Viking, and falls head over heels. Gunther is also headed for Morocco, and Tad goes with. It’s the start of a crazy trip, and with Tad as narrator, the whole story is a little bizarre and very funny. The action (and sex, and comedy) have more to do with what’s going on inside Tad’s head than in reality. It’s a device that shouldn't’t work so well -- but does. It works marvelously.

The book is long out of print, but you can still get used copies, and Amazon has a good deal on this item. Very recommended, when you’re looking for a good laugh. AG’s rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

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Gay romance on the high seas: The Buccaneer by M.S. Hunter

At last, just when you thought the beast would never come along ... there it was! A novel that is at one moment an adventure, a romance, exciting, colorful, up-beat, well-written, well-researched, long enough to be a satisfying read, and ... gay!

Alyson Publications put out this volume in 1989, and I do not know why a raft of others answering the same description didn't follow it. They didn't all have to be historicals, like M.S. Hunter's The Buccaneer. They didn't have to be "gay pirate novels," like this one. So long as they delivered the goods according to the short list above, I'd have been happy to keep buying books as long as Alyson kept putting them out!

An exciting gay adventure romance that's well researched and written, at least 250pp long, and fun. What was so hard about that? Apparently it wasn't just hard, it was completely impossible. There's a handful of gay novels that I'd group in the same part of the bookshelf as The Buccaneer ... and I think most of them have been penned by Mel Keegan! I'm thinking about Fortunes of War, Dangerous Moonlight, The Swordsman, The Deceivers ...! They're all Keegans, and shelved with Keegan.

Now, MK didn't start publishing with GMP, and (you're going to shriek when you hear this) I missed the first few books entirely, they just blew by me. I used to get my books out of the Bulldog Books mailorder catalog in those days and my brain must have been out for pizza, because the first Mel Keegan book I saw, bought, read and fell in love with, was Fortunes of War -- which is a tale of gay buccaneers in the Elizabethan era, same time and location as the Errol Flynn movie, The Seahawk. (Oh ... joy of joys! Because Fortunes of War could easily have been a project written for Errol Flynn who would be playing Dermot Channon, and I still have endless fun trying to "cast the part" of Robin Armagh.)

But -- enough about Aricia and Mel and Errol Flynn.

Suffice to say, M.S. Hunter's The Buccaneer came along like a life-saver. I got this one when it was hot off the press and just arrived in Australia, late '89 or early '90 ... I remember it being hot weather, which to us means Christmas plus or minus a couple of months. It was love at first sight. First, I was enthralled by the fact that one of the characters in the main romantic pair was African.

(Do you want to "cast the part?" You couldn't go past Will Smith ... and I'm being wicked here; and I admit it; but with Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey on the big screen in a gay movie right now, I can't resist "seeing" movie versions of the really great gay novels!)

The romantic aspect is between Ozei (known as Ozzie) and Tommy Cutler (known as The Cutlass), and there are some steamy scenes as well as the romantic. The supporting cast in the novel is huge, and most of the characters are very well drawn, which is unusual in many adventure books. The novel is long, at 316pp of smallish type, and M.S. Hunter wrote extremely well.

Sadly, you'll notice the past tense there. M.S. Hunter is another loss to the art form of gay literature. He passed away some time ago, after having written only a little gay fiction ... and after a lot of digging to try to find some info on him, much less an obituary, I came up empty handed.

The Buccaneer is therefore his legacy to this art form, and I can only recommend it. The story is huge, and a bit rambling. It centers on Tommy and is told in the first person with Tommy as the narrator. It's a tough act, but Hunter makes it work superbly. You like the characters in this book, and the story of ambition, desire, derring-do, hazard and sensuality will keep you turning pages. Sometimes the plotline is a little bit easy to predict, but when you've read upwards of five hundred books, very little is going to take you totally by surprise, and that's not the writer's fault! What should amaze you is the research that went into this.

Does the novel have a downside? Well ... a little one, maybe. The author keeps butting in with short "documentary" segments, which you might find make it hard for you to keep your disbelief suspended. The first time I read this, I just skipped over them, didn't read them at all. The second time, the same -- but when I was done I went back and read the documentary parts separately. Nothing wrong with this, and you actually get two reads for the price of one here. The doco segments are set off into arial or some plain font, and are ostensibly about Hunter's personal experiences while researching the book. In fact, they're very interesting, it was just the interruption to the flow of the fiction that didn't quite work for me the first time through.

Highly recommended! AG's rating, 5 out of 5 stars. The Buccaneer is long out of print (god knows why) but you can get it from Amazon, and ... please do!



If you're into gay pitate novels don't miss Fortunes of War by Mel Keegan, and also have a look at this article: Were the Pirates Gay? by W. A. Hoffman, who's written a gay pirate novel called Raised by Wolves. I haven't read the novel, but I was impressed by the article, and will get to the novel in due course.

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Gay and coming of age in '68: John Fox's Boys on the Rock

First, my apologies to all regular visitors: I haven't been able to blog for about four days. It's just too hot! If you don't live in a part of the world that Lance Armstrong last weekend called "insanely hot," you might not be able to imagine trying to do anything at all in a room that's cooking your computer to death. So ... sorry for the delay. But I'm back. (Never really left, just couldn't blog!)

Today's review will come as a surprise to some of you. It's not my usual fare -- in fact, when I borrowed this book from a pal (a loooong time ago), I didn't expect to like it. I was in for an awakening, and I've had fond thoughts about John Fox's one and only book, The Boys on the Rock, ever since.

It's a damned shame that John Fox passed away, because he would ave gone on to be a remarkable writer with a lot to add to the corpus of gay fiction. Alas he was yet another AIDS victim, and his legacy is this one book, which was put out by Saint Martin's Press in 1993. A couple of editions have been done, and I'm fairly sure it's back in print right now. Copes are readily available from Amazon, with a different cover from the original; and I'm going to recommend it, even if it's not your "usual" thing in reading! Why would I recommend it for that specific reason? Because it'll stretch you, make you use your brain cells to see other people's points of view and appreciate different lifestyles. Which I think is important in a world that's still struggling to achieve freedom, tolerance and respect for all.

The Boys on the Rock is a coming of age story (which I don't usually go for because you can only read so many of them before they all sound alike), and a (teenage) love story. It's a very short piece -- I'd call it more of a novella than a full novel. (It's about the same length as something like Windrage or Tiger, Tiger.) The good thing about "short reads" like this is that you can finish them in a single bite. Also the author has the opportunity to tackle ONE subject, finish dealing with it and finish the novel. There's a lot to be said for the "singular voice" and the "singular theme."

John Fox certainly had a "singular voice." He managed to make The Boys... actually sound like it was written (sometimes gabbled!) by a sixteen y.o. boy who was just discovering his feelings, and falling in love. There's a massive skill in this. A fair few writers who're adults are in the business of writing "young adult novels," and I have to say, the kids in their books don't sound like real kids. Not even kids from 1968, which is when The Boys... is set. (It's a historical too, as you can see, which to me adds to its interest factor.) However, John Fox has the teenage boy of the late 1960s "voice" down pat.

Now, forty years later, younger readers might even have to work out what some of the slang means! For those of us who were there at the time (okay, I was six, but I as there, damnit) there's no problem.

Books about randy teens are not my usual fare, but this one is very good. I can usually take or leave this kind of book, but The Boys... is a young man's story, written by a young man, in a young man's voice. It has a power of Truth about it that made it wonderful to me. (As a woman, I found this story opened a doorway into the mind and heart of a teenage lad and showed me what they might be thinking and feeling. And yes, I realize a lot of readers would say, "I really don't care what a 16 y.o. is thinking!", but a lot more readers do care, or would care if they gave themselves a chance to find out.)

The storyline is fairly simple, or at least linear. Boy meets boy. Boys fall in love. Boys have sexy fling. Boys ... start drifting apart once again, when teenage love unravels itself, as if normally does at that age.

The novella doesn't have a traditional happy ending: the character of Billy, who's the narrator, is not ready to settle down into a long-term affair. Few kids his age are! But the book does have a sort of happy ending. Billy's coming of age affair was a learning experience with some emotional highs as well as the lows, and even though you can feel the sadness at the end of the book, Billy has grown so much as a human being and as a young man, that you end the book certain that he'll be able to make a good life for himself -- and find a long-lasting relationship when the time's right. I remember even wondering at the time I first read this, if Billy and his first love might be back together one day when they've, uh, grown up a bit. Nice fantasy!

Does the book have a downside? Well, it depends who you are. If you're a young gay gay guy, you should love this; if there's a boy left hiding inside you, you'll love it; if you're a friend, sis, mom, aunt or even gran of a teen just coming out, you'll take this book to your heart. If you're just plain interested in what might be going on in the mind and heart of a gorgeous young boy -- again, you'll probably love this! If the above have absolutely no interest to you (say, George Clooney in a tux, with a brandy in one hand, is more your style...) you won't get much out of it. Also, the book is very short (shorter than Jackal in the Dark), and if you want something longer, this one might disappoint. Lastly, it' set in 1968, which is now 40 years ago, and some younger readers might find it "obsolete" for this reason. I'm sure John Fox chose the time setting deliberately. To begin with, it was the era when gay Pride was really getting into gear. Second, it was just before AIDS sprang up and started taking victims in the gay male community. In 1968, kids could (and did) have wild affairs without thinking about the consequences, and most of them got away with it (except the gals who came home pregnant ... not that this was ever going to be a problem to gay kids, but ...!)

Recommended for a lazy afternoon's read -- or a rainy evening. AG's rating: 3.5 out of 5, or maybe even 4, depending on the mood I'm in at the time! Get a good deal on it from Amazon, and if you like this, you might also like Glamourpus. and Jackal in the Dark (follow the link above).

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Adrien English takes on The Dark Side: Josh Lanyon's The Hell You Say

I know, I know, I've been promising for weeks to get to my favorite of the Adrien English novels ... life has been "interesting" this month, which means blogging time has been hard to find. But here I am, and here's Adrien -- back in style, in the third of the novels, The Hell You Say.

Of all the series (there are four titles to date), why is The Hell... my favorite? To begin with, it has the paranormal plot line. The story involves a connection to a satanic cult, and I love this kind of thing ... the touch of the exotic, the creep-out aspect of "black magic." This installment in the series is also extremely funny, which gives the book a kind of "three pronged assault" on the reader. There's its dark occult side, its cuttingly witty side, and also the gay theme. All of which makes the novel irresistible.

As you'd expect, there's a killer on the loose, and he seems to be after a weird young man called Angus who works for Adrien at the bookstore. Angus is being threatened via the phone, and Adrien helps him get out of harm's way -- which may or may not be a good thing, because Jake Reardon (the LA cop with whom Adrien has a sometime and stormy relationship) is also being haunted by a serial killer with satanic-cult connections. Very dead bodies being found, and they are "marked" in ritualistic ways ... and now I have to be very careful what I say about the plot, or I'll be into spoilers!

This book is full of moments that are fascinating and amusing, emotional, even disturbing. Josh Lanyon writes a sparkling first-person narrative tying everything together with the personal observations and thoughts of Adrien, who is witty and smart, with a razor-sharp tongue.

And especially in this book, Adrien is a fully-developed personality. He's "off the leash" for the first time. This is actually very true in another way, because this book marks the start of Josh Lanyon self-publishing his novels -- a road he's sharing with top-name writers from Mel Keegan to Storm Constantine. (Readers need to get past the "stigma" and find out, and then admit, that great writers can publish their own work with tip-top results. The fact is, this book, The Hell You Say, was only going to be published if JL did it himself -- and it's better than the first two which went out under the GMP label! Time to get past the "vanity publishing stigma" thing, people. The industry's changed. When great writers get stuck on a sandbank, they rescue themselves and all of us profit from their courage).

During the course of a real page-turner of a plot, Josh Lanyon has Adrien interact with a cast of characters ranging right across the spectrum. There's the gorgeous detective boyfriend Jake, who is deeply "challenged" and breaking Adrien's heart. There's Adrien's mother (!) who is deliciously batty, getting married again, and presenting Adrien with not one but three step-sisters. Eegad. And there's also the Wiccan-pagan guru who appears late in the book ... and I'm so very pleased to be able to relate that this writer knows what Wicca is all about. It's such a relief when a writer possesses the facts and not the prejudices.

If you've collected all the Adrian English books, it's great to be able to watch Josh Lanyon mature, as well as his character. From the first book through to this one, the style, the storytelling, everything "fleshes out." Also, The Hell... is 230pp, a longer book with a lot more to get your teeth into.

Does the novel have a downside? Weeeeeell, maybe, if you were waiting for Jake to get his act together and figure out that he belongs with Adrien. Plot spoiler: not in this book, guys. In fact (stop reading right now if you don't want to know!!) Jake is getting married to his rather pregnant girlfriend, leaving Adrian high and dry. Hey, there's always a fourth book...

Highly recommended! AG's rating: 5 out of 5 stars. You can read this one first if you're on a tight budget, but I think Amazon will combine shipping for you -- which is especially important, if you're in the South Pacific region. Give them a try, and see...

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The gay SF trilogy that maps the future of all mankind: Wraethu

It's impossible to believe that it's over 20 years since this book came out. It was the first of a trilogy ... and a debut novel ... and created quite a stir in the late 1980s. Even today it's one of the "weird ones," but it's also the best of the first-published Wraethu Trilogy. The second one (The Bewitchment of Love and Hate) was good too, and then the story somehow trailed away, didn't end with the wallop we'd all expected from The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire. You can actually ready this first one as a stand-alone novel without getting into the other two, and it has a lot to recommend it, without having to tow the rest of the trilogy behind it.

Storm Constantine looked like one of her characters, at the time: sort of goth-punk with electrocuted hair. 20 years on, she has the look of a wiccan practitioner -- which is close to accurate, since she's a Reiki master and publishes magic books. She's also written loads of SF and fantasy, but it all started right here with the first of the Wraethu books... which remains my favorite of her writings. The trilogy has been reprinted, but I'm lucky enough to have the whole thing in the original editions. It came out from Tor between 1988 and 1991, and as I said, raised quite a stir.

There's some disagreement even now, about whether these novels are actually gay SF or not. I'm not going to pass judgment! They're often listed as, and with, "Queer SF," so, what the heck? In fact, the characters are more of what you'd call androgynes. The Wraethu seem to be the next evolution of humans, where individuals have the characteristics of male and female, and can swing either way. At least, that's how it seemed to me ... it's complicated!

The story is post-apocalyptic. The blurb says, "the cities of the industrial north have become a wasteland," and there seems to have been a breakdown in the climate. We've caused a kind of runaway greenhouse effect, and mankind is evolving again, in order to survive.

There's no map in Enchantments... but if you stick around till the third book the map there centralizes on a land-locked sea, and anybody who knows a bit about the map of the globe goes "aha!" because you can easily recognize the Black Sea and the little Sea of Azov just to the north. In the Wraethu books, they're known as the Sea of Shadows and the Sea of Arel.

So the stage is close to set here. The world is a hothouse, the story takes place in eastern Europe, and concerns a new evolution of mankind ... and magic, sorcery, psychic powers, the foundation of a new race, new cities, the troubles between the Wraethu and the old humans from which they evolved.

The story follows several characters. You'll like Pellaz, a young man -- this is his "coming of age" or even "coming out" story. He and his strange new friend Calanthe trek south to find the Wreaethe and join them. They meet the tribe known as the Gelaming, who are peaceful and sophisticated. Other Wraethu are warlike -- it's said that they would exterminate humankind if they could -- but these are artistic and diplomatic. Calanthe is Wraethu already ... Pell will become Wraethu.

They're superhuman in many ways, and are probably some kind of mutation. Nobody seems to know when or how the mutation started, except that it began among young people ... and specifically young male gays, if I read the hints right.

Down in the south these new Wraethu have gathered to build their city. Cal is heading there to join them, since his own tribe has been wiped out in the fighting, in the north. Pell runs away from a village of huts where dirt-farmers manage to pound a living out of the sand and dust...

But what's he running toward?

There's a glossary of the alien language in the first book, but the map is in the third. You'll be glad of the glossary! I didn't have trouble remembering all the terms, but a lot of them are pronounced differently than you'd think ... which starts to make sense when you run into the map in Fulfilments... and you realize what part of the world this is.

The trilogy is huge. At 300pp of very small type, Enchantments is the smallest book. Both the others are about 400pp, so you have 1,000 pages of mind-blowing, gender-bending SF ahead of you! Storm Constantine has recently returned to this world and written another trilogy, which I believe is a prequel set, Wraiths of Will and Pleasure, Shades of Time and Memory and Ghosts of Bood and Inncence. I believe these were also done by Tor, but I've not yet managed to get them.

As far as I know, the Tor editions are out of print (nobody carries a backlist or warehouse stock anymore ... I did hear that it has something to do with rules regarding the "depreciation in value of warehoused goods" ... but this is OT), but you can get them from Amazon -- either the old edition as used books, or the POD reprints of the backlist direct from SCs company, Immanion Press.

Very recommended, but be warned these books are dark, intense and can be a bit weird! AG's rating, 4 out of 5 stars.

Here is Storm Constantine's website: a href="http://www.stormconstantine.com

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