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Published in: January-February 2021 issue.

 

STORIES TO SING IN THE DARK
by Matthew Bright
Lethe Press. 271 pages, $17.

 

Matthew Bright’s collection of short stories is full of little wonders like the “Last Drag Show on Earth,” which explores a dystopian future where drag encompasses not just gender, but age and identity in all its forms, and “In Search of Stars,” about a gay painter who applies paint to his tricks, which causes them to float away—leaving us to wonder if our protagonist is the most romantic of serial killers, or so involved in his æsthetic pleasure that he doesn’t perceive his brutality. Or is it just a comment on the predatory and impersonal nature of hook-up culture? “Director’s Cut” is a darkly comic tale that grapples with the gay trope of the unhappy, tragic ending, except in this case that scene gets left on the cutting room floor. This humorous and playful tale is liberating in that it comes complete with the predatory Mr. Text and Mr. Subtext as well as a heroic, colorful romantic interest who helps provide the happy ending.

            Several of the other stories are queer re-interpretations of classics, from the Picture of Dorian Gray (“Golden Hair, Red Lips,” which features a hidden portrait ravaged by KS lesions) and Wind in the Willows (the noir version, aptly named “Croak Toad”) to A Christmas Carol—in Bright’s collection re-titled “By Chance in the Dark,” which is my personal favorite of these variations on a theme. The moral lesson explored here is of a man’s denied sexuality, a more relatable form of miserliness, while Tiny Tim and Jacob Marley as gay men bring the story to contemporary life. It’s a wonderful extrapolation, the queering of this well-known story of a life sadly unfulfilled, especially the way in which Bright develops the theme that everyone else is a ghost when you are disconnected from yourself.

Trebor Healey

 

 

YOU WILL LOVE WHAT YOU HAVE KILLED
by Kevin Lambert
Translated by Donald Winkler
Biblioasis. 184 pages, $15.95

 

Faldistoire is the openly gay, precocious, and eloquent narrator of this deeply disturbing, dystopian tale set in author Kevin Lambert’s hometown of Chicoutimi. Located 300 miles north of Montreal, it’s a city where “death is contagious,” sex is something that takes place in the basement, and “everything sexual is deeply repressed.” Faldistoire’s story takes him from kindergarten and his first relationship with another boy in the 1990s, through high school, when he works part-time in a video store. Except for its many rivers, Chicoutimi sounds like an unlovely city—at least in the author’s telling—with its low-end malls and all too many big-box stores. Faldistoire’s mother is too busy looking after a little girl to care for her

son, and she sends him to live with his grandparents, allowing him to return home each weekend. Under this living arrangement, he is sexually abused by his grand-father. There’s much foreshadowing of gruesome deaths of Faldistoire’s schoolmates and young relatives, including a transgender cousin who worked in a strip club to pay for her surgery. Adults go on to fulfill the curses placed upon them, tarot cards are read, and ghosts are ever-present, to such an extent that this novel may help Chicoutimi develop a tourist industry for those interested in the paranormal. This is Lambert’s first novel, published in French in 2017 and translated in 2020 by Donald Winkler.

Martha E. Stone

 

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