IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Bloomsbury. 384 pages. $29.99
Picture it: Los Angeles, 2044. Sculptor Mason Daunt fiddles while Burbank burns. Throw in an over-the-top 100-person $100,000 baby shower he’s planning with his screenwriter husband, Yunho Kim, to celebrate their forthcoming child by surrogacy. Add a mysterious pink fog smothering the Valley and a few zombie-like creatures, and you have the spellbinding start of It’s Not the End of the World, Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s queercentric, prescient, dystopian rom-fantasy.
This cheeky geopolitical ecological-crisis novel ranges over almost 100 years in three settings (L.A., Montana, and Mars) some thirty million miles apart. Despite massive debt, Mason and Yunho live large. (They can hire WeatherMod to create artificial rainfall to clear the smoke from their mansion.) In a clear homage to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers for her party, Mason, wearing a Gucci gas mask, jaunts off to Los Feliz to pick up flowers and a humongous cake. The harried errand is not without distractions: a writhing figure, “one eye gouged out, cheeks shellacked with blood,” blocks Mason’s car; a billionaire client demands emergency advice on placing a $200,000 ten-foot marble penis in his foyer. Disaster befalls the party; Mason seems overcome by a “white void”; mandatory evacuation leads to relocation at an anarchistic commune in Montana where “hope is a discipline” with the promise of “love for everyone.” But utopia doesn’t last long. Subterfuge leads to an FBI Counterterrorism infiltration. Perhaps the solution is retreating to a Mars colonized with harvested retirees.
Readers seeking a little Clive Barker (lurid sex, including VR BDSM), a little Cormac McCarthy (grim, grisly The Road-style scenarios), or a bit of Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us) will welcome this epic generational saga. It may not be the end of the world, but it certainly comes close, and Parks-Ramage (Yes, Daddy) delivers an entertainingly audacious view of it.
Robert Allen Papinchak
BANGKOK AFTER DARK
Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies
by Benjamin Tausig
Duke University Press. 264 pages, $29.95
A popular nightclub entertainer of the 1940s and ’50s, Maurice Rocco was known for singing and playing “boogie-woogie” piano standing up, performances that possibly influenced another Black gay performer, Little Richard. As interest in his unchanging musical style diminished, Rocco performed less frequently in America, eventually leaving for Europe and Australia. By 1964, he landed at the Bamboo Bar in Bangkok, Thailand’s Oriental Hotel, in residence as “an opulent character from jazz’s mythical golden age.” Rocco’s years in Thailand closely aligned with the most active phase of the Vietnam War, when Bangkok was the main R&R destination for American servicemen.
Author Benjamin Tausig, an Associate Professor of Music at SUNY Stony Brook, considers Rocco an important “hinge” in popular music’s shift to rock and roll, and uses his time in Thailand to explore many of the transformations caused by the U.S. presence. As the title suggests, Bangkok after Dark emphasizes nightlife-centered encounters, both romantic and sexual relationships, and the new identity formations created by these interactions. Despite extensive research and crucial assistance in both countries, however, Rocco himself remains elusive. Rocco shielded parts of himself, understandably for a Black gay man in pre-Civil Rights, pre-Stonewall America. Both he and the music press stretched or fabricated parts of his biography. As Tausig notes, “absence is part of his story.”
Rocco’s life is a slim thread for an author weaving such a complex tale of the cultural effects of war. Thailand was a place where farang (white foreigners) frequently went to hide and enjoy the relative freedom that status allowed them. Rocco’s unsolved murder by a pair of male sex workers in 1976 exposes the vulnerability of queer and nonwhite foreigners there as well.
Reginald Harris
“A MOST INFAMOUS YOUNG SWINDLER”
The Short Tragic Life of Thomas Langrel Harris
by Patricia J. Fanning
Rock Street Press. 200 pages, $24.99
A model and aspiring artist, Thomas Langrel Harris drowned himself in Paris at age 24. Like many fin-de-siècle contemporaries, he was beautiful, erratic, and gone too soon. Harris undoubtedly had talent—Edward Steichen greatly admired his paintings, most posthumously destroyed by fire in 1904—but he left only the barest trace in the historical record. In A Most Infamous Young Swindler, Patricia J. Fanning, biographer of photographer F. Holland Day, attempts to overcome this obstacle.
Growing up in Kansas City, the scion of an upper-middle-class family, Harris’ artistic nature, along with what Fanning diagnoses as bipolar disorder, alienated him from his stolidly Midwestern parents. Alienation remained a theme throughout his short life, as Harris bounced across North America and Europe, leaving in his wake a series of debts for which his irritated friends became responsible. These friends included Day, for whom Harris modeled in Boston and who was in love with him, and Oscar Wilde, briefly charmed by Harris during his exile in France. Fanning’s best passage discusses several Day photographs for which Harris modeled, including correcting the record about a frontal nude previously assumed to be a study for Day’s famed Crucifixion series.
The problem is that, despite valiant efforts, there isn’t enough material about Harris to justify a full biography. Two chapters about his much younger sisters, who also wanted to be artists but never knew their brother, are irrelevant to the subject at hand. Fanning’s biography reads like a scholarly article padded to book length, and indeed she previously published two articles examining Harris’ relationships with Day and Wilde.
Philip Clark
BOTH/AND: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color
Edited by Denne Michele Norris
HarperOne. 240 pages, $27.99
In Both/And, Electric Literature editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris brings into print previously online essays chronicling trans and gender-nonconforming life. In a project initiated at Norris’ nonprofit digital publisher because of her “fury” over Dave Chappelle’s transphobic “jokes” in his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, the writers of color gathered here mostly use personal
narrative to explode competing, and often contradictory, stereotypes about their communities. As Kai Cheng Thom writes: “We are always the saint yet also the shadow, always the martyr yet always the monster. We are always symbols and never people.” Divided into three sections, “Selfhood,” “Desire,” and “Coming to Light,” the book uses speeches, family history stories, and reportage from seventeen contributors to explore issues ranging from language and word choice to embracing anger and its inner power.
There are many high points, including Vanessa Angelica Villareal on the created worlds of video games, “the only place to imagine wholeness … a site of (im)possible futures,” and “Trick,” Meredith Talusan’s first-person mix of the comic, the erotic, and the terrifying. The feelings the essayists describe of not fitting in and chafing against constricting notions of gender will be familiar to many readers. Novelist Caro De Robertis comments: “For some of us, the training to keep ourselves small or distort our own truth for the comfort of others runs deep, below consciousness. … None of that worked as well once I let my whole gender exist in my skin. The change expanded me. … I had to access more of myself than ever before.” For those wanting to understand the inner lives and hopes of trans and gender-nonconforming people, Both/And is an excellent place to begin.
Reginald Harris
TWIST
by Bruce Parkinson Spang
Warren Publishing. 124 pages, $17.95
Many of the poems in Bruce Parkinson Spang’s Twist flesh out the portrait of a boy growing up beneath a “pure suburban sky” in the 1950s. Innocence abounds—most memorably in the wide eyes of a five-year-old gazing down a row of men standing at a long urinal at a drive-in theater’s men’s room, and in a young boy’s enjoyment of physical closeness while his father lifts his sleepy little body from their car, gets him into his pajamas, and puts him to bed.
Unsettling questions, however, keep nipping at this youth’s serenity, as in the poem “August, 1956,” when Allen Ginsberg’s disturbing lines of poetry puncture the peace of sleepaway camp, where the speaker misses his time with Ricky Nelson’s “heavy-lidded, bedroom eyes/ and pouty lower lip” back home on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Poems that convey just how unmoored a closeted man finds himself when his marriage breaks up and when his father dies deepen and expand this collection’s primary focus on boyhood. Readers will admire Spang’s skills with syntax, rhythm, and lineation in poems like “Useless” and “Our First Orbit,” where the pacing that he orchestrates accentuates the movement toward resolutions that satisfy in terms of sonics and sense.
Steven Riel
MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story
Created by Ian Brennan
Netflix
Does cannibalism need nuance? Does incest? Antisemitic sadism at the hands of the Nazis? How about transgender people who delight in human torture and wearing their dead mother’s panties? Monster: The Ed Gein Story argues that you’re not thinking deeply enough about such matters, and it follows two previous installments on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. The third entry in Ryan Murphy’s franchise tells the lurid tale of Wisconsin-based psychopath Ed Gein (1906–1984), whose body count was relatively low—he only confessed to two murders—though, if Monster is to be believed, he spawned the entire horror genre as we know it.
Murphy, the Herculean Hollywood producer of Glee, American Horror Story, and American Crime Story, has said that the thesis of the series is the question of whether monsters are made or simply born that way. Gein’s killings inspired some of the mightiest tentpoles in horror cinema. Beyond Psycho, there’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and even the trope of the babysitter in distress. The most controversial episode in Monster, “Sick as Your Secrets,” links Gein’s grave-robbing and dancing around in female flesh with the hidden homosexuality of actor Anthony Perkins (aka Norman Bates), who died of AIDS-related illness in 1992. Perkins (played by Joey Pollari) turns to a shrink for an electroconvulsive bout of conversion therapy.
The online outrage was as swift as it was justifiable. Why, in this especially dark time for trans people and trans rights, are Murphy and Ian Brennan serving up the visual equivalent of food poisoning? After being shown the set of Psycho, with Alfred Hitchcock as his personal tour guide, Perkins rushes offstage to vomit. My sentiment, exactly: The third season of Monster—unfortunately, more incarnations are in production—leaves the bitterest of aftertastes.
Colin Carman
