Reviews: More Gay Fantasy Fiction Worth "Howl"-ing Over!

A round-up of some of the gay fantasy-themed works of fiction that have recently crossed my desk:

In his forward to the new graphic novel based on out gay poet's Allen Ginsberg's classic "Beat Generation" poem Howl (HarperPerennial, $19.99), artist Eric Drooker comments on the ridiculousness of the task at hand: "Sure, let's animate Dante's Inferno while we're at it"

But Drooker needn't have worried. The resulting novel, based on work Drooker did as animation designer for the new film Howl, is evocative and mesmerizing — a good fit for Ginsberg's trippy, mind-blowing imagery.

But I do have one quibble. Ginsberg's poem was, of course, famously "gay" — and that was a big part of the reason why the book was repeatedly labeled "obscene." There is a scene or two of phallic imagery, but when Drooker illustrates the graphic sex in the poem, it's all about heterosexuality. This struck me as extremely odd given the poem's famous origins.

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Keeper by Kathi Appelt (Atheneum, $16.99) restored my faith in humanity a little. As much as I love young adult and middle grade fiction, I sometimes get depressed that it's often the (very sub-par) Twilight-like books that get all the attention.

But Appelt, following up on last year's Newbery Honor medal-winning The Underneath, gives her children's books an extraordinary degree of sophistication and literary depth. (Full disclosure: Kathi and I were once on a college faculty together, and she asked me to blurb this book, which I did enthusiastically).

Ten-year old Keeper lives on the Texas coast in a world (and a point-of-view) that is infused with myth and magic, including her idea that her absent birth-mother is really a mermaid capable of making right everything that's gone wrong in her life and in her poverty-stricken community. In a journey that is as much psychological as it is physical, Keeper and her trusty dog take a boat out into the ocean to try to call her mother home. Along the way, Keeper meets a variety of characters (both human and animal), and the line between reality and fantasy becomes very, very blurry.

Why am I including this book here? Mid-way through the book, a love story is recounted about one of the adult characters as a teenager — and it turns out that it involves two young men, one of whom is also a merman. It's handled in a sensitive and refreshingly matter-of-fact way, but it's also delightful and magical, just like the rest of this wonderful book.

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Last month, I reviewed Lord of the White Hell, Book One, which I said suffered from the fact that it was the first book in a trilogy, and it didn't "stand alone" as its own story. It turns out I was wrong: this series is not a trilogy, but just a two-book series, and now Lord of the White Hell, Book Two by Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books, $14.95) is out.

This second book picks up the story of teenage Kiram, who had traveled from his gay-accepting society to a gay-intolerant one to study at a prestigious university. There he became romantically involved with his oh-so-hot roommate, Javier, who suffers from a family curse called the White Hell.

In this second entry in the series, Kiram and Javier travel back to gay-tolerant Cadeleonia, and I have to say: I really enjoyed seeing a medieval society where gay people are completely accepted and integrated, where all the local mothers send their eligible sons to come and try to win the hand of the handsome son of the local successful candy-maker. Maybe this is a fantasy, but it was a very enjoyable one — and Kiram and Javier's frequent, impassioned romps didn't hurt the book any either.

Since my review of the first book, I've learned that this project was originally conceived as all one book, but was split into two parts by the publisher because it was just too long. This was an inopportune solution to the fact that the original book itself was simply too long. There isn't enough of a plot here to sustain two full books, so it sometimes meanders a bit and repeats itself. However readable the author's style is, it needed an edit so it could've been published as one book.