The sad thing about gay fiction is that there isn't enough of it for a reader to be discerning. No matter how shoddy it is, it will end up on gay booklists just to fill up space. And if you try to leave something off because it sucks, people will assume you haven't read it. As a result, a lot of crap ends up getting recommended on gay booklists.

THIS NEED NOT BE SO.

There is a surprising amount of gay fiction out there, but it tends to slip by under the radar as a survival mechanism. With the help of my good friend the Internet, the Borders where I work, and countless hours spent trawling countless used book stores, I have put together a list of gay fiction--primarily science fiction and fantasy--that is, I hope, approaching comprehensive. Moreover, I've read everything on it and can offer a plot summary plus my own admittedly biased opinion on its relative worth. Arm yourselves with this list, my friends, and happy hunting!

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My [revised] completely subjective key is as follows:

- Phenomenal. I'd buy it (in hardcover) and then buy copies for all my friends.
- Not perfect, but still extremely good.
- Not bad per se, but not good.
- Some redeeming qualities, but gay or not, I'd give it a miss.
- I'd rather watch my screensaver.
- Crap beyond crap. Stabbing yourself in the eye would be more fun. Scroll down to "Matthews" for the only book that I've yet given this rating to.

In addition to basic standards of plot, characterization, and good writing, ratings are likely to be influenced by...

Things I dig: snark, realistic relationships, narrators who lie to the readers, taking a cliche and turning it on its head, gay people being Awesome (even better than gay people being gay, in my opinion), incarceration, unique dialects, monsters as love interests, good people making terrible mistakes, and anything that hasn't been done before.
Total turn-offs: cliches of all varieties, characters who are Too Stupid To Live (tm), writers who neglect character development to focus on world-building, deus ex machina for author's darlings, and binary distinctions of good and evil.

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Lastly, if something isn't on this list and you think it should be, shoot me an email. I'm always on the prowl.

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The Last Rune Series
Beyond the Pale
The rest of the series:
Maybe it deserves more than two stars, because I didn't have any trouble finishing it, but I also don't have any desire to buy it or read the rest of the series. It starts with two characters from our world, a doctor named Grace and a bartender named Travis, getting sucked into a magical and medieval world on the verge of collapse. The plot was intriguing and kept me going and the writing style is engaging enough, but I didn't care about any of the characters. A different review described Grace as a "boring ice queen" and I'm inclined to agree. Travis is more sympathetic, but not much more interesting. There's a martial cult that is beyond Spartan in the way they spurn women, which got my hopes up, but apparently the homosexuality is not to be realized until later volumes.

Shadowdance
I think perhaps I went into this with expectations that were too high, because while it was a good book, I remember being disappointed that it wasn't better. Set in a fantasy version of archaic Greece, the main character is Innowen, who is a crippled woodcutter's son until a powerful witch gives him back the use of his legs, under the condition that he dance in her tribute every night. The catch, that neither of them reckoned on: anyone who watches him dance will succumb to their innermost desires, often with horrific consequences. The premise was very interesting, but something about Bailey's writing style kept me from ever empathizing with the characters much.

Imajica
One thing to get out of the way before I begin: this book is fucking huge. That said, it was never a chore to read despite the length, although it was often a chore to figure out what the heck was going on. In Imajica there are five planes of existence, five worlds if you will, of which ours is one. Some people are endeavoring to unite them so that people can travel freely between them, and some are attempting to stop that unification at all costs. It features three protagonists who are all intimately tied to the original unification efforts, two of them unaware of it. The most interesting by far is Pie Oh Pah, a powerful, hermaphroditic creature called a mystif. Technically the romance is man-hermaphrodite and not man-man, but Pie strikes me as an attempt to slip homosexuality into mainstream fiction, because in spite of gender-neutral pronouns it still comes off as very male.

Ironside
(Ironside is the third book in a series, following Tithe and Valiant. Valiant was my favorite of the three, but this was the only one gay enough to make the list.)
The third installment in Holly Black's Tales of Faerie, an urban fantasy series aimed at young adults. The main characters are Kaye, the changeling protagonist from the first book, now on an impossible quest for True Love, and her human friend Cornelius, who's holding a grudge against fairies in general from his previous misadventures and staunchly sticking by Kaye, being helpful and being gay. I hadn't been expecting a gay subplot when I started this series, so it was a pleasant surprise when Cornelius got center stage for romantic developments in Ironside.

As a genre, I quite like urban fantasy, but it's been years and years since I've read any young adult fiction and I found the writing style extremely jarring. It feels as though the author speeds through plot developments too quickly, relationships and characters don't get properly fleshed out, and the prose and dialogue are less sophisticated than their adult fantasy counterparts. I enjoyed it anyway, but the young adult warning is a major caveat I'd make before recommending it to anybody.

Drawing Blood
Horror's not my genre, and it's possible that if I liked horror more I would have given this a higher rating. Our bold young heroes are Trevor and Zach--Trevor is a cartoonist, haunted by his father's murder-suicide, that killed his mother and brother but skipped him; Zach is a slutty computer hacker on the run from the FBI. They both get drawn back to the house where Trevor's father committed the murders, which has taken on a frightening life of its own in the mean time. Brite's writing style is very engaging and her haunted house is imaginative and genuinely scary; my issues with the book are Zach's continuous and varied use of illegal drugs, and the lack of any deeper emotions than lust between the two boys when she seems to insist that there is. Show me, darling, don't tell me. And I was rather disgusted by her idea of a happy ending.

Ethan of Athos
A delightful turnabout on the overdone lesbian utopia books. Ethan (from the planet Athos, which is populated entirely by men) is an obstetrician sent all-unwilling on a mission to procure ovarian tissue cultures to replace the ones from the original colonists, which have begun to fail--a mission that will take him into contact with women. The back-cover summary hints at a relationship between Ethan and the hot female mercenary who takes it upon herself to keep him from getting killed--this is a lie. She doesn't convert him (she's not even interested in him) although his abject terror that she might is hilarious. A short, fast, very fun read; but keep in mind that it was published a while back, so even though Ethan IS gay he never really gets to BE gay.

Bone Dance
The sub-heading on Bone Dance calls it a "fantasy for technophiles," a title that becomes quite apt as you read the book. I'd read Bull's Finder before this, and the milieu feels much the same--a seemingly anarchic society that is dangerous but not without rules, where Bull's young, pragmatic protagonists manage to carve out a niche. But where Finder was urban fantasy, Bone Dance is sci-fi with a touch of the supernatural. It's set in an unspecified city presumably somewhere in the U.S. in the wake of an apocalyptic (though never fully clarified) war with South America. Our protagonist is Sparrow--adept techie, avid collector of pre-war media, and of completely ambiguous gender. A job gone wrong leads to unwanted attention from some very dangerous people, ominous blackouts in which Sparrow loses days at a time, and persistant rumors about the involvement of the Horsemen, the terrifying, mysterious soldiers who were responsible for turning the tide of the war.

And at the risk of being as cryptic as the back cover of the book, I'm going to leave it at that. Bull does a masterful job throwing the reader in at the deep end and tossing enough lines to keep you afloat. By the middle of the book you'll know exactly what's going on and it will be an epiphany--I enjoyed the revelation immensely, and I wouldn't want to spoil that for other people. Unfortunately, the book seems to run out of steam in the last third. I had the impression that I was sympathizing with the wrong characters, that I found the author's preferred ones somewhat dull and had taken a liking to the ones that she was indifferent to. And ironically, I think the plot detracted from the book by moving the overall focus from Sparrow's personal struggle to an external conflict that felt almost artificial. All in all it's worth a read, although I liked Finder and War of the Oaks better.

Kushiel Series
Kushiel's Dart
The rest: Kushiel's Chosen, Kushiel's Avatar, Kushiel's Scion:
I'm not entirely sure this belongs on a gay booklist, but I know a lot of people would be pointing it out to me if I left it off. Certainly, bisexuality is the norm in their society and our bold heroine is totally weak in the knees for the evil lady, but her love interest is male--which strikes me as giving a nod to homosexuality without being a gay book. That said, this is nevertheless an amazing work of fiction. It's an impressive author who can pull off a writing style that feels consistently, authentically non-modern, and Carey does it in spades. Her series is set in a fantasy version of Europe (France, specifically), overflowing with intrigue and beautiful people. The protagonist is Phedre, a courtesan and dyed-in-the-wool masochist. Her sexuality seems to get trotted out as the feature that makes these books unique, but it's really not. Once the groundwork has been laid and the plot gets rolling, it never stops. I'd been resisting reading it for a long time, but now I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Unfortunately, the series can't keep up the promise of the first book. I read perhaps 2/3 of the way through the next one, then put it down and wasn't interested enough to pick it up again. I might skip to the fourth book and give that a shot, because apparently Phedre's son is the protagonist and if he's even half as promiscuous as she is, it should be fun.

Mordred, Bastard Son
(This is supposedly the first book in a trilogy, but so far it is the only one out)
So as I was reading this book I was pondering a tagline, and the phrase coming to mind was "mostly tedious" (which is always a bad sign, when I'm thinking about my pending review instead of the book itself), but then when I was done with it I got a little drunk and started feeling more benevolent. Working in the book's favor was that it's a very fast read. It's still mostly boring--yet another rehashing of the Arthurian legend, in the recent trend of taking the tales back to their primitive Celtic roots (Alice Borchardt's Tales of Guinevere duo comes to mind). There are pages upon pages of descriptive paragraphs that I skipped with a lazy eye, a truly ridiculous amount of detail regarding pagan mythology (which would no doubt make this book my favorite if that were my field of interest, but it's not), and a fair bit of sermonizing towards the beginning about gay people being just as good as anyone else. (Hello! Anyone reading this book is going to be gay-friendly, which means you're preaching to the choir.)

So if you take out the recycled plot, the tedious world-building, and the preachy theme... you're left with Mordred, who turns out to be a surprisingly well-crafted character. Clegg, being a gay man himself, knows how to make homosexual desire hot. The plot picks up a lot near the end and actually made me sort of wish the next book was out, although Clegg's choice for Mordred's one true love didn't sit well with me. In retrospect, I can see why summaries of the book were deliberately vague about Mordred's passion for "a knight in Arthur's court" instead of giving a name. I'll foist spoilers upon you when I get around to reading/reviewing the next book in the series, but for now you can read it and pass your own judgment.

Wraiththu Series
This is a series with a fascinating premise: in a dystopian world, humans have begun to be replaced by a viral, hermaphroditic new race called the Wraiththu that is gradually driving mankind extinct. It's a plot that has turned up in other forms in other sci-fi (usually the B-movie variety), and usually with humans rallying to fight off the intruding race and managing to save themselves. Not so in the Wraiththu books--not only are they winning, but all our protagonists are members of this viral new species.

Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit
I'd heard a great deal about this series before I read it, as it is somewhat of a cult classic, and thus I was greatly dismayed when the first book was... alright. Not bad, to be sure, but it seemed undeserving of the hype. The main character is Pellaz, a young human man living in rural poverty who is enticed (without much difficulty) by a traveling stranger named Calanthe into becoming a Wraiththu himself. We travel with Pellaz as he learns about the world and about what it means to be a Wraiththu, which is admittedly necessary for world-building but Pellaz was never a very strongly defined character. Even though I wanted to like it and respected the wealth of creativity that had gone into the story, Pellaz's lack of appeal made it impossible for me to connect with him.

Bewitchments of Love and Hate
I'd delayed reading this because Enchantments had been such a disappointment, but my fear was unfounded--as it turns out, it was Pellaz who made the first book blah and with a different narrator Ms. Constantine simply shines. Our new protagonist is Swift, the child of a Varr warlord and a member of the first generation to be born to Wraiththu parents rather than incepted from humans. Calanthe, who was intriguing in the first book, is magnetic in this one--a captivating, carelessly vicious presence who drives a wedge through Swift's family with the enmity he incurs from Swift's mother and the desire he stirs in both father and son. I am, admittedly, very biased because I like cruel and lazy characters, but this book is still undeniably better as it is not being bogged down with world-building. Nor is it just Cal who receives more screen time in this installment--many of the minor characters introduced in Enchantments get more fully developed, their lives being woven into the tapestry of the Wraeththu world.

Fulfillments of Fate and Desire
Calanthe was an enigmatic, mercurial mentor in the first book and an itinerant home-wreaker in the second--in the third book he's the protagonist, and fulfills all his potential from the first two. By this time Cal has discovered the hoax executed by Thiede, gone to Immanion seeking Pellaz again, and escaped in failure. He's wandering in search of something he can feel but can't even begin to define, struggling on the fringes of society to survive and maybe claw his way up again, and facing it all with the strangest mixture of snark, stubborn pride, and vicious self-loathing. Cal makes an absolutely riveting narrator--if he tossed off some good one-liners before, in Fulfillments you realize that he kept 90% of it to himself. Very, very rarely are characters this intricate and contradictory; Cal is as "strong" a person as they come, but he's at an utter loss and in his antipathy for inaction he ends up chasing his own tail. He tells us all the time that he wallows in self-pity, but when horrible things happen to him, there's no pity--he believes quite matter-of-factly that he deserves everything he gets and more. He's not without empathy, but he still ends up hurting a lot of people; as he puts it, "I have conscience that stands by and lets me do terrible things so it can torment me for them later."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the weakest part of this book (and the ones that follow) is Cal's continued obsession with Pellaz. Pellaz, despite being a much less-defined character, is still the only one in Cal's heart--which I find somewhat inexplicable, since I'm not feeling the chemistry and Constantine has already created a slew of more interesting characters to replace him. Accordingly, I was not rooting for their reunion and was indifferent when it happened.

The [X]ments of [Y] and [Z] trilogy was originally published in the states in mass-market format by a large publishing house (Tor) so I didn't have much trouble finding them used. They have since been reprinted together in one hefty trade paperback volume simply called Wraeththu, which is sold at bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes and Nobles. Also available directly through her own Immanion Press.

Wraeththu Histories Trilogy
A second trilogy in the same world that she went back and wrote nearly two decades later, featuring characters from the next generation of Wraeththu.

Wraiths of Will and Pleasure
Much like its sequel, Shades of Time and Memory, this book scatters the story across a multitude of viewpoints -- unfortunately it doesn't work as well, because there's no compelling plot tying them together, or nothing we haven't read before. Wraiths covers a large span of years from the original trilogy, showing us what other various side characters were busy doing and feeling during that time. It features Ulaume of the mysterious, desert-dwelling Kakkahaar, who has inexplicably paired up with Flick from Saltrock (a character that I had absolutely no recollection of from the first book) and adopted, somewhat by accident, a strange Wraeththu child named Lileem. We get to see the exact circumstances of Cal's ill-fated return to Saltrock after Pellaz's death, culminating in Orien's murder, which had been hearsay until now. We see the building of Immanion, some of the details surrounding Pellaz's resurrection, and the advent of the Kamagrian, Wraeththu's sister-race.

It was sporadically very interesting, but fell short on the whole. It renewed my dislike of Thiede, how he manipulates the hell out of everyone and always wins (that might have been intentional on Constantine's part), and my aggravation for Pellaz (which I'm fairly certain wasn't) -- could he get any more boring?? And the one alternate perspective that I was particularly keen on seeing, Seel's point of view for the mind-rape that was his relationship with Swift, ended up being completely glossed over.

Shades of Time and Memory
God only knows why I didn't consult my own list when guessing which book came first in the Histories Trilogy--but considering that I made it halfway through before I began to suspect that I'd skipped one, I'd venture to say that it doesn't really matter. Where the books of the first Wraeththu trilogy tended to focus on one character, filtering the story through them, Shades is a complex tapestry woven together from a multitude of viewpoints. Pellaz is the Tigron, but he's uncertain without Thiede's guidance and the triad of him and Cal and Caeru is still fraught with tension. The villain of the piece is Ponclast, erstwhile leader of the Varrs, who has struck a pact with dark forces to free him and his people from the nightmarish prison that Thiede had left them locked in. As he gathers his forces and plots the overthrow of the Gelaming, Pellaz must rally the Wraeththu tribes and find his own divine intervention to counter Ponclast's--all very interesting, but it's the characters that make this book brilliant.

Pellaz is still boring, but the brittle, self-perpetuating feud between Caeru and Cal is hypnotic. Ponclast is a captivating figure, grotesque and clever, ruthless and vulnerable--yet still laden with his own yearnings and insecurities, fiercely loyal to his people, tender and sweet with his lover, protective and fearful for their son. Moon, Pellaz's shy, eccentric nephew, and Cal's son Tyson rebel against the shadows of the older generation as they work toward a tentative romance. Moon's father, Snake, struggles with being a mutilated creature in a race that prizes perfection, and Cobweb fights to reclaim a masculine side that has been dormant for too long and take Terzian's place as the leader of a desperate people. The task of balancing so many opposing perspectives is not an easy one, but Constantine executes it flawlessly.

Ghosts of Blood and Innocence
The last book in the Wraeththu Histories started out promisingly enough, as it picks up with two loose threads from the last book: Darquiel, product of a union between Pellaz and Cal and Caeru (must be fun to be wraeththu), raised by strangers all unaware of his parentage but conscious of some difference in him; and Loki, who still doesn't know that Cal isn't his real father. And then... it just doesn't go anywhere interesting. The strain of having a cast as large as the Wraeththu series is starting to show, because Darquiel and Loki are just two more exceptionally beautiful beauties (how do they even judge these things anymore?) without anything to set them apart from the rest of the herd personality-wise. I put the book down and forgot to pick it up again for six months, by which point I had somewhat lost the thread of the plot. The gist of it is that our bold heroes are finally becoming aware of higher powers in their world that are vying for control of the future of wraeththu, which just leads to characters becoming overpowered like DBZ and fighting in various worlds constructed in their imaginations.

Worse, though, is how the series seems to have lost touch with its established characters. Ponclast has been lobotomized and I'm convinced death would have been a mercy (see Terzian). Cal's kept his good looks but lost the manic, self-destructive craziness that made him so interesting; I used to cheer when he walked onstage but now he's hardly better than a paper doll. Darquiel's love interest is another barbarian warlord from the dawn of Wraeththu, but he's been declawed as much as the rest of them. On the whole, a disappointing end to a series that I enjoyed a lot.

Each of the Wraeththu histories books has been printed in hardcover and trade paperback format by both her own England-based Immanion Press and by Tor. I've seen some of them around in Half-Price Books; my Borders had the latest one in stock and I was able to order the others, but if you don't have similar luck you should consider ordering them from Immanion directly.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
The plot in a nutshell: Korga is slave, programmed to be dumb and docile although not necessarily innately so, plodding along in a life of hard labor until a mysterious holocaust destroys his world and leaves him the only survivor. Marq Dyeth (pronounced "death") is a privileged industrial diplomat who happens to be Korga's perfect sexual object to nine decimal places (and Korga to six decimals for him). They get thrown together, and there's something about a long dead tyrant tying their fates together--but putting it like that makes it sound a lot more lucid than it actually is.

I imagine some people will jump on my case for this, but I'd say Delany is like the James Joyce of science fiction--lyric prose, light on the plot, and frequently incoherent. Stars in My Pocket suffers from being extremely uneven, sometimes very engrossing and sometimes unreadable, and what plot there is (more like the suggestion of a plot) remains totally unresolved at the end. Ultimately, I'd give it a miss and maybe try with one of his short stories.

Nightrunner Series
Luck in the Shadows
Stalking Darkness
Traitor's Moon
Immensely enjoyable set of books--follows Alec, an orphaned young fur trapper, after he gets picked up by a cheerfully unscrupulous man named Seregil and whisked into a dangerous life of magic and espionage. Luck in the Shadows was Flewelling's first novel and in some places it shows, but it's great fun--action and adventure, comedy and drama, and a gradual romance. My only major complaint is with the third book--on the whole, it lacks the fun and flair of the other two books, and it feels like she was having to force herself to write it.

The Tamir Trilogy
(Consists of The Bone-Doll's Twin, Hidden Warrior, The Oracle's Queen)
Deals with a historical figure from the Nightrunner world, a queen who was disguised as a boy through her childhood to save her from the systematic assassination being carried out on women of the royal family. Tamir, called Tobin through the first two books, doesn't know that he's not really a boy which makes for some interesting issues to explore. However, the sort of gender-bending that Flewelling is playing with here is a pet issue of mine and ultimately I think she doesn't explore it deeply enough. (Namely, that the attempted suicide rate for transsexuals--which Tobin is, for lack of a better word--hovers around 50%, but he's largely unaffected by any sense of gender incongruity as he's growing up.) On the whole though it's quite good, if not as much fun as the Nightrunner series.

Maurice
I like to think of this as the gay version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Forster was a contemporary of D.H. Laurence which means, yes, that the writing style is slightly archaic, but it is still a marvelous book and quite easy to read. The protagonist is Maurice Hall, your average upper middle class British man in every way--except that he's homosexual. This book follows Maurice as he grapples with being gay and trying to find happiness despite that. And here Forster has my undying respect and admiration, because Maurice does get his happy ending, even though that prevented the book from ever being published in Forster's lifetime. *salutes*

If you can't bring yourself to read it, the movie is great and sticks to the book almost verbatim. It features James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, and is rated R for gay sex. Just putting that out there.

Mind Fuck, and other stories
Imagine a dystopic future Europe controlled by a totalitarian autocracy that ruthlessly crushes all suspected resistance. Now picture a protagonist who works in middle management for said government. That's not precisely accurate, but catches the feel for Mind Fuck quite nicely, because in any other book the "heroes" of this one would be the nameless, faceless bad guys. But as the author herself states, there are no good guys and bad guys here, only better guys and worse guys. The main character is Val Toreth, a "para-investigator," which is a cross between a high-ranking police detective and a government-sanctioned torturer. He's also, literally, a high-functioning sociopath -- a requirement for the job. The other main character is Keir Warrick, the young CEO of a company that's about to take their ground-breaking virtual reality technology public. They're both Type-A control freaks (who turn out to be surprisingly compatible in bed) and they have a fair bit of kinky sex, but what hooked my interest in the first book turned out to be the plot: people using Warrick's VR technology are dying and it could be mechanical or it could be corporate sabotage, but Toreth is on the case and it would be an engaging read for the mystery alone.

The problem I initially had with the romance, briefly stated, is that we see it mostly from Toreth's perspective, and from his perspective there is none. It took half the book before I remembered that this is because Toreth is a sociopath -- something that's deceptively easy to forget while you're reading. He's not vicious by nature; he's motivated sometimes by pride and sometimes by spite, but mostly just curiosity. He has a steady job that he likes well enough, spends more time doing paperwork than torturing people, goes out for drinks with his coworkers, has hobbies that include swimming and S&M. It's very subtly done, but then suddenly you realize that all of his interactions with other people are missing some crucial element of human connection; that he just doesn't care about them the way he's supposed to, he doesn't connect to them right, and it never even occurs to him. There's something deeply, fundamentally wrong with him, that no amount of love or friendship is ever going to cure -- and my adoration for authors who can take risks like that and pull them off knows no bounds. Mind Fuck focuses mainly on the plot, but Francis explores the relationship further in the short stories that follow it, posing the very real question: what sort of genuine relationship can you have with someone who doesn't care about people? Sometimes it's funny, sometimes painful, sometimes even sweet, and altogether fascinating.

(In related news, Susan Matthews, author of Prisoner of Conscience had better be taking fucking notes. Look sharp, lady, this is how it's done.)

Go to the author's website for now, though apparently Mind Fuck is due out in print before long.

Becoming Human
Somewhere in the future, a confederation of worlds is ruled over by a small, elite group called the Electors. Electors have at their disposal bio-engineered beings called probes, whose loyalty is built-in and whose lifespans are kept deliberately short. The story kicks off with a probe named Alexander, who in the course of some very complicated political maneuverings, acts according to his conscience instead of the best interests of his Elector and is put down. The story picks up again some twenty years later--our new protagonist is August, a clone of Alexander's, continuing the political struggle that remains unresolved and trying to work out his own identity and loyalties.

This book was very engaging--I would even call it gripping in parts--but ultimately very frustrating because (and it sounds trite to say it) of August's love interest. He feels intense loyalty toward Alexander's Elector and fancies it to be love, but pursuing him relentlessly is a rival Elector, Lee, who also happens to have been August's designer. Lee created August to be an "ideal companion" for himself, and doesn't hesitate to use pre-programming to bring August round to his advances when he wasn't doing it on his own. I didn't like Lee and I found the whole thing distasteful. Meanwhile, a charming foreign diplomat named Evan Kolet that I did quite like (despite the fact that he was pronounced "inflexibly heterosexual" and sadly remained in that state) treats August like a human, with basic, uncomplicated respect, and never takes advantage of his sub-human status--the same of which cannot be said for anyone else in the cast. Yet even though August is supposedly starved for such affection, he hardly seems to notice. This book would have been infinitely better if Kolet had been given center stage instead of Lee, but since he wasn't--very frustrating. The best part remains the cover art.

Kirith Kirin
Jim Grimsley isn't a fantasy writer--his usual fare is realistic fiction and stage plays--so it seems almost criminal that he should sweep in and write one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read. It tells the story of a boy named Jessex, from his childhood in a peasant farming family to becoming one of the most powerful magicians in the world and working to restore Kirith Kirin, the dethroned king, to his rightful place. Jessex is a marvelous narrator, wry and gentle and unexpectedly funny. Kirith Kirin is adorable too, even if everyone tends to treat him more like an errant schoolboy than an immortal king. The descriptive passages are beautiful and just bring the world alive. But where Grimsley really shines is in the treatment of their relationship; this is one of the very, very few books that manages to keep it just as fascinating after consumnation as it was before. I cannot recommend it enough.

Steal it from the library. No seriously--that, or cross your fingers for a reprint. If you try to buy it online, you'll be paying seventy dollars for a copy that someone else stole from the library. If you would rather be hopelessly optimistic and keep an eye out for it at used bookstores, be aware that it's a trade paperback so you won't find it on the mass-market shelves.

The Ordinary (Yes, it is both.)
When Jim Grimsley wrote Kirith Kirin a lot of people who were fans of his other works criticized it quite harshly, as they believed that writing fantasy was beneath him. And though in many ways I consider Kirith Kirin to be a perfection of the genre, it stays quite firmly in the realm of fantasy. The Ordinary, although I liked it less, is an astonishing work that transcends genre.

It's set in the same world as Kirith Kirin, but a millennium or so later. Kirith Kirin has long ago crossed the mountains to the afterworld although Jessex remains--a distant, almost godlike figure now known as Irion. Moreover, he has opened a portal between Aeryn, his contained, magic-ruled world, and a vast, space-age empire that looks to Aeryn as a resource to fuel its endless wars. The protagonist of the book is a woman named Jedda, a trader from the space-age society recruited as a diplomatic translator between the two civilizations. Character development though, which was the cornerstone of Kirith Kirin, gets sacrificed in favor of the setting, which is my chronic complaint with science fiction. The world-building that Grimsley does with Jedda's sci-fi society is unremarkable compared to his work with Aeryn in Kirith Kirin, but the scope of his ideas for their interaction is astounding. It's the magic-vs-technology struggle where magic is never once at the disadvantage, it's creation myth and philosophy, it's atheism in a man who has met God.

And after I finished it, I wished he hadn't used the same world as Kirith Kirin, although I realize there wasn't another option. I didn't like seeing how much Jessex had changed; I missed Kirith Kirin, and his new characters--Jedda and her lover Malin, Jessex's niece--were no replacement. Grimsley's ideas are fascinating, but I didn't like seeing them applied to the world I was so attached to. This has ended up being as hard to give a numeric rating to as Fall of the Kings, because once again, it's a phenomenal book that I didn't really like.

The Last Green Tree
Continues the saga told in Kirith Kirin and The Ordinary, now even more thousands of years into the future. Malin, now known as the Great Mage, rules the space-age empire (with Jedda as her consort) and is forcibly shifting it to socialism, but they're both no more than mentions. Jessex is still kicking around, along with a handful of copies of himself that he's made. Major characters are Phineas Figg, a member of the wealthy elite until Malin's wealth-redistribution went into effect, and his ward, a strangely damaged young boy named Keely File. To escape Malin's tax reforms and metropolitan overcrowding, Figg decides to move them to property he owns out on a distant, rural planet; he doesn't anticipate it erupting into planetwide civil war as soon as he arrives. This war is brutal and Grimsley's ever-fertile imagination takes the cake for grotesque sci-fi horrors.

I didn't like what the sequels did to the world of Kirith Kirin, even retrospectively, but as far as I was concerned the damage had been done in The Ordinary and I might as well ride it out to the end. The Last Green Tree is science fiction; there is nothing left of the sweeping fantasy that made Kirith Kirin such a pleasure. It's heavy on the world-building and the uncovering of ancient mysteries, and light on characterization. I got the feeling that I could have liked Keely if he'd had more chance to develop, but the story pulls in too many different directions and he ends up just being a function of the plot. Jessex was the only character I cared about, with just enough of the boy he used to be shining through to make me smile and think of bygone days.

And then the ending. Christ, the ending. If I come across Jim Grimsley at a sci-fi conference I'm going to give him a good shake and ask what that the hell was supposed to mean, because from where I'm sitting it looks pointless. Which is about as much as I can say without giving away unforgivable spoilers. (And I can't even work out my frustration in a good rant with a friend, because I don't know anyone else who's read it. Definitely drop me a line if you have and want to discuss it.)

Dream Boy
This is more along the lines of what Grimsley usually writes, gay coming-of-age stories. Like the title suggests, it has a floating, unreal sort of atmosphere to it, dreams verging into nightmares. It's the story of an adolescent boy named Nathan and his sweet, tentative romance with the boy next door, all overshadowed by the threat of violence from Nathan's abusive father. Abuse is a frequent theme is Grimsley's mainstream books but he handles it like no author I've read before--none of it gets shown or even talked about, it's all in the silence and the deadly tension that permeates the story every time his father is present. Extreme violence at the end with a strange, deus ex machina sort of intervention, but ultimately uplifting.

Boulevard
Another gay bildungsroman, with Grimsley's same beautiful prose but a very different feel to it. This one follows Newell, small town boy from rural Alabama newly arrived in New Orleans to embrace the decadent gay subculture there. Its lows aren't as dark as Dream Boy, but consequently its highs aren't as bright either, just a slow descent into a tawdry life where sexual gratification becomes the only priority. The narrative slides around between several other characters, to give a wider view than Newell's rose-colored one, and they're interesting but just leave you feeling even worse.

The God Eaters
I was reluctant to read this book because I saw the cover, read the description for a different book, got them confused and thought, "Cowboys and indians? Christ, what a gay cliche, I'll leave it till I'm starving." That, as you might guess from the four-star rating, was an error in judgment. The prologue suffers from some choppy storytelling and deals with one protagonist's dark past rather heavy-handedly, but it smoothes out within a chapter and the rest of the book proceeds apace.

The God Eaters is steampunk fantasy with a dystopic, frontier feel to it. In this world, a large variety of psychic talents crop up in the population and are either assimilated to work for the government, or done away with by other means. Our bold heroes are Kieran Trevarde, a smokin' hot badass who's still human enough to get the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis, and Ashleigh Trine, an Everyman in it somewhat over his head. They're both in trouble with the government for concealing their Talents (among other things; Kieran robs stagecoaches and kills people "by the batch, to save time," while Ash produces anti-government propaganda) and the first third of the book involves them being quite proactively in prison. And, mea culpa, I have a terrible weakness for prison lit.

I liked this much, much more than I expected to. Hajicek has a fantastic hand for banter, with both Kieran and Ash holding their own and delivering lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. Kieran is delightfully badass and though his angsty past nearly goes overboard with horrors, it's more than redeemed by the fact that he pities himself not at all, just takes the shit that life throws at him, dusts himself off and keeps going. Ash is a much less hyperbolic character, a shy, clever intellectual, an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances. He grows and adapts to his circumstances as he's forced to, and he's never going to be a badass like Kieran but that's okay. The prose waxes purple sometimes when talking about their epic love for each other, and waxes abstract at others when describing various magic stuff, but on the whole I very much recommend this book.

Go to the author's website. It has been published in hardcopy, and I had it on my "books to look for" list for a long time, but never found it until a friend sent me the .pdf file. I'd still buy it in a heartbeat if I stumbled across it in a bookstore.

The Coming
The premise: in the not-too-distant future, a university space-monitoring station has discovered a mysterious object hurtling toward earth, hundreds of light-years away but closing the distance fast, and received the curt message: We're coming. The viewpoint characters: professors, policemen, porn stars, reporters, mobsters, barristas, junkies, hobos, and possibly an alien. From a veritable collage of narrators, Haldeman writes an engaging, believable world abuzz with a mix of panic and optimism over the impending first contact.

This was an interesting book, neither plot-driven nor character-driven; as far as the first contact plot goes, not much happens for most of the book and yet the viewpoint changes too often for readers to get particularly attached to any of the characters. It's more about how humanity on the whole would react in this situation, and how worrying about aliens doesn't preclude you from worrying about taxes and in-laws and ordinary day-to-day life. The gay angle comes in when a mobster attempts to use it as blackmail material against a closeted professor, which sort of backfires because the professor is an ex-marine and wins at life, or at least wins at blackmail. There's very little in the way of gay people being gay, but it's got gay people kicking ass, which I enjoy about equally much. Unfortunately, after that subplot is resolved the gay professor is mostly written out of it and the book loses steam. Contact, when it happens, doesn't live up to the hype and I found the ending terribly trite and anticlimactic.

Dreamers: A Novel of the Silent Empire
The first of a series, evidently, and though the story kept me quite interested as I was reading it, I felt no need to buy it or seek out the sequels. The premise is that there is a plane of consciousness called The Dream, which affects all sentient minds even though only a handful of psychics called the Silent can voluntarily reach it. Recently there have been ominous disturbances in the Dream that are killing Silents and subconsciously instigating non-Silents to murder and suicide, along with rumors of a terribly powerful Silent who can control the minds of others. Kendi is a Silent who has been dispatched to find this alleged Silent; Sejal is the terribly powerful Silent in question. Kendi is gay and in a boring established relationship; Sejal, though he makes his living turning tricks, seems wholly indifferent to sex of any sort. Sejal is the much more interesting of the two, but the rest of the series looks like it follows Kendi.

The Fire's Stone
This was one of her earlier novels and the pacing reflects that a little, but every time I reread it I'm impressed anew at how masterful her grasp of characters and relationships already was. It features a trio of characters, all of whom are flawed when you first meet them, who need to grow and change and then actually do. Darvish, a happily slutty, alcoholic prince; Chandra, a prissy princess and exceedingly powerful wizard (and hoo boy does she know it); and Aaron, an foreign thief in exile who is Angsty McAngst. But then they all get thrown together on a quest For Great Justice and none of them are allowed to stay that way. If I had to pick my favorite Tanya Huff book, I think this would be it.

Unless you happen to find the first edition at a used bookstore (which isn't all that unusual), you ought to look for it under the title Of Darkness, Light, and Fire, the reprint where it was packaged together with her other early book Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light.

The "Smoke and" series
(Consists of Smoke and Shadows, Smoke and Mirrors, Smoke and Ashes)
Arguably a sequel, this features a minor character from her earlier Blood series, the street kid Tony, a former hustler who has now cleaned up his act and works as a production assistant for a low-budget TV show about vampire detectives. The plots are crazy, but suspend your disbelief and run with it -- Tony is endlessly entertaining in his attempts to juggle saving the world, finding a boyfriend, and not getting fired. Huff's dialogue is as sharp and funny as ever, and there's plenty of gay to go around. (Including a threesome -- to save the world!!)

The Quarters Series
All set in the same fantasy world, with three different sets of characters. In this world, there are elemental spirits called the kigh, who can be "sung" and controlled by bards with an affinity for one or more of the four elements. Bisexuality is more or less standard with most characters being "cheerfully indiscriminate," to use Huff's own words.

Sing the Four Quarters
Annice is one of the rare bards who can sing all four elements. Her lover is a woman, but a one-night stand while she's out journeying on bard duties leaves her knocked up and subsequently obliged to help when the man gets framed for treason and sentenced to death. This was the first Tanya Huff book I read, and I liked it enough to keep reading the series but I've never felt the need to reread it. Annice is, sadly, somewhat boring compared to her later characters.

Fifth Quarter
No Quarter
This pair of books follows a sister-brother duo, Vree and Bannon, who have been raised by the Imperial army and trained as expert assassins. An assignment gone awry leaves them with both minds stuck in Vree's body, while their intended target, a man named Gyhard, runs off in Bannon's. The incest overtones run heavy, but Huff is making a point rather than trying to titillate. The primary romantic subplot is heterosexual, but there are plenty of side characters in gay relationships and Gyhard's psycho ex-boyfriend is the main antagonist. I think these books are Huff at her finest -- fast-paced, both funny and dramatic, and packed with interesting, likable characters.

The Quartered Sea
In my opinion, the weakest of the Quarters series. Benedikt is a bard who can sing water, very powerfully, but only water which is rather unusual and serves to alienate him from most of the other bards. It doesn't help his cause that he's surly and defensive about it. He volunteers to go on a sailing mission that will take them far beyond charted waters, and ends up shipwrecked in a distant country torn by two rulers vying for the throne. Both immediately see the potential uses for him, but their keen interest in him puts him in a lot of danger. Benedikt's eventual love interest is male, but it is so absent from the plot as to be non-existant. It's Tanya Huff and she's always fun, but Benedikt is a prickly character and doesn't generate much audience sympathy.

Swordspoint
Funny, that this should be one of my top picks when I didn't even really like it until I was quite a ways in, at which point I was rather charmed by it, and by the time I finished I was in love with it. Subtitled "A Melodrama of Manners", Swordspoint has a very different atmosphere than most fantasy. It's set in a pseudo-18th century instead of pseudo-medieval period, in a city where nobles can hire swordsmen to settle their quarrels in proxy. (But god forbid that formalities should fail to be observed!) The protagonists are Alec, a snarky, aggressively insulting university student and his lover, Richard St Vier, the most brilliant swordsman in recent history. Alec may be a certifiably crazy, or he may just be antisocial, but either way he's incredibly entertaining. St Vier makes a nice foil to him, more subdued but charming in his own right, and their contretemps are a pleasure to read. Kushner's dialogue is brilliant, clever and dryly hilarious.

The Fall of the Kings
I don't quite know what to make of this book. It's set in the same city as Swordspoint, but it's not exactly a sequel; all of the characters from the original are dead, either legends or ghosts. The new protagonists are Basil St Cloud, a professor of history at the university, and Theron Campion, a young nobleman who becomes his lover. Basil gets involved in an academic duel, so to speak, with another professor, and his research takes him deep into the mysteries of a magic that has been all but forgotten. And that's the plot, but that really doesn't cover it; the plot just serves to keep the characters moving around, what keeps the story going is the prose. It seems to carry you, almost dreamlike, through the book as it keeps getting stranger and stranger, and when it throws cold water on your face with the ending, you're left shaking your head for days afterward. Or I was, anyway. Like I said, I don't know what to think of it--it's powerfully written and shook me up something good, but it didn't leave me feeling as though I'd liked it much.

The Privilege of the Sword
Finally, the sequel to Swordspoint that we were all hoping for, set only a decade or so later. Alec has come into his inheritance, although he's no less crazy than before, and the protagonist is his niece Katharine whom he's trying to make into a swordswoman for the novelty of it. Katharine is thoroughly lovable, and refreshingly different from most swashbuckling fantasy heroines. She has a very different outlook on life than any of the previous characters, shaping the book with her energetic, youthful optimism. Yet the tone is sadder than Swordspoint, because those were days when Alec and Richard were at their peak, and they miss it with a longing that's palpable. The ending, though, is absolutely inspired--of the three, I'd recommend saving this book for last so that you're left with this happy ending instead of the mindjob that is Fall of the Kings.

Privilege of the Sword is a trade paperback and too large for mass-market shelves.

Last Herald-Mage series
(Consists of Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise, Magic's Price)
This is probably the most well-known gay fantasy in existence, but it is far from being the best. Vanyel, eldest son of a minor provincial lord, would rather wear pretty clothes and become a bard than swordfight or inherit the estate; when he gets sent to the big city he finds out that there are other boys like him and oh yeah eventually he becomes a crazy-powerful herald mage. Plot issues notwithstanding, homosexuality is treated in an unrealistic, cliche-ridden manner--essentially, this is a book for the yaoi crowd. Relationships go from nonexistant to married-couple-level stability overnight, Vanyel spends most of his life being lonely instead of being gay, and the ending is crap.

Yes, it ends tragically--I just spoiled it for you. And that is something that raises my hackles, because a whole lot of gay media ends in tragedy and I think it sends a very negative message. (Also, I didn't spoil it much since he sees his own death as early as book one.) But on the flip side, the books are quite fun when they're not trying to be angsty or preachy, which is unfortunately somewhat a lot; I bought them (used) and have reread them a couple times.

Warchild
This is an absolutely superb book; it's almost impossible to believe that it's her first. Warchild tells the story of Jos, initially kidnapped as a child from his parents' freight ship and kept by a creepy, charismatic space pirate with ambiguous intentions for him. He nearly dies attempting to escape and is picked up again, this time by aliens that his own race is at war with. Jos is forced to reconsider things he took for granted, and choose sides in a war that he never expected to fight in.

I devoured this whole book in one sitting; Lowachee made me care about Jos the way no author had done for quite a while. Her world is vast and fascinating while still intensely character-driven. Jos is an incredible character, his actions and emotions completely congruent with the traumatic experiences of his past. As far as gay relationships go it never gets beyond heavy subtext, but it's Jos's issues getting in the way, not the writer, and you'll ache for him. Run, don't walk, to buy this book.

Burndive
Burndive picks up where Warchild left off--but with an entirely new protagonist. Our new narrator is Ryan Azarcon, the bratty rich-kid son of Captain Azarcon from the previous book, who gets hauled kicking and screaming into the war that Jos and his father have been fighting. Jos does show up later and becomes a distant sort of friend to Ryan, but he remains as asocial and incommunicative as ever, and without his POV we really don't know what's gone on with him and Niko in the mean time. Burndive is as well-written as the first, but despite the leaps and bounds his character progresses, Ryan is simply less interesting than Jos.

Cagebird
Wow--this book makes me wish I hadn't given Warchild the highest possible rating, just so I could give Cagebird one more. The newest protagonist in Lowachee's space opera is Yuri Kirov, the pirate who kidnapped Ryan at the end of Burndive, and a protege of the same space pirate who took on Jos... only Yuri never ran away. I would say that this book is darker even than Warchild, because Yuri has no Niko to save him--everything he does, for himself and the ones he loves, he has to do alone, and it seems like the only choices he ever gets are between bad and worse. Both sex and violence are ramped up in this book, and fairly well run the gamut of squicks. The only frustrating thing is the knowledge that the next book will pick up with a different protagonist, and we won't get to see how Yuri's life, which is finally looking up at the end, will pan out.

Dream Messenger
Not so much "gay fiction" as literature by a gay author, who of course couldn't keep himself from making the protagonist bisexual. It's neither sci-fi nor fantasy, but has the loose relationship with reality that is characteristic of Japanese literature. Dream Messenger follows the story of Matthew (aka Masao) from his youth as a "rental child" in New York (which is not what it sounds like, but rather children who can be borrowed part-time by couples who want to play like the children are their own) to his floating, freelancing life in Tokyo where he continues the tradition by being a rental friend, among other things. Reception to Dream Messenger when it came out in the U.S. was mixed, with a lot of people complaining about his empty, materialistic life and the lack of a message--I think they missed the point entirely, but even I'll admit that Japanese literature is an acquired taste.

Prisoner of Conscience
(Other books in the series are The Devil and Deep Space, An Exchange of Hostages, and Hour of Judgment but they are and damned if they ever will be.)

If I had stopped reading this book when I first wanted to, it would have gotten a star and a half, or maybe two. At 57% of the way through, it was down to zero and I couldn't continue. If I kept going it would probably end up negative. It's not even really gay, and the only reason it's on my damn list is to keep some other poor schmuck from seeing it on the Lambda Sci-Fi Recommended Booklist (what were you thinking, lambda people??) and wasting their time and/or money on it.

The plot: Andrej Koscuisko is a physician and dyed-in-the-wool sadist, which makes him well-suited for his job as an official Inquistor, re: torturer. If I were a movie critic, I would make some snarky one-liner about how this book was torture. He gets transferred to a prison, the man that it's implied he was sleeping with gets killed in a terrorist attack, and he tortures a bunch of people. According to other reviews he has some crisis of conscience later, but I didn't read that far. I know that makes this review suspect, and I apologize, but I couldn't take it anymore.

The problems: Let's start with her distractingly horrid prose. It's not even amateur, it's something else entirely--a third person omniscient narrator that slides between different points of view for only a few lines at a time, has an inconsistent, inexplicable, painful use of 'thee' and 'thou,' and is riddled with asides that are dumb, irrelevant, and often contradictory. Also she has a tendency to. Break up. Her sentences. In really stupid ways. I wish I were joking. Not to mention the absolutely moronic way that she anthropomorphizes Andrej's penis and refers to it as his "fish." And that's just the style problems--now picture plot and characterization handled with the same finesse.

(Incidentally, see Mind Fuck, by Manna Francis, for a torturer-protagonist done right.)

China Mountain Zhang
Sci-fi of the most un-science-fiction-esque sort -- there are no aliens or flying cars here, just a future that's a little bit ahead of ours and populated by people real enough to have come from anywhere. The main character is a gay man named Zhang, and the book follows him as he travels from a socialist US that seems to have taken its cues from communist China, to a lonely stint on the arctic circle, to vibrant, impersonal, totalitarian Shanghai, and back again. There are narrative detours along the way to explore other people whose lives intersect briefly with Zhang's.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It touched on a lot of themes that resonate strongly with me -- wandering through life without knowing what you want from it; searching for friends and lovers but not really clicking with anybody; the lonely, liminal state of being an expatriate. It's extremely realistic, which is usually a good thing, but in this case I think it went too far and the resulting novel is rather dreary, lacking the flair of fiction. Zhang is not a particularly compelling character, but he's more interesting than the other narrators whose POV we occasionally delve into, and those sections weaken the story overall. A bland review for a fairly bland book.

An Arrow's Flight
One word summary of this book: Wow. It is... utterly unlike anything I've ever read before, bizarre and outrageously funny and I mostly loved it. It's the Iliad set to the seventies gay subculture, with all the camp and enthusiastic promiscuity that goes along with that. The main character is Pyrrhus, the extremely gay son of Achilles, who it has been prophecied must join the war before the Greeks can win--a task that Pyrrhus himself doesn't find very appealing. In many respects the book is very dated--as homosexuality becomes more mainstream, that aggressively free-love subculture is quickly becoming an anachronism; as AIDS becomes more manageable, the impact of AIDS allegories lessens. Still, Merlis has a marvelous knack for writing true-to-form humans, and you can empathize with each and every one of his characters, alternately rooting for and resenting the same people as the POV shifts.

Melusine
It always hurts to recommend a book and have to amend it with "it takes a while to get rolling, but..." ...but you have to read this. Melusine has two main characters and splits the POV between them: Felix, a high-handed wizard aristocrat, and Mildmay, a scarred, snarky, aggressively pragmatic cat burglar from the lower end of the city. Very early on in the book (unfortunately, before we get a good handle on Felix's character), Felix is framed for the destruction of a very powerful, very important artifact and cursed with an insanity that prevents him from proving his innocence. His insanity, initially, is not very interesting and it's Mildmay's sections that keep the book afloat, as we gnaw on our nails waiting for fate to finally throw them together--which doesn't happen until over halfway through the book.

That's the problem with this book, that it drags until they meet, but HOT DAMN when they do. Don't get your hopes up for sex, but Monette's hand for sharp, witty dialogue is brilliant and her character interactions are unparalleled. There is not a dull moment for the rest of the book, or for the rest of the sequel.

The Virtu
If Melusine's only flaw was the downtime before Felix and Mildmay met, then The Virtu is flawless. Finally cured of his insanity, Felix sets out with Mildmay to return home and attempt to fix the Virtu before their country is overrun. The sexual tension, which was largely absent in the last book due to Felix being busy with the crazy, runs hot and heavy all the way through. We finally get to learn what Felix is really like and find out that he is as fascinating a character as Mildmay, with even deeper flaws. Plot-wise, it doesn't end in a cliffhanger, but the lack of resolution in their relationship will leave you desperately waiting for the next installment in the series.

Edit: I think it bears discussing that several people who have read these books have wound up loving Mildmay but hating Felix with astonishing intensity--we're talking about hating him so much that these slashfans are rooting for Mildmay to end up with a woman instead. Now I'll freely acknowledge that Felix fucks up--he fucks up a lot, and very big sometimes. He does some rather horrible things, but not out of malice and moreover (this is where they would disagree with me) he's not a horrible person. He reminds me a lot of Cal from the Wraeththu books; vicious to his enemies, careless with his loved ones, and always sorry when it's too damned late. Mildmay is an immensely likeable character, so when Felix hurts him it provokes a response for the reader to take his side against Felix, but Felix is not a simple "bad guy" and writing him off as such does Monette's books a huge disservice. That's my firm belief, but said Felix-haters have heard me out and been unmoved, so it really is subjective. And as someone else pointed out, in real life I am much more frequently the giver of abuse than the receiver, which could explain why I empathize more with Felix than Mildmay.

I have become a Felix-apologist. I suppose there are worse things to be.

The Mirador
I didn't get a chance to read The Mirador until many months after it had come out, but critical reaction to it had been a deafening silence, which was in itself telling. I knew that it had added Mehitabel, a woman introduced in the last book, as a viewpoint character, which I wasn't particularly looking forward to because I'd found her thoroughly unmemorable. Though as irony would have it, she turned out to be far more interesting than I'd expected, and the rest of the book far less.

Following their adventures in the last book, Felix and Mildmay are getting (re)accustomed to life in the Mirador, where Felix is somewhat of a social pariah and Mildmay is totally a social pariah. Mehitabel's story runs mostly independent of theirs, as she juggles being a stage actress with being blackmailed into spying on the Mirador's major players for the Bastion, Melusine's ancient rival. The budding romance between Mehitabel and Mildmay, which had been hinted at toward the end of The Virtu, gets put out of its misery right away, which is a relief because that leaves Mehitabel free to be her own character instead of a love interest.

And then... nothing happens. Seriously. Nuthin. Felix is bitchy, Mildmay is passive-aggressive, and they spend the entire book getting in petty fights with each other and with all the supporting characters. They both make some desultory investigations into separate matters -- Felix checking around to make sure that Malkar is going to stay dead, Mildmay investigating a mystery left over from Melusine -- but on the whole, this book might as well have not happened. It is four hundred pages of them wandering around accomplishing very little, followed by twenty pages of frenetic action as if the author realized that it couldn't be a book unless it had some kind of climax. Granted, Monette's writing style is very good and she makes it fairly interesting to watch her characters do nothing, but that doesn't change the fact that this book is absolutely stagnant in terms of character and plot development.

The Chosen
Set in a brutal, heavily ritualized fantasy society with a distinctly Aztec feel, our protagonist is a young man named Carnelian, heir to the empire's class of ruling elite. Living with his exiled father, Carnelian has spent most of his life on a lonely island far removed from the decadence and intrigue of the capital. When the emperor dies and his father is summoned back to society, Carnelian suddenly finds himself trapped in dangerous political games that threaten both him and those he loves... which could have made for a good ride if it weren't so freaking dull.

My initial complaint had been with this book was the pointless, over-the-top violence -- not because it made me squeamish but because it made me go, Bitch, please. Jim Grimsley's The Last Green Tree remains the only book that's been able to faze me with sci-fi grotesqueries, and while I certainly wouldn't want to live in George R.R. Martin's brutal fantasyland, it's imminently believable. The Chosen is not -- the ruling elite is so excessively, indiscriminately hazardous to the health of everyone within a ten mile radius that, had this been real, their society would have quickly destabilized in its own violence and collapsed in bloody revolution. Laws are only worth obeying as long as they provide some degree of degree of protection -- when you can be minding your own business and still get slaughtered for no reason by passing aristocrats, that's not going to fly. The book was alternately boring and off-putting, and even the gay part, about 2/3 of the way through, couldn't salvage it. I'd been endeavoring to finish it for the sake of the booklist, but then it occurred to me with sudden clarity, Life is too short to waste on books that suck! I put it down and never looked back.

Since then I've discussed the book with someone well versed in pre-modern anthropology who liked The Chosen and has assured me that Pinto (an anthropologist himself) knows what he's talking about; Aztec culture really was that pointlessly brutal. "Oh," I said. "Hmm. Well it's still really boring." "Yes," she replied, "and if you've read that far, then there's nothing at the end that's going to change your mind." So my review stands.

Cry to Heaven
It's been a long time since I read this, but I remember liking it overall despite a few objections. It tells the grand and sweeping story of castrati singers in Renaissance Italy--Guido, a eunuch who loses his voice in spite of the castration and feels his life over, and Tonio, a young nobleman who is enchanted by the music of the castrati but by virtue of his station unable (and obviously unwilling) to become one. The prose is vintage Anne Rice, before she got bigger than God and fired all her editors. The romance is between Guido and Tonio, but also between Tonio and a girl, who is as saccharine and boring as most of Anne Rice's female characters. The ending was unsatisfactory, but on the whole, very much worth reading.

The Dark Beyond the Stars
If you like sci-fi, this is brilliant sci-fi. If you're reading it for the gay, you're going to be sadly disappointed. Like countless other fictional societies in which "bisexuality is the norm", it's just a sideline activity until the protagonist manages to score with the heterosexual love interest. Typical.

But all bitching aside, this is a very cool book, dark and captivating and creepy as hell. It kicks off with our protagonist, Sparrow, losing all his previous memories and waking up to find himself on an ancient, dying ship that has been searching unsuccessfully for alien life for the past two thousand years. We're plunged into a mystery as Sparrow tries to figure who he was before, why he seems to be different from everyone else onboard, and why everyone's lying to him. I was, predictably, smitten with the villain, hateful and antisocial sex predator that he is. Unfortunately he turned out to be something of a disappointment, because his resolution never matched up to the hype he got, although plot-wise the book did a good job keeping me hooked even after the initial mystery was revealed.

Point of Hopes
Point of Hopes is set in a city in which horoscopes and astrology are both accurate and of major importance. The main characters are a policeman named Nicolas Rathe, the only cop in the city who doesn't take bribes and a bit of a curiousity for it, and a soldier named Philip Eslingen who's working as a bouncer in the off-season. Rathe is working to solve a case involving missing children, and Philip is sort of helping.

This is essentially a detective story, only it's the way detective work probably goes more in real life than in fiction: lots of legwork, lots of talking with people, lots of leads that go nowhere. As a result it's a rather slow read, though it never dragged so badly that I wanted to quit. Rathe and Eslingen are pleasant enough characters, but neither of them has much of a sense of humor. Any chemistry or sexual tension, at least in this book, run so subtly as to be nearly invisible. The book also has a bad habit of reiterating events that we've already seen as other characters get informed of what happened in their absence. All in all though, I'd recommend it.

Point of Dreams
So Nico and Philip were friendly acquaintances at the end of the last book, and in this one we are dropped into the story some six months later after they are already together, without so much as a flashback to indicate how it happened. To which I say, "Oh honey, you did not!" But they did, and worse--not only do the authors never show Nico and Philip carrying on like the lovers they're supposed to be, we don't even get to see so much as an intimate conversation. They're friendly but never affectionate; if I hadn't been told point-blank that they're sleeping together I wouldn't have believed it, because they have all the chemistry of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman. Burn.

So the story kicks off with Philip losing his job, because he's with Nico now, and working for a crime lord while sleeping with a cop generates the sort of conflict of interest his employer would like to avoid. He gets a job at a theatre, teaching extras how to fence, and when inexplicably dead bodies start turning up onstage Nico finds himself hanging around a lot too. The mystery in this book is more interesting than the one in Point of Hopes and dialogue handled with less of the redundancy that I complained about before. Sadly, I remain distracted by how unbelievably stingy the authors were with Philip and Nico's relationship. Lesbian extras get more explicit lovin' than our bold heroes. Nico has a hot and heavy kissing scene with his ex-boyfriend but never exchanges so much as a smoldering glance with Philip. What's going on here, people? Seriously.

The Merro Tree
The plot in one line: Mikk is an artist who has mastered many different forms of live performance, but when he performs something forbidden he finds himself on trial for his life. It's set in our own galaxy, with lots of different alien species that all seem to have sex with each other willy-nilly; Mikk is vaguely humanoid and his soulmate is a giant snake. A male giant snake, granted, which is where the gay comes in, but that pales beside the fact that his boyfriend is a giant fucking snake.

This book would have worked better in first person. Mikk is--no two ways around it--a hypersensitive weirdo, and without his perspective we're left shaking our heads at his bizarre responses the way all the other characters are. Crazy people can make marvelous protagonists, but you have to see it from their point of view as well so you realize they're not as random as they sound. (See Monette for Melusine) Without it, I can't empathize with Mikk or care much for his plight, and since the plot is all about his fate I'm not working up much enthusiasm for that either. Also, as other reviewers have pointed out, Mikk's trial reads like a Socratic discourse on censorship, and not a particularly inventive one at that.

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and all suggestions or flame mail should be directed at me.