SEE YOU IN THE MAIL

Can you fall in love—sight unseen—with someone you’ve never met, based on a shared love of music and language?

Greg—aka Gory Cat—is a zinester, which means he’s part of a community of writers who self-publish their work in small pamphlets and distribute them at festivals and punk shows and through the mail. His zine is called Long Walks on the Beach, and each issue is full of fictional personal ads based on different themes—one issue has ads written as if by characters in songs, “imagining what Jack might have been seeking after Diane refused to run off to the city with him”; another has personal ads written by objects in a movie. Greg secretly buries one “real” ad in each issue—that is, one ad describing the sort of connection he might be looking for himself. A mysterious reader named M begins writing to Greg, each time responding to the ads in which Greg reveals his most vulnerable parts, even as Greg moves into his aunt’s house to figure out his next step. M turns out to be Morgan, a cellist who helps Greg peel back the layers on the work he might want to do and what it might look like for him to fall in love—even with someone as ephemeral and unknowable as a pen pal. Set in the early-to-mid 2000s, this book is a love letter to a very specific queer punk scene that invites readers in by referencing titles and bands they can explore on their own. The letters between Morgan and Greg do a lot of heavy lifting here, but author Terry’s excellent prose and character development keep the story moving. It’s more a slow-burn love story about falling for someone who really sees you than it is about specifically queer relationships, and the lack of sex may leave some readers wanting.

Beautifully intimate and inventive.