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PRETEND IT'S MY BODY

Original work intent on creating new ways to imagine transformations.

A debut collection of stories about characters on the brink of claiming new genders, sexualities, lifestyles, and even forms.

In “Certain Disasters,” a girl survives a tornado only to feel a “negative space” suddenly crack open in her that fills with masculine imagery and makes her crave a male body, while in the futuristic “Suzuki in Limbo,” the protagonist returns to see her family one final time before she plans to give up her “meatsuit” and have her consciousness uploaded as computer code into an alternate reality. Not quite magical realist yet filled with magic, these stories perform groundbreaking work in their search for apt metaphors to describe moments of revelation for trans and queer people. Mind-reading is the magic in “Other People’s Points of View,” a story about Ted, a teenager with the niche ability to sense peoples’ thoughts as they wrestle with decisions. It also perfectly conveys why it’s hard for Ted to come out as a girl. In “Crush Me,” a slightly less successful story, the sudden magical appearance of a growing number of boulders in a riverbed brings to life the narrator’s consuming crush on her best friend, another woman. Blue writes with nuance, empathy, and wit about the complexity of gender and sexual orientation. The middle-aged narrator of “My Mother’s Bottomless Hole,” who realizes too late (from her perspective) that she wants to be a man, tells the high school students she advises in the Gay-Straight Alliance that bodies are like tattoos: “Yours mean a lot to you now because they’re perfect, but eventually they’ll be worn out and falling apart….Every adult has dysphoria. It’s called aging.” Blue’s bigheartedness extends to all of their characters, even the mothers who struggle to understand their children’s desires. That’s the case in “Bad Things That Happen to Girls,” a sneakily devastating story.

Original work intent on creating new ways to imagine transformations.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-952177-03-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Amethyst Editions

Review Posted Online: July 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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THE GOD OF THE WOODS

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

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Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

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THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

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A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

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