Category Archives: Fiction

Listening to Dust by Brandon Shire

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“…and if we could capture it, put it under glass, keep dampness from tamping its restless tranquility. What then? Every storm has brilliance, Dustin; has beauty when you look at it from a distance. It blurs all those incessant imperfections we seek to hollow out with each of our hopes. But when you step into its still center, when you see its fury and its power, you also see its beauty; its grace.

Five thousand miles away and I can still feel your turbulence on my skin, Dustin; your grit stuck in the chambers of my heart…and all the silence that has followed it.

Please write me back.”

Listening to Dust by Brandon Shire is a devastatingly beautiful and emotionally powerful love story of a magnitude that is at times overwhelming. It is not often that I find myself without the ability to articulate my thoughts in a review because the writing has rendered me so. This is such a story and I am not altogether sure if this review can or will do the writing justice.

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Reading Round Up: Road Trip and Book Shopping

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This summer’s road trip was not too far from home. In late July we headed to Toronto for about a week and then it was on to the Rez with a few side trips to Guelph, Paris (Ontario) and Fort Erie. Visiting with family and friends was our main activity, however, as always, I made time for some book shopping.

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Arthur Wooten’s Shorts – Stroke of Luck: a short story & The “Dear Henry” Letters by Arthur Wooten

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I will begin this review by getting directly to the point. Arthur Wooten’s Shorts is an intelligently humorous and often hysterically funny compilation of one short story – Stroke of Luck, and a short novella – The “Dear Henry” Letters.

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Taxi Rojo by Erik Orrantia

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Erik Orrantia is one of a handful of authors in gay fiction with whose writing I connected almost immediately when I read and reviewed his Lambda Literary Award winning debut novel Normal Miguel (Bristlecone Pine Press; Cheyenne Publishing, 2010) for Rainbow Reviews. His is an evocative and fluid voice and from this author I have come to expect good writing, an intuitive understanding of his adopted home of Mexico and always, always extremely well written and developed characters. Mr. Orrantia delivers all of this in his third novel Taxi Rojo a multi-layered “tale of triumph and defeat, hopelessness and perseverance, life and death.”

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Songs for the New Depression by Kergan Edwards-Stout

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“I’m leavin’ my fam’ly
Leavin’ all my friends
My body’s at home
But my heart’s in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines
On a new front page sky
My tears are salt water
And the moon’s full and high”
(Shiver Me Timbers by Tom Waits, 1974)

Kergan Edwards-Stout’s debut novel, Songs for the New Depression, is the poignant and darkly humorous story of Gabriel Travers who is HIV positive and convinced that he’s dying despite his doctor’s proclamations to the contrary. His viral load is undetectable, his T-cell count is up, but according to Gabe one glance in the mirror tells him everything he needs to know. “His ass, once the talk of West Hollywood, now looks suspiciously like a Shar-Pei…” Faced with his own mortality, Gabriel’s first person narrative takes the reader on an emotional journey as he recounts his life experiences and relationships, reflecting on the choices that he’s made along the way and questioning his treatment of the people in his life.

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Dark Lover: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood (Book 1) by J.R. Ward

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There are probably only a handful of devoted readers of mainstream paranormal romance that have yet to read the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward. Although I’m not an exclusive reader of romance (whether paranormal or other), I began reading this series in 2006 and while I enjoyed the early books, my interest in the series began to wan and I easily let go of the series in 2008 following the release of Lover Enshrined (Book 6). But, with the recent publication of the tenth book, Lover Reborn, which features the story of Tohrment the last of the original Brothers, I’ve picked up the books once again to catch-up on the newer storylines and characters in anticipation of reading Book 10. As I’ve never reviewed any of the books in this series I thought it would be interesting to post my thoughts on some of the stories in retrospective, starting with the first book Dark Lover.

  As the first book in the Black Dagger Bortherhood (BDB) saga, I consider Dark Lover foundational to the series as a whole and the book upon which the author springboards the BDB world and introduces many of the characters that are set for stories in future books. While it’s not the strongest written book in the series, it is a solid beginning.

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The Wicked Instead (Twisted Tree #1) by Vivien Weaver

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The Wicked Instead by debut author Vivien Weaver is the first book in the Twisted Tree series and the flagship publication for the recently launched Hard Limits Press. It is an urban fantasy that combines Ozark redneck “haint” culture with ancient Hungarian mythology and folklore to tell the uncommon coming of age story of brothers Cary and Lindsay Delaney.

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