Book Review: Love and Survival Under the Iron Heel

 In Light’s Shadow, by Warren Rochelle (JMS Books)

This dystopic urban fantasy blends a sweet m/m romance, a coming-of-age story, and a horrific alternate-history world. Magic and magical creatures exist, although throughout the history of this world’s United States, the Columbian Empire, they have been progressively more restricted and then criminalized. Even a hint of returning the “the Relaxation” is enough to ignite assassination attempts. Meanwhile, fairies are locked away in ghettoes or have gone into hiding, and magical beasts, such as gryphons and unicorns, are kept in zoos. Hand in hand with oppression of magical beings comes proscriptions against same-sex relationships and freedom of speech. Church, school, and state unite in systematic brainwashing and instilling fear and hatred for anyone who deviates from a rigidly conformist norm.

Gavin Booker has grown up in such an environment. His half-fairy mother was so traumatized by discrimination that she has become pathologically secretive. Although “passing” for human-normal by marriage, she imparts her paranoid to Gavin. He has always known he was different, but with the stirrings of his earliest childhood attraction to other boys, his very life is now at risk. His mother is terrified that such close friendships may cause them both to be revealed as hybrids, and she pressures him to “pass” as straight. At the same time, she takes him to a healer who dispenses medicines to suppress the beautiful golden glow of fairies and teaches him psychological suppression methods.

Gavin’s life becomes one of unending denial of his deepest feelings and his true nature. The price of exposure is not just immediate public execution without trial. It has consequences for the family and friends of the accused. Suicides by gay, fairy youth are rampant, and Gavin himself, a teenager drowning in despair, attempts to end his own life. One of the few consistent bright spots in his world is his relationship with a golden fairy boy who visits him in dreams. Their emerging love and sexual bonding sustain Gavin through the deaths and disappearances of every other boy he’s cared about.

The Columbian Empire is alarmingly like our own United States. Rochelle fleshes out Gavin’s daily life with details like news reports by Walter Conkrite, popular obsession with “the royals,” and almost-accurate bits like Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Summer” (my favorite)

Rochelle’s portrayal of the intense psychological devastation of unrelenting fear, the toxic nature of secrets, and the impact upon self-esteem is chillingly accurate. I grew up in the 1950s, when my father was the target of a McCarthy Era probe and a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department to take away his citizenship. Although I was too young to know about the FBI surveillance of our family or the relatives who went “underground,” I have vivid memories of the anxiety my family endured. Yet even in those dreadful times there were beacons of light: friends, family members, sympathetic and courageous attorneys, organizations like the ACLU, labor unions, and Quaker and other religious groups who, often at great risk to themselves, stood up for the rights of those under suspicion.

Although in Rochelle’s world, there is an underground of sorts, I found the absence of public resistance disappointing. The Columbian Empire arises from the same traditions of rights and limits on power as the United States today, dating back to the Magna Carta and earlier. At the same time, the unrelenting targeting of both gays and hybrids is an important dramatic element in how much it intensifies the pressure on Gavin and others.

One of the strengths of this book is how many different ways a reader can look at it. Certainly, it’s a gay love story. It’s also a psychological and political thriller. It’s an examination of the corrosive effects of ignorance and hatred. In all these areas, it has broad appeal.

Short Book Reviews: An Unrealistic Depiction of Recovery

The Shifting Pools, by Zoë Duncan (Trafalgar Square Publishing)

I requested a review copy of this book based on its description: 

Fleeing war and the death of her family, Eve has carefully constructed a new life for herself in London. Yet she is troubled by vivid, disturbing dreams, symptoms of her traumatic past, which intrude increasingly on her daily life. As she is drawn further into her dream world, she finds herself caught up in a fresh battle for survival. A dark, lyrical fantasy about healing and reconnecting with the full richness of the self.

As the family member of a murder victim, I am especially interested in stories of survival and healing. Although competently written on a prose level, The Shifting Pools turned out to be an example of telling the reader how to feel. (Actually, bashing the reader over the head.) Sections alternate between modern London, where Eve has begun psychotherapy (not, as the author says, psychoanalysis, a mistake that threw me out of the story!), Eve’s childhood trauma, Eve’s dreams that make no more sense than any other dreams, and a “fantasy” fairy tale that lacks the internal structure, sense, and mythic elements that make such a tale work psychologically.

Besides being confused by constantly switching from one brief scene to another, I found each thread unbelievable. I’ve already remarked on the fairy tale. Although Eve and her family are brutalized by an invading army, they read like an ordinary Western family. Given what has been happening to refugees in the past few centuries, this depiction of white privilege, with all its wealth and resources, struck me as shallow. Certainly, wealthy people can be victims of violence, but in this case there was the opening for a deeper cultural context.

More than that, modern Eve didn’t feel like a person grappling with buried trauma. Her journey into the dark places of her own psyche came across as superficial and trite, much too easily accomplished, without the soul-deep agony and strength of real survivors. The list of references at the end is light on psychology, and includes the outdated psychoanalytic work of Frankl and Jung but none of the modern understanding of PTSD and its treatment. Medication, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), PE (prolonged exposure) and other clinically proven methods aren’t even mentioned. The result might be poetic and overly dramatic but struck me as not at all realistic. My suggestion is to go spend some time with people who actually have survived PTSD and listen to how they talk because I didn’t believe Eve was one of them.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything about it.