WeReCaTs!!

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Alex the Werecat by Anna Rosenrot

So andrewjpeterswrites.com has been looking more like andrewjpeterssleeps.com lately, but truly, I have been doing a lot of writing off-line. Over 30K words in fact. It’s a project that was inspired in part by Allison Moon’s tasty werewolf series TALES OF THE PACK.

Lesbian werewolves: meet gay werecats.

Some of my friends have been quick to point out the comic possibilities of such a theme: high strung, fastidious queens who perch above the world throwing shade at their “inferiors.” I’m not taking it from that angle, for better or for worse. The series that’s coming together is dark and sexy and aims to explore what might really happen if man and feline could be merged. Some of you have seen my posts on my beloved tiger-striped tabby Chloë. I’m fascinated by cat psychology, as well as human psychology, so I hope to delve into those aspects, while keeping the tone gothic, humid and romantic.

Werewolf stories have a pretty big fandom, but who likes werecats? The literature is rather sparse. A Barnes & Noble search of “werecats” turns up fifteen titles, three of which are studies of an array of demonic creatures – vampires, werewolves and the like. Jami Lynn Saunders has a werecat horror series that comprises four of the other titles. The rest are paranormal romance (Sally Bosco’s WERECAT CHRONICLES for example) from a female heterosexual point of view.

 

Werecat films are few and far between. The only one that has some notoriety, from thirty years ago, is CAT PEOPLE, with Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell and a title song by David Bowie.

Poster from the 1982 movie

Then of course, there are the comics and RPGs. Thundercats tends to be the major reference when I tell people I’m writing a werecat story. (Regrettably).

So what do you think? Are werecats a long-neglected theme rife with literary possibilities? Is the subject too cheesy, too wannabe-werewolves for success? I’m writing this story either way, but I’m curious how people feel about werecats?

On Various Things YA

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Two recent happenings in the sphere of LGBT Young Adult books caught my interest, and I thought I’d share them here.

First, Lambda Literary Foundation announced they are starting a new venture for young adult readers on May 1st called My Story Book Club. According to their press release on their website:

As part of our LGBT Writers in Schools program and our growing mission to promote the acceptance of LGBT works, their authors and LGBT students in schools, we are launching a national online book club for LGBT youth. Lambda Literary Foundation, in partnership with the Gay/Straight Educators Alliance and the National Council of Teachers of English, aim to provide readers 14 years-old and up the opportunity to read and discover LGBT works in the safe and protective atmosphere of Goodreads. 

The forum will feature youth moderators and a monthly Q&A with an author as well as typical features like discussion boards, polls, and playlists. Upcoming guest authors include Cris Beam of the trans-themed I AM J, Sara Ryan (“two girls in love” EMPRESS OF THE WORLD) and Charles Rice-Rodriguez (Latino, gay coming-of-age CHULITO). All three of those titles are on my ever-growing ‘to-read’ list. Their reviews are stellar, and I love that My Story Book Club will be showcasing diverse queer fiction.

Elsewhere, a blog post by sci-fi YA author Paolo Bacigalupi on Kirkus Reviews, has generated a lively discussion about the place of queer characters in future dystopias. In considering the question of why there aren’t more gay and lesbian characters in the genre, Bacigalupi suggests that gay experiences are better portrayed through allegory than overt characterization, because it’s hard to imagine a future more “dystopic” than modern gay queer living.

Bacigalupi says his goal in writing a dystopia about being gay would be to “rattle” complacent straight readers into awareness and understanding. His criteria for a good dystopian story are that it be “insurgent.” The story should “illuminate the horrors right before our eyes,” and “build empathy and humanity.”

The statement he makes that became a bit of a lightning rod is:

“So instead of writing a story about being gay, create one about being straight. Create a world where heterosexuality is a shocking desire.”

Bloggers like Rebecca Rabinowitz were quick to respond that obliterating queer characters from dystopian tales confuses the point Bacigalupi purports to make, and I would agree.

Imagine Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD taken from the viewpoint of a gay father who is determined to protect his son in a post-apocalyptic world of starvation and cannibalism. The possibility of gay parenting transcending terrifying obstacles seems to meet Bacigalupi’s criteria of insurgency, empathy and humanity delightfully well. It makes readers re-think their notions of fatherhood, and provides a powerful queer representation for young adults.

(Allright, THE ROAD isn’t a YA novel, but it was the most accessible title I could think of).

Would a gay THE ROAD have a wide enough access point to reach the “complacent straight readers” Bacigalupi talks about? Probably not. But for many of us authors and fans of LGBT YA, I think, that perennial debacle–making LGBT stories “palatable” to a non-LGBT audience–is kind of tired and irrelevant. We like our queers in outer space, in Medieval-inspired fantasy lands, as well as confronting dilemmas of modern living. A fresh setting is nice, but the fact that we exist, and can exist everywhere is the greater part of our engagement in literature.

Greg Herren’s SLEEPING ANGEL

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I’ve been on a review kick lately. It’s a nice departure from my fiction projects now and then, and it gives me a chance to talk up queer-themed lit that may get overlooked elsewhere.

This week: Greg Herren’s young adult-mystery SLEEPING ANGEL (Bold Strokes Books, 2011).

The story has a terrific premise: Eric, a high school football hero and Junior Prom King, wakes up from a coma to find out he’s the only person who can solve a murder he remembers nothing about. He was pulled from a car wreck with a classmate in the backseat. The classmate Sean had a bullet in him, and he didn’t survive the car crash.

Eric has total amnesia.

The portrayal of Eric early on was one of my favorites parts of the book. Eric is panicked and confused. He knows he should feel something for the people who are worried about him, like his mom, but he can’t. He searches for clues about what kind of person he was. Amnesia can be a convenient mystery plot device, but here it’s a departure point for a multi-dimensional journey of discovery.

One discovery is Eric’s brain injury somehow gave him the ability to hear people’s thoughts when he touches them. Those interactions, revealing what’s really on the minds of his family and friends, are nice, intriguing moments. They shed light on Eric’s character and keep the story moving forward.

We find out the deceased Sean was gay and being bullied at school. Eric was one of his tormenters. The history between the two places Eric as a prime suspect in Sean’s murder, and Eric can’t say whether he did or didn’t do it.

It’s an interesting approach to the subject of teen homophobia. Amnesiac Eric – removed from social pressure and the attitudes of his peers – can’t understand why he would kill or even dislike Sean just because he was gay. Eric is ashamed when he hears from other people, and starts remembering himself, how he treated Sean.

With all those narrative hooks, and Herren’s tight, fast-paced writing, I sped through the story to the end. Eric finds a Facebook message from Sean asking him to a confidential meeting just before the car accident, and I was dying to know what the meeting was about and who shot Sean.

I’ll be judicious, and just say another nice aspect of the story is the build-up of various suspects. What could’ve been a heavy-handed lesson about the treatment of gay teens becomes richer through the range of people in Eric’s life. I liked especially Eric’s younger brother Danny who is full of rage and hurt because Eric is perceived as the perfect son.

I went back and forth about what it meant to take the story from Eric’s perspective versus Sean’s. It felt at times that All-American hetero Eric didn’t deserve to be the story’s hero just by virtue of becoming enlightened about his bad behavior through this scary episode in his otherwise privileged life. In fact, Eric expresses as much, which earns him some self-awareness points, but Sean, for whom there was much more at stake in the story, was more interesting and likeable to me.

Overall though, SLEEPING ANGEL is a satisfying mystery with very clever storytelling approaches.

COLLECTIVE FALLOUT: Queer Speculative Fiction!!

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Cover art from Collective Fallout Vol. 3 Issue 3

While researching queer fantasy markets, I discovered Collective Fallout. It’s a literary magazine dedicated to queer speculative fiction.

Issues are themed, and the one I ordered – Vol. 3, Issue 3 – was called “Futuristic.”

It blew my mind. In a good way. If you’ve read my reviews, you know it doesn’t happen often that I go off raving about stuff I read.

The stories are imaginative and tightly written, and I’ll get to some of my favorites. But what I responded to, most wonderfully, was the sum of the issue’s parts: wild, conceptual fiction as a platform for queer possibilities, and often queer transcendence.

Most of the authors take the future theme from a dystopian perspective. Warren Rochelle’s “Green Light” posits the rise of a multinational, totalitarian empire, genetically engineered warriors, and a substratum of outcasts fending for survival on a war-ravished frontier. In Christopher Keelty’s “Toll Road,” bio-contamination leads to a politically-fractured state where Catholic knights vie with leather-clad biker dudes called “the Dawn.”

Somewhat smaller in scale, and charming in its quiet way, is Terence Kuch’s “Other I Now.” In Kuch’s future, media technology has born the creepy pastime of ‘voying’, downloading other people’s memories. When Kuch’s narrator Ned rents out a memchip that is uncannily like his own memories, he goes in search of his “other I,” and discovers another life he might have lived.

The struggle to live queerly and authentically is a theme tying many of the stories together. It’s sometimes the main narrative drive, as in the case of Rochelle and Keelty’s stories where an accumulation of heterosexual power has begotten a nightmarish era of persecution for their queer protagonists.

In Derrick W. Craigie’s “Tales of K’Aeran: A New Road,” opportunities for queer living are contrasted when two strangers, from different fantasy clans, band together for survival in a sub-zero neutral zone. The Highborn woman Tatyana comes from an elite society where being caught with her female lover brought about a campaign for her assassination. Her companion Garon, from the martially-centered Nathikan clan, reflects on the more nuanced traditions of his people, who hold heterosexual marriage as a tribal obligation, but believe in the essential practice of choosing additional lovers for personal fulfillment, whether hetero or homo.

Caleb Wimble’s “Singularity” evokes queer otherness through allegory. The central character’s choice to undergo experimental cloning, after a terminal diagnosis of brain cancer, sets off  violent, global organizing by “humanists.” “Synths” are criminalized because they are seen as an affront to the way God intended humankind to be.

I was surprised by the romantic spirit of the stories, a universal thread, which may be a bit too ‘on-the-nose’ for some readers, but it worked quite well for me. Rochelle’s “Green Light” has an outcast teen and a young warrior, trained to exterminate the masses, deferring life and limb to be together. The story invokes the poetry of Walt Whitman. “Singularity” finds love possible between a man and the clone of his former boyfriend.

Not a bad thought that in the future, love will conquer all.

 

Fantasy Movie Review: JOHN CARTER

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Maybe after my huge disappointment with CLASH OF THE TITANS and IMMORTALS last year, my expectations for the latest fantasy blockbuster JOHN CARTER were low.

But I liked it. I really did.

My partner and I saw it in the theatre yesterday, the way – I guess – these movies are meant to be seen nowadays: on a massive IMAX screen with 3D glasses.

JOHN CARTER is a good story. The title character is a young, embittered former Confederate General from the Civil War. After losing his wife and daughter to a fire, Carter is grasping for a reason to live. He finds that reason when he’s stumbles on a magical artifact that transports him to an amazing world on Mars, where some trick of gravity, or bone density? (it’s not explained very clearly), gives him super strength, including the ability to leap great distances. There, he realizes that his abilities are exactly what the strange inhabitants need to save their planet from a tyrant who seeks to conquer all, and in the process destroy Mars.

Taylor Kitsch does a decent job as the movie’s hero. There’s not a lot of emotional range with these type of characters, but my favorite scenes from the movie were where he was overcoming his early dilemmas – a funny sequence of breakaways from the Union mounty who wants to recruit him, his awkward first steps on Mars with super-powered legs, and his attempts to ditch a martian creature, something like a giant, reptilian bulldog, who attaches to Carter hard and fast.

The action scenes are harrowing and great, and the world on Mars Barsoom is well-realized and imaginative.

My complaints are that the movie goes on too long, and I was uninspired by the romantic storyline. Of the former, there’s a point quite early on, when I think the audience gets it that this story is all going to come down to John Carter rallying Barsoom to liberation. But the journey is a belabored by a trip back to Carter’s original captors, the alien Tharks. We know what’s going to happen – Carter is going to succeed, no matter what incredible challenge the Tharks put him up to. They could’ve cut 15-20 minutes of film.