Review – Gideon the Ninth

I experienced this book as a revelation.

Before you assume that’s hyperbole, the only other books I’ve ever read where I felt my life had changed in some subtle, indefinable way—that the me before reading was not the same person afterward–were the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake, which I first read in my teens; a series that also happens to be a spiritual ancestor of Gideon the Ninth.

I’m thirty-five. When I was growing up, a queer Chinese kid in deeply white semi-rural Australia, th...