The Advantaged, by Mark Allan Gunnells

The Advantaged by Mark Allan Gunnells

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’m a big fan of Mark Allan Gunnells and I’ve been following his career over the years with great pleasure. He is well-known for his horror fiction, including Twilight at the Gates, a fine story collection, and a recent horror novel, 2B, a tale of a haunted apartment and obsessed ghost, and a much longer list of fine stories and novels. He is a master storyteller and he has turned his talents in The Advantaged from horror to more mainstream queer fiction in this “queer drama of love, lies, and loss” (front cover).

The Advantaged is a well-told story that is very carefully plotted and constructed. Silas Granger is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist. He is a student at Greenville Tech, in Greenville, South Carolina, and the son of a single working-class father. He lives in Greer, a nearby small town. Silas is gay and he has been an outsider for most of his life. High school was lonely. He had no real friends. The beautiful Furman campus draws him in, as does a gang of Furman students talking about Ray Bradbury. He “feels good to be thought of as an ‘equal’ to such intelligent and passionate young people” (back cover). They take him in and at last he belongs; he’s not an outsider.

Silas lets these students think he is a Furman student as well, a lie of omission. “He figures he’ll never see them again … What could be the harm?” What could go wrong? A lot is the answer both questions. Gus, who is clearly the “epicenter [of the group], the planet around which the other five orbited like moons” (Gunnells 3) and the rest, take him in. Silas falls in love with Kris, who, somewhat to his surprise, reciprocates his feelings. The lie seems worth it. “Silas doesn’t want to hurry anyone in the group, especially Kris, but he also doesn’t want to lose the first friends he has ever really had in his life” (back cover).

So it begins, lie after lie after lie, all to maintain his mythic status as a Furman student, his place in this group, including manufacturing a Furman schedule, and “losing” his university ID. The list goes on. Inevitably he is caught and his house of cards Furman identity crashes around him. It seems Silas has lost everything, including love, including Kris. The Advantaged is a novel rich in details and in character. Readers will find themselves becoming familiar with both the Furman University campus and Greenville, and a trailer in nearby Greer. They will come to know Silas and to like him, and worry about what will happen when he is caught, and yet, keep wishing he would tell the truth. I found myself identifying with Silas, and no, not because I manufactured a fictional life to be accepted, but because I know what it’s like to be an outsider and wishing to be inside. These feelings are not uncommon for gay adolescents. Here, they are compounded by not being one of the “advantaged.” For many working class students, immersion in the culture of college can often feel like being a fish out of water—not matter how much they have wanted it, as Silas does.

I highly recommend this “queer drama of love, lies, and loss”—and of redemption and truth.




View all my reviews