Slashed and Mashed, Seven Gayly Subverted Stories

[Ulysses]

Slashed and Mashed (Seven Gayly subverted tales)
By Andrew J. Peters
NineStarPress, 2019
Four stars

I am not a short story kinda guy, so when Andrew Peters alerted me to his new anthology, I was anxious. As it turns out, however, I got totally captivated by this group of seven disparate, but somehow thematically linked, stories, each one drawn from a different tradition of storytelling. Other than the obvious link of having gay central characters, these stories also focus on personal integrity and inner goodness. Some of them have recognizable links to familiar folk or fairy tales (“The Vain Prince,” or “The Peach Boy,”) while others are more thinly tied to their sources. There are happy endings, but not always – but there are never tragic endings. What struck me most was that, while Peters’s sometimes eccentric language is always there, the tone and style of the stories vary rather more than I expected – and thus each chapter offers the reader a very different experience.

“Theseus and the Minotaur” picks up on Peters’s long-established love for classical mythology, but the story is fascinatingly detailed and twisted so as to subvert (remember the title?) the purpose of the original myth. Honestly, the Greek pantheon was nothing but a bunch of spoiled teenagers, petty and vengeful, so it is lovely to see Theseus be something other than a pawn of the gods.

“Karoly, Who Kept a Secret” is a clear homage to the Grimm fairy tale genre, with a specific Hungarian (Magyar) slant, which I found endearing because of the nature of Karoly himself. When all around him are being selfish and cruel, his core goodness shines like a beacon. This story is followed by an update of the classic Japanese tale of “The Peach Boy” (and why I know that story so well I can’t tell you). It feels timeless and weirdly modern at the same time, as an older male couple deal with a magical surprise.

“The Vain Prince,” another fairy-tale based story, was maybe my least favorite – but I still enjoyed its dark mash-up of all sorts of normative moralizing to make a story that Disney wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. On the other hand, “The Jaguar of the Backward Glance” was a fascinating historical horror story, set in the late 17th century. Peters’s careful research offers this macabre story of European explorers confronting isolated South American tribespeople an eerie sense of authenticity. The gay identity of the main character – a Belgian secretary running away from his fear of bourgeois conformity only to fall into a nightmare of a different kind – is almost tangential, but ultimately places this interesting young man into a logical sort of moral limbo. Both this and the last story, “A Rabbit Grows in Brooklyn,” use mythology drawn from non-European culture, and both have equivocal endings that were neither sad nor happy. Sometimes, self-discovery is a painful journey, but one worth taking nonetheless.

My favorite story was “Ma’aruf the Street Vendor.” It’s a tale right out of the Arabian Nights, except that it features a forty-something Egyptian immigrant, trying to make a living selling falafel from a street cart in New York. Innocent and a little naïve, Ma’aruf is both gentle and believably good. He has fled his homeland and family in the hopes of making a new life (and having the chance to find a boyfriend). What he finds is betrayal and prejudice, until a fantastical moment changes everything. This one brought tears to my eyes.

All in all, a really interesting and worthy collection of stories.