The Remaking of Corbin Wale by Roan Parrish

[Ulysses]

The Remaking of Corbin Wale
By Roan Parrish
Monster Press, 2018
Four stars

From one of the best craftspeople of the genre, Roan Parrish’s “The Remaking of Corbin Wale” is a dreamily romantic story that skirts the edges of the paranormal without actually crossing the line. It is really about the power of the mind to trap us in a place that keeps us from fulfilling our lives.

Alex Barrow, facing the all-too-familiar double whammy of millennial New York life (loss of job and boyfriend at the same time) decides on a gut feeling to return to his native Ann Arbor, Michigan, and to take over the coffee shop his parents ran for many years. His idea is to regroup and start fresh, but once he has transformed his family’s rather lame coffee shop with his baking skills, he becomes entranced by an elfin stranger who he seems to have inherited along with the shop itself.

Corbin Wale, a local boy whom Alex vaguely recalls from high school, buys his coffee, barely communicates, and sits in the shop for hours on end writing and drawing in a notebook. He becomes Alex’s obsession, and in this beautiful dark-haired young man Alex sees someone special and someone badly wounded – by what Alex can’t imagine.

In some ways this is a classic story of people fearing what they don’t understand and projecting their fears with cruelty and disdain. Alex is the bright light of compassion and thoughtfulness. What I particularly liked was the way in which the whole set-up of Corbin’s life – living alone since his teen years in a ramshackle mansion isolated in the woods near town – is gradually picked apart and transformed into the opposite of what it appears to outsiders. Alex discovers the real darkness of Corbin’s life, but also comes to understand that it is Corbin who has built himself a prison, because of the intense introspection of his own mind.

Alex’s best friend from college – a New York chef named Gareth – enters the picture as an apparent sidebar, but it is Gareth’s simpler, and more brutal, situation that becomes a touchstone for Alex’s approach to Corbin.

Parrish is a lovely writer, and she handles what is really a psychological romance with great dexterity and believable, palpable romantic skill. I liked these characters a lot. Only one of them, a neighboring shopowner called Mac, seems to bear the stereotypical burden of being the prejudiced one, and felt a bit artificial to me. But maybe it’s just because he is such a contrast to everybody else, whose quiet dismissal of Corbin Wale has helped make his prison walls higher.

Roan Parrish gives us the m/m genre at its finest. A lovely, lyrical read.

[Lori]

Hmmm.. I had forgotten this, purchased as part of a bundle benefit for charity. I'll have to bump it up in my to be read queue!