dream boy by Jim Grimsley (cross-posted)

[stungunbilly]

dream boy by Jim Grimsley

 

A h/c fest, first love celebration, and a cool freaky ghost story, there is a lot to like about this book. I found the ending impossible to predict, which kept me involved in the story’s events rather than jumping forward as I usually am tempted to do. Nathan, the main character, is sweet and wounded; not at all weak, however.

 

 

Grimsley wrote all 195 pages in the present tense. He uses it to great effect, so that I found myself travelling through the story as if I were a native of its landscape.  It moved unhurriedly, yet I finished it in a very short time because I found it so compelling.

 

The main characters are laid out mostly in terms of emotion and sensory awareness, which allowed me to feel connected to them and their relations to each other. The fantastic qualities of the story, in spite of the gothic edge, lie in the ways they choose to relate to each other. Each has a strong feeling for the others and operates on the invisible guidelines I experience in real-life groups but rarely in fiction.

 

 

Overall, 2 thumbs to the sky.

 

 

Sample text:

| Nathan waits in the bedroom window, quietly tucked into a fold of curtain. The rich yellow bar of Roy’s bedroom light spills across the hedge, and Roy’s shadow passes one way and then another, a long teasing interval., until finally Roy returns to his own window. He glows in the warm square of glass. At last he waves to Nathan and disappears.

Nathan remains at the window a little longer, breathless and numb, the memory of the evening wrapping around him like a warm mantle.|