by
What if there were a place that nobody else knew about – a secret place – where everyone was queer?”
That’s the question Guy, an elderly, lonely gay anthropologist asks Richard, his young psychiatrist, as he searches for his tolerable truth.
During each session, Guy tells Richard a story in which he survives the sinking of a cargo ship and is washed ashore on an uncharted tropical island along side the ship’s first mate, Luca. There, the two young men discover a world counter to everything they have ever known – a complex society in which almost everyone is homosexual and sex is considered the most basic form of communication.
In his naive, awkward way, Guy attempts to integrate himself and win the love of a local man but first he must undergo a brutal initiation ritual, endure a crazed shaman, and swim across shark-infested waters. Meanwhile, Luca, who is unable to accept his sexuality, becomes obsessed with being rescued and degenerates into drug dependency. When Luca attempts to steal a large stash of gold salvaged from an old Spanish galleon and leave the island, Guy is forced choose between staying with the man he loves, or saving the life of the man who saved his. For more than 40 years Guy has been consumed by his longing to return to the island and recapture what he believes he has left behind.
Although enthralled by his tale, Richard must be constantly wary of Guy’s attempts to manipulate him and meddle in his personal life, threating to upend his own sense of truth, leaving him to question if there could really be such a society, or does it only exist within the fantasy of a lonely old gay man?
Rich with legends inspired by ethnography, this is a story within a story; the two collide when the depth of Guy’s subterfuge is revealed.
Publisher: Ninestar Press
Genres:
Tropes: Lost Civilization, Marooned
Word Count: 80000
Setting: Caribbean/Toronto
Languages Available: English
Tropes: Lost Civilization, Marooned
Word Count: 80000
Setting: Caribbean/Toronto
Languages Available: English
“It’s not the whirl of my hair or the tone of my skin, but it’s written in my DNA.
It’s not the language I speak but the way my tongue and mouth form the sounds and my hands follow as if they already know what I’m about to say.
Whether I face the east or splash myself with water, it’s the altar at which I worship.
It’s how my feet touch the ground and carry me through space or move me to the rhythm of music that flows inside my head.
It’s in the way I hold my eyes when I look at you and the world around me, and it’s what whispers to me when I close my eyes to sleep (Eating the Moon, NineStar Press).”
May 03, 2021Serena Yates rated it it was amazing
Shelves: fantasy, gay, read-2021
Do you ever have the impression that some books have just been written to completely confuse you? ‘Eating the Moon’ did exactly that to me, and I mean this in the best way possible. This novel is mysterious, complicated, and deeply psychological all at the same time. It is not only the story of Guy, an anthropologist who comes of age when he is sixty-seven and finally talks about the events of his life with a psychiatrist. It is also the story of that psychiatrist finding himself as he deals with what he hears and begins to examine his own beliefs. But there are more layers to this tale: there is an adventure on an uncharted tropical island, a society where homosexuality is the norm, and the story of two men who make very different decisions about how to deal with what they find.
