Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is a collection of four curious, often invigorating stories. These tales glide through trans, queer interiorities and the sticky spectrum of human desire, with infinite promise.
Stag Dance, the titular novella, is deliciously filthy in its portrayal of a community of lumberjacking men in an American past, felling trees and hearts in neat succession. There is an abundance of genderfuckery, alongside snot, spunk and sap, written in an idiolect that summons Herman Melville’s gleeful ghost. Across her stories, Peters unravels the glorious, aching euphoria of giving in to yourself. The Chaser delivers a discomforting relationship between two teen roommates at a Quaker boarding school.
In skin-crawling detail, Peters demonstrates the psychic damage of publicly and privately dismissing the person you love – especially when they love you back. The Masker questions what it means to glimpse your true self in the mirror of someone else’s lust – and the consequences of chasing their affirmation to the bitter end… solidarity be damned.
The narrators linger in both the freedom and the fetters that femininity affords. Peters charts the self’s slow, fluid continuum, unpicking the shame that haunts so many of us, across centuries. Her stories honour the yearning to be truly held in our complexity, whether by lovers, fellow sisters or even the reckless creatures of the wood. Her gimlet eye is a marvel. Her stories engender such wondrous, transformational possibilities.
Stag Danceby Torrey Peters is out now (Serpent’s Tail, £16.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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