In the city of shy hunters : a novel /

Spanbauer's pansexual period piece about a half-breed in an Idaho whorehouse, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1992), won him a delighted readership that has been awaiting a follow-up. He shifts setting to the Big Apple in the mid-'80s, when shy, stuttering Will Parker arrives from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, searching for his lost love. For the first time in his life, Will is surrounded by equally quirky people. Finding a niche among them, he learns to accept himself. He falls for a six-foot-five black drag-queen-slash-performance-artist just as AIDS becomes epidemic. Spanbauer's long meditation on love and loss proves mesmerizing, carrying readers backward and forward in time, often in chantlike, repetitive passages lacking conventional punctuation. When Will's Native American friend sees an Indian exhibit in a museum, "pretty soon True Shot was sobbing way loud and his chin moving funny and he was weeping weeping and you could hear his weeping all over inside the halls of the Museum of Unnatural History. . . . I put my arm around True Shot's extra lovely shoulders. . . . his whole big extra lovely belly bouncing and chest up and down up and down . . . True Shot made his extra lovely hands into fists." This extra lovely novel should enchant Spanbauer's fans and win him more. --Whitney Scott

An expertly drawn, starkly authentic, early-1980s Manhattan provides the setting for this sprawling novel by Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon). It tells the story of Will Parker, a young man from Jackson Hole, Wyo., who comes to the "Wolf Swamp" of New York in search of his boyhood first love, Charlie. After Will secures a seedy apartment, a bevy of tough, typecast but blissfully genuine New Yorkers immediately materialize. Among them are drug-addled Ruby and her Indian sidekick, True Shot; Fiona, the tenacious waitress who robustly trains Will at his new restaurant job; and "Shakespearean drag queen" and upstairs neighbor Rose, with whom he falls in love. But while dramatic temperaments and sequined wardrobes are being sorted out, AIDS, gay fiction's great leveler, has already begun claiming victims. Spanbauer's rapid-fire narration and clipped sentences generate a surprising amount of tension and gritty emotion, as does his vibrant, dead-on dialogue and keen sense of place. The high points come along the trajectory of Will's awakening sense of self, first when Rose drags him to his first Gay Pride parade and then, as years pass and the plague intensifies, when he witnesses the sudden death of friends. This is a big, brazen, histrionic work of fiction, one that pays respectable, if unsentimental, homage to a devastating period in gay history. However, the overstuffed plot crammed with a swirling pageant of madcap characters (even a dance-floor cameo by Elizabeth Taylor) and a brewing imbroglio concerning squatters rights may exhaust readers before the epic tome reaches maximum velocity. (June) Forecast: Spanbauer fans will expect a more cohesive effort, but this is a fitting opus for Gay Pride Month. The book's striking turquoise cover art and Spanbauer's name in red will attract readers' attention, as will a 14-city author tour. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

One can't help being leery of this latest work from Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, LJ 10/1/91). Is it just another AIDS story concerning the early plague years? But after a few pages one realizes that it is not. Will Parker moves from Idaho to Manhattan in search of himself and his childhood best friend (and first sexual partner). Will isn't dumb, but he isn't educated either, and he lands a crummy job as a waiter and an even worse apartment. His new family of friends more than make up for this, and Will sets out to find out about life. Just as everything seems to be settling into something comfortable, he begins to lose friends and co-workers to drugs and AIDS. Unlike other "early AIDS" novels, this one acknowledges that AIDS touches all classes, races, religions, and sexual orientations. Excellent characters (real New Yorkers), great writing, and a new twist on an over-used plot recommend this book for most libraries, though some readers might want a more conventional ending. T.R. Salvadori, Margaret E. Heggan Free P.L., Hurfville, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Sexual abuse, incest, pansexualism, and Native American spirituality—explored so well by Spanbauer in the cult favorite The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991)—combine with early–AIDS-era New York for a work that’s utterly fresh but crammed with enough characters, subplots, coincidences, and romances to keep several telenovelas churning for years. Will Parker may stutter and be both sexually confused and dysfunctional, but he’s a real people magnet. Having escaped provincial Jackson Hole for 1983 Manhattan, he’s not five minutes at LaGuardia before he’s hooked up with Two Shots, a Native American van-driver, and Ruby, his gay male side-kick; in no time they’ve settled Will into his Lower East Side digs and themselves into his life. East Fifth Street is crowded with the requisite New Yorkers of fiction: across the hall is a mad cat-lady, upstairs is Rose, the tough African-American drag queen/performance artist with a heart of gold, and downstairs is the junkie superintendent. Hackneyed types to be sure, but with sharp dialogue and details, Spanbauer infuses them with new life. Waiting tables, Will meets Fiona, a rough-mouthed, Greenwich, Connecticut, would-be artiste who takes Will under her wing and under the sheets. There’s plenty of graphic, although not gratuitous, sex as Will trades experience and love for self-knowledge. As 1983 moves on to ’84 and ’85, AIDS takes over: co-workers die, friends disappear, Rose—now a lover of Will’s—sickens, Fiona’s two brothers die. The slow slide into the world of the epidemic, with its sense of unreality and despair, has never been better realized. But there’s too much more going on here: a murder, a squatters’ riot in a local park, cultural repatriation, and Elizabeth Taylor, arriving for a slow dance with her best friend Rose. Will’s occasional and abrupt flights into magical realism only serve to make the story—already saddled with superfluous, undisciplined subplots—feel more out of control. A haunting and undeniably powerful work marred by its own excesses. First printing of 30,000; author tour