okay, enough of my ragging on rachel reid being a hack and shit writer buoyed by white fujo mediocrity, here are three book recs by three Asian writers you should read if you enjoy well-written prose and interesting exploration of queerness beyond gay realisation and coming out narratives. These are all fantasy/magic realism, because that's the genre I gravitate towards, but also stray away from typical Western fantasy tropes; not all of them are romance-focused, but they all do feature queer male leads who navigate desire in different forms.
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
This is a love story, down to its blade-dented bone.
Summary: Two warriors travel across a wasteland with a dying moon goddess to meet with a group revolutionaries and overthrow the current regime, who has imprisoned her to maintain their own immortal reign. Along the way they encounter challenges such as: a sentient tortoise surveillance network, the emperor's warrior sons, revolutionaries, weed-smoking monkeys, and many, many civilians whose lives are upended by the journey.
While the book’s core plot structure is a fairly typical of epic-journey-fantasy-story, the narrative style is mind-bending and unique, switching between first-person stream-of-consciousness psychic bleedthroughs, second person framing device, and third person narrative.
This is also, by far, the most overtly romantic book of the three. Aside from its unique setting and refreshing fantasy elements outside of your typical Western tropes, it's also got: slow-burn romance and explorations of tentative attraction, two damaged boys shaped by violence and raised to repress desire and emotion coming to trust and care for one another, the fear of emotional vulnerability, penance and the search for self-identity, and one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of romantic progression. Queerness and male homosexuality isn't marginalised in this world, but it still explores queer desire and attraction as something that can be joyful, intoxicating, fear-inducing, and hopeful in a meaningful way.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Lessons learned in childhood leave deep roots and are not easily plucked out by adult reasoning
Summary: Fetter is the abandoned son of a living god called 'The Perfect and Kind', and was raised by his mother, Mother of Glory, as a perfect god-killer. He tries to outrun his fate and arrives in the city of Luriat, where he joins a group therapy session for Almost-Chosen Ones. Despite the description, this is not a post-modern poke at the fantasy genre; Luriat is a police state, where group therapy sessions are recruitment cells for a revolutionary cadre, certain doors in the city lead to a hole in reality, and pogroms in the name of The Perfect and Kind persist. Fetter soon realises he cannot actually outrun his fate.
This is a world where same-sex romance is normalised, and both the protagonist and primary antagonists (The Perfect and the Kind and Mother-of-Glory) take on same-sex lovers. Fetter also navigates attraction and dating while having to hide his identity as a god-killer. The romance is more secondary, however, as book is more a character study using tenets of Buddhist mythology, through the lens of colonialism, authoritarianism, generational trauma, and rebellion.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate.
Summary: Photojournalist Maali Almeida has died and has seven days in the limbo of afterlife to sort out his affairs, and to let his loved ones know where he hid his cache of film negatives that would reveal the brutal truth of the ongoing civil war. He leaves behind his mother, his best friend Jaki, and his secret lover DD.
What follows is seven days of an unravelling murder mystery amongst post-death bureaucracy, political corrption, encounters with demons, assassination attempts, and bitter confrontations with the protagonist's own regrets.
Set during the Sri Lankan civil war, the book is a lot heavier than the other two, and doesn't flinch away from depicting violence and war crimes. While not a happy book by any means, the prose is very cleverly written with a lot of dark humour. The protagonist is steadfast in his belief of his profession as a photojournalist bearing witness to atrocities of the conflict and the release of the truth being instrumental in ending the war. He's also a stark reminder of freelance journalism and media coverage of the Global South in relation to Western press; as a fixer for the Associated Press, his career was strung up on tenuous contracts and none of the safety nets afforded to his AP counterparts.
This is definitely a heavier read, and with a predetermined ending, and the topic of violent homophobia and sexual taboos is at its core. Still, Maali's arc is atypical of a lot of Western queer lit, in that the protagonist is unashamed of his sexual appetite and isn't in the trajectory for "self-acceptance" and "coming out" arc.
Anyway, stop reading white mediocrity, and start reading queer books by authors of colour who are putting craft and effort into their stories.
gamechangershow
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
