What Manner of Man

I believe I picked up What Manner of Man on some Stuff Your Kindle day, passingly intrigued by what outwardly appeared to be a steamy, independent, MLM vampire x priest romance. It sat on my Kobo unread for I don't know how long, until I felt the urge to read something 'light' while I'm on vacation.

This book has consumed me, and will stay with me for a very long time. What Manner of Man is one of those books that I will read over and over again, but only every so often, because it truly makes my heart ache and bleed and sing.

The author himself (@stjohnstarling) writes that What Manner of Man is inspired by Dracula Daily, and for the first third of this book, I very much interpreted it as a queer Dracula retelling. Having finished it in its entirety, however, I amend that statement: What Manner of Man is not a retelling of Dracula, but rather, a love letter to every queer Dracula reader. It takes such vital pieces of Stoker's original work - being told in letters and journal entries, summoning an innocent main character into the fold of a high-class, ancient, vampiric lord, struggling with morality, love, and desire - and creates something wholly unique out of it. You can see so intimately that Victor is not only Harker, but Mina and Lucy, too: he is not only the beguiled, unwitting savior, but the lover, the tempter, tempted, desirer, and desired all at once. What Manner of Man so intricately weaves Victor and Lord Vane's stories together, wrapped in the very spirals that consume Swallow's Rest.

As much as I do love the cover art, I think that What Manner of Man is the absolute archetype of "don't judge a book by its cover." It looks very indie, spicy, potentially kinky romance, but please believe me when I tell you that this book is one of the best-written stories I have ever read, I mean it. Starling so perfectly emulates a Stoker-esque voice for the twentieth-century time period that this story takes place in, and I am still in awe of the fact that What Manner of Man isn't traditionally published. While I am eternally grateful (and still forever stunned) by the fact that Starling has released this book in its entirety for free online for anyone to read, I would pay every single cent for it. I'm actually a bit heartbroken that there isn't a physical edition of this, because I've annotated by Kobo copy so heavily, and I would love to have a physical keepsake of this.

I keep seeing reviews of What Manner of Man that classify this is a "blasphemous/hot/spicy gay romance," but that is such a vulgar oversimplification of this story that it actually makes me a little angry. There is sex in this book, yes, but it isn't there for spectating - the way Victor recounts his encounters with Lord Vane is so spiritual, so intimate, and so loving even at its roughest, that I consider the sex in this book more in-line with poetry than prose. It isn't raw, crude, graphic, no; it portrays sex the way marble statues and Renaissance paintings portray nudity: as something to be admired for its beauty, not something to be gawked and flustered by.

And then, there is the matter of spirituality and religion that I can't even begin to reasonably unpack my own reaction to. The way Victor's experience with religion shifts over time, and his understanding of 'higher powers' by the story's end has shifted is so irrevocably altering. I suppose I take that on more heavily as someone who struggles with death and the afterlife, who is forever wondering about forces beyond our control and if our lives are really our own. I've never seen someone so perfectly articulate those fears and those wonders as Starling has in this book.

What Manner of Man is a poetic, character-driven, exceptionally well-written, engaging, heartbreaking, emotional journey that ends with such a sigh of relief that it did, in fact, bring me to tears. At its crux, at its most basic and yet most complex, What Manner of Man is the untangling of queer identity when for so long, it has been entangled in shame, in guilt, in secrecy, and in pain. Whether you identify with being queer from a religious background or not, I think every queer person can relate to some painful part of Victor's journey here.

I won't spoil the ending, of course, but What Manner of Man does not end suffocatingly. I could feel ash choking up my lungs toward the end, the possibility of tragedy making my mouth taste sour, but this book ends not with a breath of fresh air, but with a gasp of it. It feels like coming up for air after drowning, sweet and relieving and cooling. That's the only way I can describe how I feel coming out of this story.