Welcome to Cold Falls, an upstate New York town that joins Provincetown in a list of Michael Thomas Ford’s favorite places to plan your happy ending.
This is Ford’s latest novel. If follows Last Summer. This book is improved with its smaller cast and exploration of the gay dark side. But like its predecessor, this is essential reading only at a beach near you. It should get rave reviews only from gay men who are just beginning to explore the big gay world. Ask them to read the book again in ten years, and you’ll get a different review, I bet.
You might be wondering what “it” is. Remember, this is beach reading so don’t get too cerebral here. “It” is everything you think it is. Love, sex, companionship, penis size, God, the answers to life’s questions, and so on and so forth. With Ford novels, the question usually is, who’s invited to the big gathering in the last chapter? This is the happy-ending group; the ones who found “it.” With Ford, though, the best characters in the book are those who were not invited.
Definitely missing from the New Year’s Eve party guest list is the character of Peter Thayer, who almost fully embodies the dark side of this novel. Pete adds quite a lot of grit to this story. You might say that he is in denial. He puts on a good show, hanging with a tough crowd and making the moves on a blond (who turns him down in front of his friends). But when no one’s looking, he seeks various “services” from anonymous men. He’s also a bit explosive, beating the living crap out of two of our other main characters, who, unfortunately for Pete, are destined to be on the happy ending guest list. Turns out, his violence is merely his way of proving to himself that he’s not gay, since gay people don’t fight back.
A good cop (whom will never appear in any of the Michael Nava mysteries, I assure you, and I’ve only read two) nearly gets a confession out of Pete for the crimes, but luckily, Pete is written well enough not to fall for that. Pete’s fate is a bit harsher than I’m used to for Ford, but it certainly adds to the character’s mystique. I spent some time considering what societal changes might have made his character less tragic.
I did wonder if I should have been troubled at my realization that the most compelling sex scene in the book is that between Pete and the sleeping T.J. You enter the scene with heavily mixed emotions, and yet you cannot turn away from the sheer graphicness of it. I also wonder whether you could do what Pete did under the covers and not run out of oxygen. That might not be a horrible way to go, though, come to think of it.
Yes, there were plenty of other characters, and they were all fine. Stephen is worthy of a separate mention, since he flirts for a while with the dark side himself. His own descent to attempted suicide is troubling reading, but it seemed a bit of overkill to me.
Although I cannot say that I look forward to the next novel, I have no doubt that it will have a thought-provoking illustrated cover and that it will be easy to read. Ford is not an author to easily dismiss. For example, he has recently returned to non-fiction, a book that I was permitted to glance at recently, called Ultimate Gay Sex (published 2004.) Wow, that didn’t take long to find its way into my shopping cart! Finally, something for my coffee table.