Issue 15 - April 2008

	Vintage by Steve Berman Reviewed by Hayden Thorne

Summary (from Haworth Press): A lonely gay teen bides his time with trips to strangers' funerals and Ouija board sessions, desperately searching for someone to love - and a reason to live following a suicide attempt. Walking an empty stretch of highway on an autumn night, he meets a strange and beautiful boy who looks like he stepped out of a dream. But the vision becomes into a nightmare when the boy turns out to be the local urban legend, the ghost of a star athlete killed in 1957 - a ghost with a deadly secret and a dangerous obsession.

Review: When I first saw this book advertised, I was desperate to get a copy. Three things sold me on it, the first one being its genre, which is horror, specifically ghost fiction. I've always been - and always will be - a diehard fan of ghost stories. Now throw that in the mix with queer YA fiction, and I'm putty in anyone's hands.

Considering the rich literary heritage of ghost fiction (M.R. James, woot!), I'm always disappointed with the fact that it doesn't get as much attention (dare I say respect?) as other subcategories of horror. I mean, look at the more popular themes: shapeshifters and vampires. Rarely ever ghosts, which is a shame, given all the metaphors/allusions/allegories/whathaveyou that can be made in the stories of both the unquiet dead and the living. And queer ghost stories? Don't get me started.

Vintage seamlessly weaves the traditions of ghost fiction with a mini-bildungsroman while keeping to a classic form of queer YA fiction, which is the "problem novel." Most of the kids in the novel are goths, and regardless of the characters' sexuality, alienation (on different levels) is an overriding theme. Living and dead, everyone seems to be isolated from each other and the world, and regardless of the frequency of their interaction and the closeness of their relationships, there's still some kind of pervading loneliness among them. It could be the setting muscling its way into my reading, I suppose, because almost everything's cloaked in shadows, with much of the action taking place at night. Lonely roads, big houses, cemeteries, murky vintage stores (again, packed from top to bottom with relics that come with their own brand of ghosts, if one were to look at them through the eyes of history), or even a boy's ordinary bedroom - these are classic elements that create the right atmosphere for hauntings.

Time also becomes elastic. The dead and the living move in and out of each other's worlds every time, and we're given glimpses of the past when the narrator (who remains unnamed in the novel) becomes an unwilling conduit between the two worlds.

Berman's handling of queer teen (or even just plain teen) issues is delicate and sympathetic. Even the "bad guys" (for lack of a better term) such as Kim and Liz are reacting to specific problems of their own that turn them into bitchy, unreasonable types. The descriptions are nicely detailed without going overboard. The cemeteries (both in the day and especially at night), the vintage store, the different houses where hauntings take place, and the dance club are vividly drawn. The hauntings themselves are perhaps the scenes that are most alive. Ghost fiction being an old literary tradition, there's certainly a danger of resorting to cliché in describing hauntings, but I didn't see that in Vintage.

Berman makes use of almost all senses in describing them - the narrator smells death, he hears it, he touches it, he sees it - so much so that these scenes turn almost organic, and even if one were to say "Oh, I've seen that in The Sixth Sense," they still pack enough of a punch to catch you off-guard. And the specific hauntings? Seriously creepy. Have I mentioned how much I love ghost stories?

The story is multi-layered, so much so that parallels can be drawn between subplots, with the ending of the novel being a satisfyingly realistic one. For all the extremes with regard to the characters' private demons and, in the case of the narrator, his emancipation (which happens on several levels), there's still that lesson in temperance, and it's quite a mature lesson at that.

Now if only there were more queer ghost stories out there.

From the Publisher: Since Vintage is dedicated to a young friend of the author who committed suicide, Steve Berman has arranged that 1/5 of the royalties from Vintage will be donated to charities helping gay teens: 10% will be donated to the GSA Network, which assists Gay-Straight Student Alliances in high schools; another 10% donated to the Trevor Project, which works to prevent suicide among gay youth.

Editor’s note: this review made me buy the book and I can certainly recommend it. Since this review was written the novel has appeared in the top 10 of the annual Rainbow listof YA gay fiction by the GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association - deservedly!

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The author of this review, Hayden Thorne, frequently reviews GLBT fiction and films. Other reviews can be read at his website .