how i would fix "Disco Witches of Fire Island" by Blair Fell

this post contains spoilers for Disco Witches of Fire Island by Blair Fell. you can read it anyway because i do not recommend you spend your precious time on this earth reading it.  

I finished reading a book on Friday that I disliked reading so much I was just happy it was finally over. I've read many reviews of this book and a lot of them simply praise it, which I think is cowardly, but understandable, considering the book is based on a highly personal story from the author. in the author's note, Fell writes: 

While Disco Witches of Fire Island is a work of fiction, it's partially inspired by own life events during the early years of the AIDS crisis in America, when I fell in love for the first time with a wonderful man and lost him to the virus. [In the aftermath of that heartbreak] ... I moved into the attic of a house on Picketty Ruff which was inhabited by three older gay men who had come of age in a time before AIDS. ... I had always wanted to write something about that summer and about the challenge of trying to find love when the world was on fire and all seemed hopeless.

it's difficult, reading a book about AIDS that's badly constructed on every level from prose to character to plot. it's even more difficult reading reading a book that clearly doesn't only want to be sad and about AIDS, and finding that its only redeeming portions are sad and about AIDS.

mr. Fell, I'm sorry for your loss, and I'm sorry for harshing your vibe, but you put this work out into the ether and I paid for it with real money, so now I'm going to use my education to talk about it.

there were so many unpleasant elements to disco witches of fire island, I struggle to sort them into an organised list. everything filters into each other and entangles to make for a text so awful, I lack the power to explain how it came to print. I just took a class about print culture studies, the main takeaway being "print media is in the fucking shitter," so that makes me wonder, if everything has to be a safe bet, how on earth did this come to be?

the terrible prose (so many reviews I have read call it camp, and I have to say, I think some of you just have bad taste) profoundly worsens how stocky all of the characters are. the pacing is on fucking coke, which is to say, it starts off racing and has an ugly drag in the middle until it takes another bump and goes off the wheels again. that terrible pacing doesn't exactly do wonders for the plot, which is simultaneously stuffed with events and utterly vacant. 

sometimes a book is bad in a way where it's interesting to pick apart on a creative writing level. it's like watching a bad movie and pointing and laughing at it, figuring out all of the mistakes and pondering over how it could've been better. this is, generally, one of my favourite things to do when a work frustrates me, because it allows me to articulate why something doesn't click for me. 

for disco witches, I think "how to characterise an unlikable protag" is a very primary issue here. Joe, bless his broken heart, is pretty self-centred, cowardly and immature. that's not bad in and of itself: it's good for the narrative if our protagonist has room to grow! it's even fine if we have no reason to sympathise with Joe at all -- but here we are already running into a problem, because we do have a good reason to empathise with him, we just don't find out about it until we're a good 200 pages into the book (to be honest, you see it coming from a mile away, but it's played as a big reveal, so that's what i'm counting).

a little bit of character-plot: the story is magical realism meets queer coming of age meets AIDS historical fiction. Joe is a 29 (although everyone else thinks he's 24) year old cleaner at an elderly care facility (or hospital? i can't quite remember) and has lost his boyfriend Elliott to AIDS (put a pin it). he meets Ronnie and has a disappointing hookup with him, after which they become best friends and Ronnie promises to teach him how to become a successful gay*.

they decide (Ronnie drags him along, really) to move to Fire Island for the summer, 'cause Ronnie says he has a connect who'll hook them up with jobs. Joe's going to have his hot girl summer to get over his grief-stricken, broken heart, and Ronnie's going to find a rich daddy who'll let him chase his dreams to become a motivational speaker. 

but whaddayaknow, when they get there, it turns out there's no housing, no job, and no connect. Joe runs into Lenny and Howie, two old queens, gay men from a different generation to, who remember what life was like before AIDS and 80s synthpop. they love mysticism, disco music**, and their coven's high priest, Max, who is dying of AIDS off-page. and yeah, they are a witch coven (their spells are performed by boogying out to Sylvester's Do You Wanna Funk - this is actually glorious to me and I love it), it's the title of the book, get with the programme. 

Joe doesn't know about any of that, though. on the island, Joe meets ferryman Fergal, who has webbed feet and fingers and loves the sea. he finds a job bartending at Asylum Harbor, a run-down gay bar owned by Dory the Boozehound (another member of the disco witch coven) and managed by Vince, who's Irish, ripped, and moody.

Dory has a granddaughter named Elena who is in love with Claire (but like, she's not ready to be a lesbian yet and she's a recovering heroin addict, so it doesn't really go anywhere). Asylum Harbor is under threat, because the space they rent from evil landlord Scotty Black has to be profitable or he'll kick them out. Scotty Black has a trio of drug-blasted goons who call themselves the Graveyard Girls and lightly bully Joe and his entourage, but eventually end up as good guys. 

there's also a wildly attractive hunky sexy hot big muscled man Joe keeps running into that he starts to call The Gladiator Man, and boy oh boy does Joe want to have sex with this guy (insert lucille bluth good for her gif). bad news though, this figure is actually an egregore and wants to kill Joe (he ticks all the boxes to be this story's negative twist on The Chosen One, but Howie doesn't realise it until very late because Joe is a liar)***.

if you're thinking that that's a lot of characters for 300 pages, you're right!

there's a lot going on, and as often happens when a short books featuring an ensemble cast, most of the characters feel underdeveloped, even those who are supposedly close to Joe. this is also a feature of his self-interested disposition, but like, this book is about community and connection, and Joe can't be connected to anyone because he's hiding a big secret and trying to overcome grief-induced commitment issues. it's not impossible to execute well, but in disco witches it's pretty clear that Fell has written himself into a corner.

let's talk character development and Joe's big secret - we've arrived at our pin: Elliot and Joe weren't together when Elliot passed away. they were so not together, in fact, that Joe only found out about his death when mutual friends who didn't know they had split up started leaving condolence messages on his answering machine. their relationship fell apart because of the social and interpersonal constraints imposed upon them by Elliot's illness: where Elliot didn't want to talk about his impending painful death, for Joe, it was all he could think about. 

the pressure turned Joe into a controlling mess of a boyfriend. he's in his early to mid twenties at this point, and he's losing his first great love to an illness a large portion of the country believes is a punishment to gay people from God, so I'd say it's a very understandable reaction. now 29, he's clearly got stuck in this mindset. in the middle of the book, we get this character nugget - one of the only moments that touched me: 

"[Dory]'s the best," Joe said. "Know what I still can't figure out? How did a class act like her start hanging out with a pair of house cleaners like Howie and Lenny?" 
"She met them out a club after my grandfather died. That woman loves to disco dance. Or rather she did. I think she feels guilty experiencing joy while her friends are sick or dying."
Joe squeezed his eyes tight until the blood red glow through his eyelids turned black and the peaceful feeling drained from his body. "I wish you hadn't said that." He folded his arms across his eyes.
"What?" Elena said. "It's not like she can ignore it." 
"I know," he said. "But I have to think about that shit all the time. I wake up, I think about AIDS, I go to bed, I think about AIDS. I came out here to forget, but each week I see these faces at my bar getting sicker. Some guys that had been regulars at the beginning of the summer have stopped coming. I just know they've either gotten sicker or died. I hate it."

this is really quite good. that last piece of dialogue is a great character statement. here's my problem: it happens on page 202. it falls flat in the overarching story because so much has already happened, and structurally its wedged in between Ronnie and Vince's breakup and Elena's confession that she's positive for HIV. that reveal and it's thematic importance (how difficult it was for women to get diagnosed, much less obtain treatment) are glossed over in favour of Joe's character development****. 

here's what I would do: move this scene all the way towards one of the first 10 pages of the book, make it a conversation between Ronnie and Joe (this will also help them feel more like they're actually friends). I would have Joe go out to a hookup and Ronnie tell him to be safe, then have Joe react i wish you hadn't said that and Ronnie can say you can't ignore it. then we get I know, I have to think about that shit all the time... this way, Joe's constant anxiety about AIDS would feel more prescient throughout, because every mention of it would call us back to this statement. 

I mention all of this in the Elliot section because I believe that secret should be made clear to us from the get-go, too. I don't see the point, from a creative writing perspective, in withholding this information from the reader other than as as cheap suspense trick. 

you might have a (shitty) editor who tells you to do these kinds of things - to save something so important to your character's foundational anxieties and neuroses as plot twist or a reveal that makes sense in retrospect. they might believe that this builds mystery and keeps the reader wanting to turn the page, to find out what's really wrong with Joe. but this is horseshit for two reasons:

1. we already have a plot-twist that the reader can figure out right before it happens, as a reward for paying attention to the book (that Ronnie is witch and has not yet discovered his powers, allowing him tot self-actualise away from his conformist dreams and embrace himself truly). 

2. it would make for a far more enjoyable (in a torturous way) type of friction to watch Joe shy away from community and love, or be unable to bridge the gap between all his lies and his wish for connection, if we actually knew what was holding him back from doing that.  

if these two things were present for the reader from the beginning, it would give the text space and time to build on the mystery of the disco witch coven. that building of mystery would also give us more push on the magical realism aspect of the story; the witches aren't even sure if their magic is real sometimes, and their self-doubt would work better if we could spend a little more time with all of that instead of elaborately restating Joe's misery and wasting time working towards the reveal of his lie to the reader.

alright, i've shown my work - i'm not just hating on this thing for the sake of it, i can admit it's not all garbage (i did give it two stars instead of one). so now i can rattle off some other things i thought were bad, and then i'll let you go. 

• Remember Fergal, Joe's love interest? he's the son of Poseidon. no, nothing comes of it. just a little character fact that is dropped by Howie and goes absolutely nowhere. I know, what the fuck, right? it drove me crazy not to get any loose ends tied up on this. they just move to Hawaii together and that's it.

• Vince's only personality trait is being an Irish hothead, he's like a cartoon character. in the last ten or so pages of the book, he compares the moon to a boiled potato. no, i'm not kidding, that's actually what he says: "Would you look at that? Clear skies with a moon, full and white like a boiled potato." (323)

•  Ronnie and Joe have a friendship breakup halfway when they have a very ugly, very public argument at a party organised by the rich daddy Ronnie is trying to chase. Joe berates Ronnie for his naiveté after hearing two attendees talking shit about the two of them (the only working class people at the party) while he's in the bathroom. Ronnie, too attached to his dream of riches and comfort, spouts back Joe's own worst insecurities at him: that he can only be loved by people who are dying of AIDS. a few weeks after their spat, Ronnie gets dumped by his daddy and Joe finds him roaming the streets, coked/boozed up, they apologise and make up, and Ronnie says this: "You have no idea what things he made me do - and not just with him alone. It was fun when I thought he loved me. Now it disgusts me." (207).
       Okay... so... you might think that something happens in terms of like, coming to terms with what is clearly understood by Ronnie of an act of sexual violence or coercion. Like maybe we get back to Ronnie's perspective at some point ('cause we do get a little bit of that) and the book tries to deal with his experience and feeling that he was taken advantage of. we could confront the constant groping and sexualisation, what that means for Ronnie's psyche, how do you process sexual violence when your community is partly orientated around anonymous casual sex? no. nothing happens. it's just dropped and we never hear about it again. I hate this.

• the way this book describes sex is just so crazy to me. I don't know if this is common in the genre, I don't read a lot of romance fiction, but I've seen more veined arms, hairy torsos, rippling abs,  painfully neglected hard-ons straining against white jeans, and cocks springing to attention the past 300 pages than I have ever before in my life. 
       "A bullet of desire blasted away the previous moment's darkness. ... A perfect dusting of fur spread across his bowling ball pectorals, and a treasure trail traipsed downward through the granite landscape of his ripped abdomen. ... Joe's drunken guts ached with sexual hunger." (153). I can't find the exact quotation anymore, but close to this moment is also the phrase "diddling his balls" as a positive descriptor for an act of sexual touching, which threw me for a loop for sure. like, diddling means molest, right? what's wrong with cup or fondle or something? why can't it be sensuous and affectionate?
       I laughed out out loud at this scene where Joe gets rimmed for the first time: "Joe's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the feeling of Fergal's hands spreading his ass cheeks open. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to close up, but instead of feeling the painful poke of a cock, he felt the delicious scratch of Joe's beard pushing into his ass crack. Now it was his own sighs of pleasure that filled the room as Fergal began to devour his hole in ways Joe had never felt before - in ways that seemed to defy physics." (249-50). now, I'm a lesbian, so I might be way off base here. but if anyone ever described anything I did to them as "devouring" their hole, I think I would never be able to have sex again out of sheer embarrassment. and i'm just being pedantic now, but why separate asscheek and asscrack with a space? that's not nearly as sexy, right? am i too blinded by being a native speaker of a compound language?

I'm going too insane to talk about anything else now, but let's just leave it at: I haven't even touched the period-appropriate biphobia or the way this book treats women. please, if you made it all the way to the end, let me know if there are well written gay/lesbian romances out there. 

I am drowning, there is no sign of land. we'll read Giovanni's Room, hand in unlovable hand.

 * it may sound like i exaggerated the escalation for comedic effect, but it's literally just what happens. i don't really have an issue with this, i think it's cute. casual intimacy is actually something i think the text portrays well.

 **side note: Joe casually mentions he hates disco music because Elliot did, which is really funny because the book keeps mentioning his much cooler contemporary music taste.... such as duran duran and peter gabriel. i know he can't help it because it's 1989, but it did make me laugh every time. digging at howie and lenny for listening to Grace Jones when you're bopping it to Cher and Phil Collins is really funny.

*** to be clear, I don't think the negative twist and Joe being a liar is bad. it makes for good drama.

****let's just call it character development, i don't think it really is because Joe doesn't so much "develop" as he quite literally has a magical, life-changing, confidence instilling revelation in the last 10 or so pages, but whatever...