Paper Trails

Enlarge Image

With her fourth novel, Monoceros (Coach House Books), Suzette Mayr tackles gay teen bullying and suicide. It’s an accomplished and sensitive take on a vital issue. It should be very widely read.
   
Patrick, four months from his high-school graduation, is tormented because his boyfriend’s girlfriend (it’s complicated) finds out about the affair. With her mean girl pack, she threatens to expose the two. The boyfriend panics and drops him — and Patrick takes his own life in despair.
   
Mayr skillfully rotates through multiple viewpoints, from Patrick’s mother, who refused to believe her son was gay, to people with little or no contact with him  — such as his classmate Faraday who never really spoke to him except to sell him his weekly latte.
   
The boy’s school principal and guidance counsellor — two men in a long-term relationship — refused to help, worried about their pensions and the Catholic school’s reputation. Mayr exposes their hypocrisy and shows the effect of the boy’s death on their relationship.
   
She also writes some beautifully heartbreaking pages about the grief of Patrick’s mother and boyfriend and their survivor’s guilt.
   
The book isn’t completely grim, though. As the reader moves further from Patrick’s circle, the characters and situations become funnier. There’s some gentle parody of grief counselling. Plus, we’re introduced to Crepe Suzette, a drag queen who’s the most level-headed of them all.
   
Monoceros is another name for unicorn and unicorns are a theme throughout the novel. Lonely and misunderstood Faraday is obsessed with them. They’re pointless creatures and most people don’t believe in them but, as Mayr shows, sometimes, they kick back.

• • •
   
Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp), by Amber Dawn, is a remarkable debut novel about sex workers that confounds expectations.
   
The narrator, Little, is a teenage girl shacking up where she can. Facing another eviction, she’s taken out of her world by Arsen, a suave, handsome man with a nice car, beautiful apartment and nice teeth. (I’m pretty sure I imagined that last detail but he seems like the type.)
   
Arsen is a pimp, and he takes Little to Sub Rosa, a magical place where business girls, the Glories, service Live Ones. The Glories are better off than the streetwalkers in the City, Arsen’s main girl, First, tells Little. Why go anywhere else, First instructs, when everything you need is here?
   
It’s not paradise. Little has to earn her place by surviving "The Dark" — a brutal nightmare zone just beyond Sub Rosa. And she has to confront her past and her memories.
   
The novel is a surreal projection onto a harrowing reality. Combine fantasy with prostitutes and I’m reminded of Fellini, actually.
   
Or, maybe it’s what might have happened to Alice if she was a little older and Wonderland was a street of bordellos.