Last time I visited Fire Island was in the 'Doc Savage' adventure, 'The Mindless Monsters', in its forty acre Sunken Forest. I called it "an exotic location" that's shockingly close to New York City, on the other side of a narrow bay from Long Island. That was set in 1941, its year of release, but by 1989, when this novel is set, it's grown into that "exotic" label in ways few would might have imagined. It's become a gay paradise, especially during the busy four month summer season to Labor Day. And apparently it is that in our reality, or at least was, because, while this is fiction, Blair Fell based much of it on his own experiences on Fire Island in the eighties.

We spend most of our time there, but we start out in Philadelphia with Joe Agobian and Ronnie Kaminsky. Oddly, given that Ronnie is a real character and Joe isn't, it's Joe who's our lead and that's because he grows as a character while Ronnie never does, at least not much. In Philly, he takes charge of Joe, who's seriously withdrawn while he deals with the loss of his lover Elliot to AIDS a couple of years earlier. AIDS is the Sword of Damocles in this novel, hanging over a whole community that's been hit so hard that half the gay people over thirty are dead. Ronnie's thirty-four, so focuses on whatever life he has left. Joe is still focused on death and what it's taken away.

Of course, the solution Ronnie comes up with is to go to Fire Island. They'll have jobs tending bar at the Promethean for Scotty Black and rooms too. It'll be a fresh start for them both. Except, he rather exaggerated. Joe arrives on Fire Island to find that Ronnie's cleaning rooms at the Flotel Motel, they don't have jobs at the Promethean and they don't have anywhere to stay either. So Joe ends up staying at 44¼ Picketty Ruff with Howie and Lenny, who he met on his way onto the island. This might sound mightily convenient but there are good reasons for it.

The main one is that Howie and Lenny are two of the Disco Witches of the title, something that doesn't remotely stay the mystery I thought it might. Fell is happy to let us in on what they are pretty quickly, even if it remains mere rumour to Joe for much longer. There are only five disco witches now, though there used to be a lot more of them. AIDS has hit them hard. They dress up like it's still the heart of the disco era and they dance their rituals now and again when the need is strong enough.

What you have to understand at this point is that they aren't remotely grand wizards who wield powers beyond imagining. They can't stop the spread of AIDS through magic, only through the charitable work of real international organisations like ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), who host a benefit to raise money for the cause in this book. What they can do is minor stuff that affects Fire Island and its community. The performance of a disco witch dance ritual is what can change a bad party into a great party, for instance. They can change moods and minds and leave a lasting positive effect.

And Howie is convinced from his reading of Joe's aura that he's one of them, even if he doesn't realise it, not least because he has no idea what disco witches are. There's a five-part check for the special one, a rubric, and Joe safely meets three of its requirements. What we know is that he meets a fourth too, because we know that he's lying about his age and is 28 at the beginning of this story rather than the 23 everyone thinks he is. So he's only short a recognisable mole and we have no doubt that there's a very logical reason for that.

The problem Howie faces, even if he confirms that Joe's the special one, is to convince him that he's like Lucho, one of the many who aren't with them anymore. You know: by explaining to him that he's a holy lover blessed by the Great Goddess Mother, a warrior for the restoration of the Great Balance, thus someone targeted for death by the Great Darkness, who's appearing and vanishing mysteriously in the form of an egregore he calls Gladiator Man. Like that. Yeah, it's a lot like telling Anakin Skywalker that he's going to bring balance to the force, but with the extra catch that Anny doesn't even know the force exists. Sounds like a challenge, right?

I ended up with this book because it was published by Alcove Press, an imprint of Crooked Lane Books. I've been thoroughly enjoying the latter's horror novels, and I've reviewed a few now for the Nameless Zine, so I was on board with trying the Alcove books they sent over too. However, that doesn't mean that they're even close to my usual genres. 'The Gods Time Forgot', which I reviewed last month, was an enjoyable romantasy that fared better with its romance than its fantasy. This would be general fiction labelled LGBTQ+ if it wasn't for the supernatural element of magic that's brought by the disco witches of the title.

Certainly, I never expected to read anything containing this much gay sex in it, especially male gay sex because we straight folk have a weird double standard where lesbians are hot but gays are icky. Nowadays, I know way too many gay men, some of whom I'm related to, to maintain a mindset like that, but that still doesn't mean that I expected to read this. In many ways, I saw it as insight into their way of life, making it as fascinating a diverse read as the Nigerian fantasy that I keep finding or the Christian romantic suspense I somehow ended up specialising in for a while. And I learned a lot, especially how these gay people differentiated love and sex and how AIDS affected them not just as people but as a community.

One of Fell's biggest successes here was his diversity of characters. While we straight folk often categorise gay men in one bucket, Fell knows better and crafts his ensemble cast of gay men as very different people. I may have intellectually realised that there are stereotypes within the gay community but that doesn't mean I knew what they were or how to tell the difference. Fell does a fantastic job of doing that and then having some of his characters step beyond them. He also includes a couple of other notable characters who are affected in other ways. One is Elena, a young model who's HIV+ from a drug habit, transmitted through dirty needles.

And while Howie and Ronnie are both gay disco witches, as are Saint D'Norman, a striking black and bald man, and Max de Laguna, who's HIV+ and currently bedridden in New York, the fifth of their number isn't. She's an eighty-year-old straight woman, Dory the Boozehound—just in case you hadn't guessed already, everybody in this community has a lively nickname—but she runs a gay bar, Asylum Harbor, and happily hires Joe as her second bartender on Howie's advice. While there's an ongoing story with the disco witches and Joe, the maybe special one, there are many smaller plot strands going on and one involves Asylum Harbor.

It's housed in a building owned by Scotty Black—he who runs the much grander Promethean—and Dory's contract requires her to make a profit for at least two out of each four months that the summer season runs on Fire Island or he can shut her down. Given how invested Joe gets in this community, Asylum Harbor becomes a huge deal to him. He likes Dory. He comes to like his boss behind the bar, an Irishman called Vince who Ronnie plans to conquer. That ACT UP benefit is held there. Elena stays there, even though she's been sober for a while now. It's a hub for the community, however shabby it is compared to the Promethean.

There are sex connections all over the place, people hooking up like there's no tomorrow, which is a pretty good phrase to use with AIDS hanging over the community like a dark shadow. Some of that ties to Ronnie, who's keen on landing a rich gay man to settle down with, even though he clearly likes Vince. That spawns a number of plot strands. However, Joe resists, partly because it's better for the bar if he doesn't sleep with customers but mostly because he's still mourning Elliot, a relationship that grows in this book even though Elliot's dead before it begins.

In short, there's a heck of a lot here in a novel that doesn't much exceed three hundred pages. I can't say that it's entirely my cup of tea for a slew of reasons, not just because it's unabashedly gay but because it spends so much time in soap opera territory. However, I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would. Even if we ignore the LGBTQ+ aspects for a moment—which is impossible given that it's so fundamentally about the LGBTQ+ experience—it's about community and loss and potential and belonging and redemption and heart and reconciliation, universal truths we should all connect to and which Fell wrings out of his pages with emotion and style. It's a strong and powerful book that's unashamed to get romantic. ~~ Hal C F Astell