The Black Emerald

Book excerpt: Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. A high schooler finds her drawings corrupted by a haunted stone she inherits from a suicidal underground cartoonist. A video game addict discovers a vast, hidden dimension to colonize in the walls of his girlfriend's apartment. A philosophy student seeks anonymous Craigslist sex with the ubiquitous devil that stalks her. In this short fiction collection from Jeanne Thornton, author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam (a Lambda Literary Award finalist), reality and relationships blur, creating a queer pulp experience with a literary sensibility, a hallucinatory journey into despair... and, possibly, toward hope. "The gorgeousness of Thornton's writings help sustain the worlds she creates... That's the kind of seductiveness these stories have. In reading them, you become strange and dreamy in the same way they are."--Torrey Peters "Jeanne has this way of writing self-consciousness inside these perfect, self-contained worlds with signifiers that make them seem like they are the world we live in but if that world were... I don't even know exactly. Mystifying and uncomfortable and bulging with complicated, contradictory feeling just below the surface of everything."--Imogen Binnie