Novelist Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby) proves she's just as agile with short fiction in Stag Dance, a dazzling and strange collection comprising a novel and three stories. She deftly presents each narrative in a different literary style--speculative fiction, teen romance, tall tale, horror--probing interactions and confrontations over identity, intimacy, sexuality, and community. Bodies satisfy and betray, accept and reject, survive and fail.
In "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones," a "contagion" causes "a complete cessation of the production of all sex hormones." The protagonist reveals life before the contagion, the moment of infection, and her continued existence as Patient Zero. The most heartstring-pulling of the quartet is "Stag Dance," set in a illegal Midwest logging camp in winter. To boost morale, the "landlooker and job shark" boss proposes a dance. He adds, "Any man here that desires to go to the dance as a lady--you just cut yourself off a brown triangle and you pin it right over the fly of your pants, and that's how the rest of us know you're looking to be courted." Babe, who narrates, "wasn't pretty enough for it," is "too damn big," "too damn heavy," but vulnerably admits, "I had many times wondered in earnest about being courted as a woman is courted." Capital-D Drama among the 30-some men ensues.
Peters, who is transgender, reveals in her acknowledgements how she "puzzle[d] out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of [her] transition--otherwise known as ongoing trans life." Yet a universal empathy lingers throughout her expansive storytelling--a longing for recognition and connection all readers will undoubtedly recognize. --Terry Hong