A collection of four novellas, although one probably qualifies as a short story, by the author of Detransition, Baby (2021, USA). I’d tracked down one of these – ‘The Masker’ – to a site for self-published fiction after reading Peters’s novel, but I’d been waiting for this collection.

There are four stories: ‘Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones’, ‘The Chaser’, ‘Stag Dance’ and ‘The Masker’. The first is science fiction, in which the narrator is the inadvertent patient zero of a virus which prevents the body from producing hormones. Society – in the US – has fallen apart, and people fight over manufactured hormones. This is not subtle – but that’s actually a strength of the story, and indeed the collection, not a weakness, I was reminded in parts of Ralph A Sperry’s Status Quotient: The Carrier (1981, USA) and Necessary Ill (2013, USA) by Deb Taber (the latter I can definitely recommend, and would really like to see more by her).

‘The Chaser’ is much more disturbing. It’s set at a Quaker school, and narrated by a senior whose relationship with a junior room-mate is… well, one is manipulating the other, or perhaps vice versa. And when the senior tries to distance himself, the junior begins a hate campaign. In parts, I was reminded of James Clavell’s King Rat (1962, UK) and, having attended a British boarding-school I grew up hearing stories that are… “adjacent” to this one.

The title story is… astonishing. It’s set in a pirate logging camp in nineteenth-century USA. I’ve no idea if the vocabulary and practices are correct, but they read as completely authentic. The protagonist is male and oversized and nicknamed Babe after Paul Bunyan’s pet ox, but his gender identity is not so clear-cut. One member of the camp, who is not a logger, and very pretty, is a pretend wife to several – more echoes of King Rat. This all comes to a head when the camp chief puts on a “stag dance”, where some of the loggers can pretend to be women by pinning a triangle of brown cloth to their groins. Which Babe does. When I first came across mention of this collection, it had a different title – but I can see why ‘Stag Dance’ was eventually chosen as the title piece. It’s a remarkable novella. 

‘The Masker’ is the least satisfactory of the four stories. At a crossdresser/transgender convention in Las Vegas, a young crossdresser is torn between an older trans woman and a man who uses a silicone female mask to crossdress. The trans woman, an ex-law enforcement officer, persuades the narrator to set a trap for the masker but instead they do the same for the trans woman.

The first two stories are good, and the last is okay. But the title novella is worth the price of admission alone. To be honest, I think it could have been published on its own. The other stories probably only really suffer in comparison, and might well hold up better in a collection on their own, but I can understand the urge to get something into print quickly. Peters is a name to watch, not only a good writer but writing stuff that’s straight up trans, documenting (US) trans culture… and more of them are definitely needed in the mainstream.