Publisher: NineStar Press
Author: Mark David Campbell
Release Date: May 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64890-270-3
Format: ePub, Mobi
Cover Artist: Natasha Snow
Category: Literary/Genre Fiction
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Word Count: 88700
Sex Content: Explicit
Pairing: MM
Orientation: Gay
Identity: Cisgender
Warning: depictions of alcoholism and murder
“What if there were a place nobody else knows about—a secret place—where everyone is queer?”
That’s the question Guy, a lonely elderly gay anthropologist, asks Richard, his young psychiatrist, as he searches for his tolerable truth.
During each session, Guy recalls surviving the sinking of a cargo ship and being washed ashore on an uncharted tropical island alongside the ship’s first mate, Luca. There, the two young men discover a world counter to everything they have ever known—a complex society in which almost everyone is homosexual.
In his naïve and awkward way, Guy attempts win the love of a local man, but first he must undergo a brutal initiation ritual, endure a crazed shaman, and swim across shark-infested waters. Meanwhile, Luca, who is unable to accept his sexuality, becomes obsessed with being rescued and degenerates into drug dependency. When Luca attempts to steal a large stash of gold and leave the island, Guy is forced choose between staying with the man he loves or saving the life of the man who saved his.
Although enthralled by his tale, Richard must be constantly wary of Guy’s attempts to manipulate him, which threatens to upend his own sense of truth, leaving him to question if there could really be such a society or if it only exists within the fantasy of a lonely old gay man.
