Dead to Me
Anton Strout
Is it just me, or is there serious sexual tension between Simon and Connor? Ever since the scene early on when an antiques hawker takes them for a couple and Connor plays along, I could feel the undercurrents. Even while Simon is developing his heterosexual relationship with Jane, whenever he’s thinking about Jane, Connor isn’t far behind in his thoughts. Then there’s this symbolic moment at the end, where Simon’s ribs are so injured that he can’t walk, and needs help:
Though Jane still wasn’t allowed back in the Department proper, there was serious talk about pushing through the paperwork because of the way she had proven herself in the line of duty. But the wheels of red tape were ever slow. I wasn’t holding my breath that it would be anytime soon.
"I can take him from there," Connor said in the spirit of cooperation as he gathered our drinks.
Maybe I’ve been spending too much time with Rebel Without A Cause, but at that moment Connor, Jane, and Simon become a weird sort of threesome with Simon at the center. And then another character hires Jane so she can come back into the Department after all, and she carries him the rest of the way, no Connor involved… To me that was like the affirmation of the heterosexual relationship and the denial/sublimination of alternatives.
Then we’ve got this ambiguous part:
"Don’t," he whispered in my ear as I struggled to break free.
And of course we can’t forget Connor’s little joke about Simon coming out of the closet after he’s been trapped there by an angry ghost.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because Connor’s character is so ambiguous. We know he’s Simon’s mentor, and about ten years older, but he doesn’t seem that older; he seems like more of a peer. He’s very hard to pin down.
The quirk that makes this book stand out from other urban fantasies is not just the bureaucratizing of supernatural powers and organizations, but the titles that emerge from this bureaucracy. Like an ongoing joke, the titles parody the typical human resources pamphlet or business seminar courses: Clairvoyance or Clair-annoyance: You Either Got It or You Don’t, Deadside Manner: Staying Cool in Troubled Times, Ten Simple Ways Your Job Will Disfigure You! (The exclamation point makes all the difference.) And the little jab at the genre: Witty Banter to Ease Any Paranormal Situation.
Most of the book is smoothly integrated, but it takes a hard right turn at the end with the introduction of Surrealism. Surrealism hasn’t been mentioned once, and now it turns out to be the underlying ideology of all the Bad Guys. Because it hasn’t been mentioned, it ends up as a placemarker–I can’t think of the exact term, but I mean the linguistic equivalent of a figurehead–rather than a developed system of ideology. The only way we see Surrealism manifested is that they all dress up like Dalí. I think the cultists, who are integrated into the story throughout, might have made more sense as the top-dog evil… maybe if they had been surrealist cultists. That way Breton and Dalí wouldn’t have popped up so unexpectedly.