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Imprisonment gives you time to think. Who gets your attention, the gay uncle who died of AIDS and has special wishes, and was like a father to you, or your distant, enterprising and sometimes disapproving mother? It can be all the more confusing when you think that your dead uncle is sending you messages. In his forties, Galen Melville, an openly gay man, emerges from prison in the mid-1990s, exonerated from a crime he did not commit. Now free, Galen returns to the idyllic landscape, of his Oregon hometown whose center is the eccentric Vondel hotel run by his quirky Dutch family. Suddenly he discovers that perhaps the ghost of his beloved uncle is afoot in the bequeathed abandoned mansion across the street and perceives mysterious signs of guidance in his search for right relationships with his young son and grown daughter. In the quest to find himself, he hooks up with two muscular and beautiful men, Anton the landscaper, Brent, the physical therapist, one older and one younger. He also fights to establish his uncle’s mansion as a refuge for gay and lesbian people. As though presented in a landscape in a Renaissance painting, this sensually evoked, affirmative, often comic, sometimes sexually explicit novel follows Galen through a slowly evolving pastoral world, made vivid and scenic in cadenced, riveting prose, where his mother finds a renewed sense of her poetic vocation, his father finds sobriety, and his older lover discovers his roots and liberation from the closet. Truly this novel underlines Christopher Bram’s comment, Henry Alley is an excellent writer. His fiction is artfully artless, clear, concise, and real. Best of all, he regularly tells stories that nobody else is telling, and Lambda Review’s summing up, This is the real genius in Alley’s work-his beautifully drawn characters. You feel you know them; their motives, their attributes, their flaws all touch you deeply.
