Stag Dance by Torrey Peters review – genre games and gender mischief
When Detransition, Baby hit the shelves in 2021, its success took readers on both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. Longlisted for the Women's prize and selected as one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century, Torrey Peters's debut novel was among the titles that defined the literary landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding herself in the crosshairs of a mounting culture war, Peters became one of the world's best known trans writers, seemingly overnight.
Of course, this isn't the full picture. Before her international breakthrough, Peters had self-published two novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, shifting enough copies for mainstream publishers to take an interest. Both appear in Stag Dance, along with two pieces written either side of Detransition, Baby: the title story and The Chaser. They make up an ambitious compendium of a decade in writing.
'In the future, everyone will be trans': Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a plague-ravaged dystopia where humans can no longer make their own sex hormones. Society falls apart as various factions seek to synthesise and control the flow of replacement hormones taken from pigs. It's a wild and gruesome story, packed with action but economically detailed. The Chaser is a preppy campus romance of sorts, articulating the suffocating desires felt by a Quaker boarding school student for his girlish roommate: it subtly upsets many of our ideas around love and sexual awakening.
The Masker tiptoes into murky waters where fetish, queer sexuality and transgender identity mingle, exposing some extremely queasy power dynamics. And the titular Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, follows the men as they prepare for their winter festivities. Due to the lack of women, some must volunteer to attend en femme, a strangely kinky tradition that naturally generates unexpected possibilities. It is by turns thrilling and wickedly funny, weaving together bloodthirsty monsters and insatiably horny lumberjacks. A million miles from the tedious pioneer tales of James Fenimore Cooper, it's still a surprise after Detransition, Baby's cosmopolitan comedy of manners.
The book as a whole brings to mind Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire in the way it uses genre conventions to address bigger themes. Just as Enríquez's spooky tales channel the horror of Argentina's military dictatorship, Peters inhabits her own disparate genres – dystopia, romance, horror, historical – to weave a transhistorical web of gender non-conforming characters.
There is nothing ragtag about this collection, despite its long span of writing and diversity of genre, because Peters is such a capable and considerate writer, skipping between modes with apparent effortlessness. The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement. Moreover, it is clear she is having a great deal of fun: even when exploring serious issues around gender and sexuality, the writing is mischievous rather than sanctimonious. Peters seems to delight in complicating liberal identity politics, refusing ever to sanitise her work or narrow her focus, and glorying in some truly rollicking prose.
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Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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