‘Stag Dance' is a worthy follow-up to ‘Detransition, Baby'

Washington Post

11-03-2025

In the early 20th century, a lumberjack nicknamed Babe Bunyan ('Bunyan' after folkloric axman Paul Bunyan; 'Babe' after his strong ox) is working in an illegal logging camp during winter, when timber inspectors don't check the frozen forests too carefully. It's difficult work in uncomfortable conditions, and the laborers pass the time as best they can, drinking dangerously potent homebrewed liquor, sleeping in cramped quarters, making bets and telling stories. Morale being low following an accidental death, the job shark (lumberjack jargon for employer) Karl Daglish decides to throw a dance — a stag dance, as there are seemingly no women present. Daglish cuts fabric triangles and announces that anyone who wants to attend the dance as a lady (or 'skooch') and be courted like one should pin one to his crotch. Babe, a giant of a person 'on the far side of ugly,' recognizes in the triangles an opportunity to fulfill a deep and heretofore unnamed need.
So begins 'Stag Dance,' the title work in Torrey Peters's new collection, billed as a novel and stories. It reads to me more like one novella and three long stories, but there's no point in quibbling over vague definitions, especially in a book that deliberately questions the limitations of genre and gender alike. The point is that there are four works of fiction in 'Stag Dance,' one longer than the others, and each piece is written in a distinct genre. In order: speculative fiction, teen romance (or, perhaps, tragedy), tall tale and horror. All differ from Peters's critically acclaimed debut, 'Detransition, Baby,' which is a contemporary literary novel, or as Crispin Long wrote in The New Yorker, 'a bourgeois comedy of manners.'