In the desert, no one can hear you, queen reads the blurb on the cover, a nice riff on the tag line for Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, and a cute nod to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s also a neat summary of this novella’s themes of extraterrestrials and journeying through barren desert landscapes. Recently graduated art student Jamie is struggling to find a place in the world. Priced out by London’s ever-increasing rents, he’s been forced to live with his parents in the West Midlands while dreaming of being a writer and hanging out with other artists. A chance encounter with a stranger in a Soho creperie sees him moving into a house in Willesden Green, sharing with New Age gardener, Matthew, a social pariah posing as a socialite. Jamie is impressionable and hungry for la vie de Boheme. His boyfriend, Billy, remains unimpressed by Matthew’s pretensions and even less impressed by his influence on Jamie, who’s quickly won over, seeing Matthew as a mentor in all things cultural and spiritual, despite gradually discovering that virtually nobody else likes him. At a trendy art happening, Jamie is star-struck by the glamour of it all and indebted to Matthew’s introducing him to these wonderfully glamourous creatures, yet he also learns that the in-crowd are rather dismissive and suspicious of Jamie’s new housemate.
On a whim, Matthew flies off to America to learn about crystal therapy with a man he’s recently met. Once there, he invites Jamie to join them, so our intrepid hero finds himself flying to New Mexico, where things become increasingly bizarre. David is very good at description, rendering a keen sense of the physical environment: “Wispy threads of silver swirl across a cerulean sky streaked with rose and violet and bright, blinding tangerine”. Taos is a far cry from the West Midlands, but it’s not just the landscape that blows Jamie’s mind, it’s also the kinds of people he encounters. Like recovering addicts Pale and Gegger, or bestselling new age author Prunella Small, and ideas they entertain about extraterrestrial lizards masquerading as humans, or that the healing machine – which resembles a dentist’s chair – actually heals the human body. Jamie has been brought there as some kind of messiah, a figure they’ve all been waiting for, but as the night of his initiation approaches, he has stronger and stronger feelings of anger towards and estrangement from Matthew.
It’s an enjoyable read, spiced with black humor that sees this cult as a great object of hilarity as much as an example of the darker side of humanity. To find out whether Jamie makes it out alive you’ll just have to buy the book.
JUSTIN DAVID is a child of Wolverhampton lives and works in East London. He is a writer, photographer, and publisher. He studied Graphic Communication at the University of Northampton and later graduated from the MA Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. His first novella, The Pharmacist, was published by Salt as part of their Modern Dreams series. His short fiction has appeared in many print and online anthologies and his full length work He’s Done Ever So Well for Himself was published in April 2018. In 2016 he formed Inkandescent, a new publishing venture with partner Nathan Evans, with a commitment to progressive ideas, subjects and voices underrepresented by mainstream publishing and a mission to discover and celebrate original, diverse and transgressive literature and art, to challenge the status quo. www.inkandescent.co.uk
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011), all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2022, Jonathan Kemp, Justin David, Kissing The Lizard, novel, review
