Shant

Most LGBTQ novels out there do little more than tread the well-worn coming out sub-genre or spin ultimately derivative yarns with occasional dollops of rote sex scenes to garnish otherwise uninteresting writing for undemanding audiences. SHANT flies in the face of this, a genuinely literary LGBTQ effort that will appeal to, as the back cover's blurb says, "readers of grandly-told fiction". This novel is a revelation, one whose wide, colorful canvas provides for a narrative depth you just don't see much of these days. The characters (and there are a lot of them) are all amazingly three-dimensional; their dialogue is so natural, so incisive, and so well-crafted, it's impossible not to think they're real people. And the granular level of the storytelling is startlingly rich, filling all 470 pages of this involving, often gripping drama. At $14.99, a bit of an investment as an indie press title goes, but a bargain in terms of content & overall quality. The best-written LGBTQ novel in years.

There are some places where you don’t venture. Like those dangerous parts of a city that you avoid at night. Or like those issues so sad, complicated and difficult that most writers won’t touch. Adam Henry Carriere is bold enough to take a journey into one of those places. His novel SHANT, a sequel to his debut novel MILES, is about four teenagers thrown away by their families and society.At first, they struggle to survive, each one in his own way, but survival is not easy when you are young and rejected. What Johnny learns to do best is to run away. To take flight and escape is his means of survival. Often ill-treated and abandoned, Ian, desperately craves for affection, and compensates for the lack of love with his dreams. For Graham, selling his body is his ticket to a full meal. Sex is but a commodity to him and as for affection… he prefers to ignore it as though it were a mere fantasy creature in a fairy tale. He won’t show his feelings easily. He won’t believe in the sincerity of the affection shown to him. And Shant, the main character, manages to keep an almost childish innocence and an admirable dignity, in spite of all the suffering and humiliations he has been through.When those young boys finally find a refuge in a Victorian house, they will keep struggling, this time for deliverance. They will try to be happy again, they will do all they can to live a “normal” life. Ned, a wonderful adult that will appear in their lives, will try to help them. But to find happiness after all they have been through is not easy for the boys, and even Ned has his own wounds to mend…The realistic insight of the novel on rejected boys, who have to sell their bodies, go through all sorts of humiliations and live without support or affection, could evoke a modern version of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist”. Also, like Dickens, Adam Henry Carrière writes a compelling story that manages, without big words or complicated sentences, to direct the attention of the reader to some ugly aspects of our society: the sordid life of the children that live in streets, the cruel treatment inflicted upon them, the difficulty to heal the resulting traumas to the souls of those children and the difficulty for them to reintegrated into society, even when circumstances become more favourable. The story also addresses the lingering hypocrisy of our society towards homosexuality. In spite of all the efforts of movements such as “Gay Pride”, homosexuality often remains a taboo and homosexuals are criticized and rejected by society just as the young boys in the novel. This is one of the reasons that the novel is worth reading. To use the words of a young girl in the story: “Maybe it’s time we start seeing things that half the world wants to pretend don’t exist” and to find real solutions to those issues.There is a positive aspect that makes the story even more moving: with all the misfortune, the lonely suffering, and the cruelty that has befallen them, the young teens in the story “still beam like boyish suns”. Drawing strength from each other; they can still love and feel joy at small everyday things and they even keep some of their innocence.SHANT will bring you to places where one doesn’t venture easily. But because of the sincerity with which difficult issues are addressed, the beauty of the story, and the optimism kept in spite of the difficult situations described in the tale, the journey is definitely worth taking.