In Stone: A Grotesque Faerie Tale

by Jeremy Jordan King

Overview

Jeremy is stuck, like most young New Yorkers, in a world between adolescence and adulthood. Just when he thought that he was an average, blend-in-with-the-crowd gay kid, he becomes the victim of a terrible act of homophobia. Thankfully, a mysterious something comes to his aid. Garth is a gargoyle, trapped in stone and cursed to live an immortal life. Human and monster must become friends and confront the mysterious and magical events of the past that have brought them together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602827615
Publisher:	Bold Strokes Books
Publication date:	11/13/2012
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.64(w) x 8.34(h) x 0.59(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Jeremy grew up in South Jersey, where his primary life goal was to become a mermaid. When that proved impossible, he decided that the next best thing would be to move to New York City and study theater at Marymount Manhattan College. He lived an actor’s life for several years before he realized that he’d be more satisfied as a writer. And he was.

Most of his work centers on the gay "emerging adult" as he struggles with finding purpose, happiness, and love in a world not quite built for him. He’s also inspired by the fantastic (or what he hopes to be fantastic). Bringing the extraordinary into a rather ordinary world is a theme that he loves to revisit. Besides fiction, he dabbles in essays, screenwriting, and illustration.

He shares an apartment in Manhattan with his best friends and a strange little dog. Read all about it at www.generalfaggotry.com. In Stone is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

In a disjointed and needlessly morose tale, a gargoylelike creature protects a mopey 20-something from gay bashers. Jeremy is a recent college graduate miserably selling hot dogs in New York. On New Year's Eve, he is beaten on 26th Street by assailants spewing anti-gay slurs. After the attack, he is helped up by someone who identifies himself as Jeremy's Guardian and later reveals himself to be a stone creature called a grotesque ("Gargoyles are drain pipes"). As Jeremy slowly recovers physically and emotionally from his attack, he learns more of Garth the Guardian's history. Meanwhile, Garth enacts vigilante justice against actual and suspected gay bashers, and Jeremy schemes to attract a fellow food-service worker who already has a boyfriend in a manipulative way that goes sadly unacknowledged in the text. Both Jeremy's and Garth's stories are delivered in plodding, tortuous prose ("Each word and strike were precious treasures I'd dropped, treasures that would help pay my way through the processing of the assault"). One of Garth's protective acts leaves a dead body in Jeremy's apartment, and although there is some concern that the police may look askance at this turn of events, the book ends before the situation is truly addressed. A tedious, poorly plotted slog with very little resolution. (Urban fantasy. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews