AIDS allegory … and pure, horrifying fun in 1980s San Francisco
Reviewer: Daniel
Originally published in 1991, Steam by Jay B. Laws is a gay horror novel that was timely in its day, could be read today as a throwback by horror fans who were around back then, and would probably have to be consumed as a time capsule by horror fans born post-80s.
Gay horror author Hal Bodner writes the new intro, in which he references several times that the book might be foreign to modern readers because it deals with AIDS and bathhouses. On top of that, it regularly drops the names of seventies disco songs and is comfortingly retro for Gen-Xers like me, because characters don’t have the convenience of cellphones and even experience the horrors of phone booths. Eek!
An entertaining fictional horror story that offers a view of our gay past
Along with similarities to Stephen King, Steam delivers surreal “other realms” and hellish, psychosexual situations in an openly gay context that should appeal to fans of Clive Barker as well.
https://boysbearsandscares.com/requeered-tales-brings-us-something-scary-and-steamy/
Reviewer: Parisdude
Rating: 4.7 stars out 5
Gosh, what a ride! This was a real rollercoaster: whoever can read the two forewords without getting moist eyes has had their hearts (or their lachrymal glands) removed; then, the novel proper begins and is a bit confusing in the beginning, but oh so captivating; and finally, it runs full steam ahead (no pun intended), and you won’t be able to put it down ere you reach the last line.
But beware! Choose carefully whom you love in this book!
This novel has been first published in 1991 by young writer Jay B. Laws, who has written it as a sort of reaction to his own being diagnosed with HIV (he passed away only a year later, aged 34). It’s a powerful, strangely alluring book with several layers. I was foremost captivated by an underlying undertone of simmering anger and complete confusion as to what is going on, which is all the more thrilling as the novel (plot and writing style) are clearly very masterfully thought-through and organized. The horror of the book is mostly made up in the reader’s imagination, as is often the case in good horror story-telling. The late Jay B. Laws has a knack of creating a strong relation with the characters he shows us: he makes us understand them, then like them. But beware! Choose carefully whom you love in this book! Don’t get attached to the secondary characters, because when at last you feel comfortably familiar with their personae, he snitches them and leaves you wanting and empty! The book’s program seems to be despair and leave all hope behind… And yet, there is one thing that can redeem all of us, and it’s… love, of course.
https://gaybook.reviews/2019/05/20/steam-parisdudes-review/
Reviewer: Michael R Collings
Steam is Horror, presented through meticulously chosen words and graphic scenes of blood and, quite literally, guts. It is horror that stems from an immortal entity reveling in despair and seeking nothing less than destruction. It is horror that enmeshes an entire city, corrupting its air with a persistent, almost impenetrable fog that transforms streets into sinister warrens traversed at one’s mortal peril, makes of fellow humans distorted and terrifying shadows, and symbolically mirrors the hopelessness enveloping its characters. It is horror that merges fictional terrors with the real-life terrors of an epidemic that strikes unseen, then systematically diminishes its victims into caricatures of themselves before finally allowing the questionable mercy of death. And in the context of Steam, the boundaries between fiction and reality become perilously thin.
Steam is inventive, terrifying, imaginative, and ultimately a masterpiece of horror
At the end of all, Laws draws all of his characters—living and dead—into a final clash with Evil Personified deep in the bowels of the abandoned bathhouse, The Caverns. There they learn bitter truths about themselves and face increasingly dire threats to life and sanity before a remarkable and memorable conclusion, an Apocalypse in the word’s original sense of a discovery, an uncovering. And a novel that has become incrementally constricting and limiting abruptly—and perfectly acceptably—expands to take on cosmic dimensions, with a conclusion both open-ended and ultimately satisfying.
https://michaelrcollings.blogspot.com/2019/06/jay-b-laws-steam-novel-of-many.html
Reviewer: Notes from an Eclectic Viewer
STEAM has a fairly complex plot, realistic characters, and is beautifully executed. Law focuses upon a number of separate characters, some of whom are either friends or lovers, but for a good portion of the novel know nothing about each other. After a traumatic accident and long recovery in New York, thirty-one-year-old David Walker moves to San Francisco to care for his ailing friend and once “college chum,” Eddie Blake, living near the Castro area. When new tragedy and inexplicable mystery enter David’s life, so does a straight, caring, empathetic police officer named Alex Weber.
Elsewhere in the city, Bobby Volanti has become lovers with the “sandy-haired and blue-eyed, outlandishly handsome” twenty-eight-year-old Mick. Having met five months earlier, theirs is “love—and lust—at first sight.”
The novel is a mesmerizing, frightening novel … contains scenes of surrealism which rival the work of Clive Barker
Because of the first-rate suspense maintained throughout, the way in which Laws unveils revelations and is constantly introducing new plot developments, the excellently drawn variety of characters and how some come to realize trust cannot be easily extended to others due to Victor’s escalating abilities and machinations, the ancient mystery that surrounds Victor and what he is trying to do, and the vivid, fast-moving pace of the novel, Steam is a work readers will wish they could read from cover to cover in one sitting, but given its length such isn’t pragmatic. Steam is, however, simply brilliant. Readers will not be able to put the novel down for long, especially as the inevitable showdown between good and evil reaches a feverish pitch as hot as steam itself. The novel’s conclusion is a fantastical bringing together of the ancient and the present in a paranormal eruption fitting for Laws’s tone and approach throughout this most unforgettable piece of fiction.
https://www.facebook.com/NotesFromAnEclecticReader/posts/2321617581225709
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