North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature
consciousness: fragmented, reticent, shaped by secrecy. Such stylistic choices align the novel with minimalism, yet Grimsley resists the cool detachment of many minimalist writers. Instead, his minimalism is charged with affect, carrying immense emotional weight precisely through its restraint. The spareness of the language amplifies the intensity of the story, forcing readers to inhabit silences, omissions, and gaps, while at moments of intimacy between Nathan and Roy, the prose swells with sensuous description. The writing’s stylistic minimalism underscores the psychological atmosphere of repression and silence, while the lyrical inflections suggest the possibility of transcendence even amid horror. Grimsley’s settings – the isolated rural homesteads, the high school, the ominous abandoned plantation house – bear the hallmarks of a Southern Gothic sensibility: decaying structures, suffocating family secrets, and the persistent presence of violence in many forms. Perhaps even more striking are the ways that literary beauty is to be found even in the more sinister aspects of the storytelling. Nathan’s family home is, for example, described as a site of dread, especially the downstairs, where his father inhabits, drinking and quoting the bible. In this way, Grimsley aligns queer experience with the Gothic’s preoccupation with secrecy, repression, and the uncanny, where the downstairs, a decidedly unsafe place for Nathan,
is described ethereally as dark and hazy, with Nathan stepping downstairs compared to slowly stepping underwater. Nathan’s father looms within this grotto-like space as one of the novel’s most terrifying figures, a representation of patriarchal violence taken to its extreme. His abuse of Nathan is central, but equally important is the climate of fear he generates, rendered most obvious by the mother’s almost literal disengagement –“She is away. She is wherever she goes”– in the face of her son’s abuse (56). Critically, Grimsley indicts not only the father, but the social structure that enables him: the patriarchal family, the authority of male dominance, and the religious cultural ethos that valorizes obedience while shrouding violations in secrecy. While the book does not engage much with the surrounding community at large, the implied presence of the church (both Nathan’s and Roy’s parents rarely miss a church service) and other adults who do not act looms large. (Remember, the family has been forced to leave past towns before.) The silence surrounding Nathan thereby reflects even broader cultural silences and failings, including the repression of sexuality in reli-
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gious communities, the denial of domestic violence, and the stigmatization of queer desire. The counter intimacy between Nathan and Roy emerges, not in open spaces but in stolen, similarly silent (or at least overlooked) moments: bus rides, an abandoned graveyard, bedrooms with doors closed. The novel’s language, often elliptical and understated, captures both the hesitancy of first desire and the overwhelming force of forbidden love. But while Nathan’s emotional and sexual relationship with Roy is often tender and exploratory, it pointedly unfolds under the shadow of his father’s ongoing abuse. The contrast between the violence of the father and the mutual desire
ABOVE Jim Grimsley reading a short story during the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s
Squire Summer Writing Workshop, at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, July 2024 (Read the story he selected, in particular, for a writing conference: “Two Jumps, In and Out.”)