I admit to having the bias that romances are poorly written, and the level of writing in Facing the Curse challenges my assumptions. The prose is deceptively easy, each line honed into something so naturally readable that it must have taken a great deal of time to craft. It’s like each sentence is a cloth that is draped perfectly. There is a smoothness. Imagery is built up step by step with such attention to what order information goes in that it’s like watching a craftsperson build a 3D model with tweezers.

 

By the time I noticed how long I’d been reading, I was in the middle of the climax, which is incredibly tense. There was no way I could stop at that point. I had to see it through. Thankfully, after finishing the book, I can say that the ending is worth it. Rarely has there been such a satisfying confrontation.

 

Thematically, “Don’t judge by appearances” is one of the messages of Facing the Curse, but it isn’t reductive, nor is it a theme restricted to specifically LGBTQIA+ topics. For example, this passage:

 

Tito Russell sat in his kitchen, surrounded by boxes. A
box filled with pots and pans littered half the oak table, along with
Tito’s keys, cellphone, and Coke can. He stared at the paper
application in front of him, frowning. This was his life in a
nutshell: He was supposed to mark a box for gender, by which
they actually meant physical sex, and there was no box for
intersex. He drew a box, wrote intersex beside it, and then put a
checkmark in it. Take it or leave it. I don’t fit into your neat little
categories.

 

This statement by Tito is an apt descriptor of the novel itself: It doesn’t fit into our neat little categories. Gender becomes a postmodern, fragmented experience, from Tito’s sense of invalidation when filling out a job application to Tito’s sudden picturing of his boyfriend at the beginning of the novel as a 1940s housewife.

 

Religion is not spared the postmodern fragmentation, but unlike the hard-edged nihilism or religion-bashing that is in a lot of postmodern fiction, Facing the Curse depicts a multiplicity of religious identities. Distinctions that we’re used to, like being Christian or Wiccan, disappear. […] Over the course of the novel, even the notion of “good Christian people” becomes destabilized. What does that mean? Who does that describe? Rather than Christian-bashing, it isn’t that simple. Like all the other points of instability, who describes themselves as Christian and why and to what extent Christianity is a performance or a mask becomes an important part of the thriller-like tension.

 

The reader is plunged into an increasingly disorienting landscape of people who aren’t who they appear to be, including Tito. Tito is not a typical unreliable narrator. What I mean is that Tito isn’t a liar, isn’t a criminal, and isn’t crazy. A major part of this novel is the discovery that Tito has Dissociative Identity Disorder — and why. This is Southern Gothic with a psychological twist.

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--Amanda Melheim, Counter Arts

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I was given permission to post this article in part but not in whole. To read the rest of this review, click here.