Anna Bachmann's Reviews > Stag Dance

Welcome Torrey Peters's sophomore work, including three short stories and sharing a title with its main novella, written over the course of 10 years to explore "the inconvenient aspects" of Peters's never-ending transition that lack the language to address them. This is a cross-genre exploration of gender, dabbling in speculative fiction, horror, and western to unpack ideas like sexuality, fetish, community, and pre-transition relationships.

This was a very unique read and I loved exploring across so many different styles of storytelling in this one work. Each story had a different tone, a different environment, and a different purpose. I'm unable to say which story was my favorite or least favorite, each was very different and has a completely different emotional impact on the reader. While each characters' motivations are quite clear and fleshed out, I found their personalities as individuals a little weak. The abrupt ending of each story also dulled the emotional impact a touch.

Unfortunately, there are some moments in here regarding violence against women as a gender-confirming and feminizing phenomenon that just made my stomach sink. I don't seek to invalidate this idea among trans women or claim that I completely understand the factors behind this feeling, but I found it a harmful viewpoint at the very least and it definitely soured this work a bit for me. I greatly appreciate what Peters achieves in this work, and she is certainly an excellent writer, skilled at creating characters and scenarios that are unique in their own ways while exploring issues that face trans and queer communities at large. Overall, I found this work effective if maybe a little weak at points, perhaps not the right book for me, but certainly for others who may see more of themselves in these stories.

~Thank you Random House for providing this ARC!~