Review: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Some friends will lead you astray on a night out. Others will lead you to start a global pandemic. That’s the premise of the story titled, appropriately, Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones, that opens this barnstorming collection of fictions from Torrey Peters. We meet the narrator, some years “post-contagion”, working on a pig farm in Iowa. The pigs are mutants, grown to produce the sex hormones that humans are no longer able to process due to the pandemic, the origin of which the narrator is entwined with. The story loops back in time, to Seattle, where the narrator is staying with her friend Lexi, who promises that “in the future, everyone will be trans”. She doesn’t mean it metaphorically; her plot is to force everyone to choose their gender.

What does it mean to be trans in such a world? It’s a question Peters pursues with glee over the course of this collection (organised, as she stated at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival, from “most to least pigs”). The settings and genres proliferate with abandon: a YA romance set in a Colorado Quaker college; a queasy thriller set at a trans meetup in Las Vegas. The longest, the title story, is a western set in an illegal logging camp in the Midwest in the 19th Century. The language, drawn from lumberjack idioms of yore — “bustadshogen”, “boomers and bindlestiffs”, “hard-boiled cackleberries”, “maple-syrup-drowned monkey blankets” and, most-winningly, “sauce”— immerses and disorients; a doubling of the kind of disorientation of being queer in a hetero world.

Each fiction presses a knife to an aspect of trans life, and then gives the knife a brutal twist: the young man who “chases” transwomen who may be being chased himself; the pursuit of femininity and beauty to monstrous ends; the fetishisation of transness. This is transness as identity, but more importantly as practice, as relationships — between trans folk, between trans and cis folk, between transness and cisness. As in Detransition, Baby, Peters is out to scare the pants off transphobes and detonate cis-het shibboleths about gender. Effortlessly she swoops from pinnacles of euphoria (see: Babe and Daglish’s consummation in Stag Dance) to the depths of shame. At the festival, Peters cited Toni Morrison’s claiming of the margin and letting the world join her; it is an astute description of Peters’ own writing. It is also: so, so much fun.

The stories cohere around the idea of sisterhood. There is nothing trite about it: this is the bruising kind of relation that can only come about when you know someone’s hopes, fears, and dreams with utmost intimacy, and you might prey on and exploit them just as much as you might affirm or celebrate them. Rejecting the abrasive smoothing effect of neoliberalism on our relations with each other, which removes complexity and friction in favour of efficiency and automation, the stories in Stag Dance articulate visions of the responsibilities and obligations owed to kin.

While Peters’ ideas set the stories alight, they live in her observation. An acid trip on the frozen Colorado prairie in The Chaser is an all-time great piece of writing, taking us from beauty:

as the sun went down, a near mirror image of the sunset reflected upon the unbroken ice crust exactly as on a placid lake … I half expected ripples to spread out from our footsteps.

To horror and the protagonist’s realisation that “there was a dark place inside me. I had to be aware of the gravitational pull of that dark place … but never to look directly at the reality of it”. Peters illuminates those dark places that frighten us like the monsters under the bed, and reveals that far from hiding horror, they might contain possibility.

Gay rating: 5/5 for wall-to-wall trans characters, sex, relationships, themes.