BOOK REVIEW: PANGS BY JERRY WHEELER

Book review: Pangs by Jerry Wheeler

22/3/2022

HORROR BOOK REVIEW Pangs by Jerry L. Wheeler .png

Book review: Pangs by Jerry Wheeler
Publisher: Queer Space (Rebel Satori Press)
Link: https://rebelsatori.com/product/pangs/
Pub date: Sept. 23, 2021
Page count: 232
By Marshall Moore

Talent vampires. That’s what this book is about. I’ll put that front and center because, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s such a terrific concept that you’re allowed to approach the first page with a little anxiety. If the author gets it right, you’re in for a fun ride with (most likely) a helping of satire on the side. If they get it wrong, on the other hand, there will be twice the disappointment: it’s not just a failed story but a missed opportunity. Jerry Wheeler’s debut novel Pangs falls into the former, getting-it-right category.

Told from main talent-vamp Warner’s point of view, Pangs starts out as a sort of tug-of-war with another vampire for access to Wade, a young country musician endowed not only with once-in-a-generation talent but with smoldering good looks and a great physique. This second vampire, Seth, is a longtime frenemy of Warner’s: there has been conflict between them over the centuries, yet they maintain a certain mutual respect. The magnitude of Wade’s talent will be enough to sustain one of them for decades without actually damaging the young man and his potential career. Thus, the game begins, the two vampires posing as producers in order to keep him close at hand. However, there’s a lot more going on in Pangs than a supernatural tussle over possession of a budding musical genius who is yet to work out whether he prefers men or women in bed. There are different types of talent vampire, for one thing: some go after musicians; others are more literary. And one of Wheeler’s authorial gifts is in his layered characterizations. To an almost noirish extent, no one is quite who they seem. There are murderous agendas, and there is also a deftly handled undercurrent of regret and even anguish at times: Warner is not at entirely comfortable drawing sustenance by obliterating talent, because unlike the blooded victims of conventional vampires, his own victims go on living but are empty wrecks when he’s done with them.

Wheeler is well known as the editor of a number of anthologies, author of the collection Strawberries and Other Erotic Fruits, and founder of the LGBTQ-focused book-review website Out in Print. He has also worked as an editor for a number of independent presses over the years, and he maintains a professional editing practice. It only takes reading a couple of pages to ascertain what a confident and capable writer Wheeler is. His exposition has a quietly authoritative quality, an interlocking precision I don’t often see even in bestsellers from major publishing houses. Yet Wheeler is also clearly having fun here: he has the experience to know all the rules and conventions, and the chops to send the plot on unexpected-but-essential pivots that shouldn’t work but do.

I should mention a couple of things I kept noticing, and then acknowledge the Catch-22 in so doing: here and there, the dialogue became expositional, with the characters explaining things more for the reader’s benefit than their own. I also had the occasional qualm about the voice Wheeler used for these centuries-old vampires. On the one hand, well, yes, they were supposed to sound ancient, and did. But I’m not sure they needed to. Both of these choices make sense, depending on how you look at them: in the first case, Wheeler had some complex world-building to do and dispensed with it efficiently rather than mindlessly adhering to the “show, don’t tell” dictum writers are supposed to live and die by; in the second, he made an effective stylistic choice and deployed it consistently. The only reason I bring these two points up is to highlight the contrast with the strength of his own prose. And that’s the conundrum: when Wheeler is writing as Wheeler, he’s excellent, and these two choices read almost as if he doubted his own (considerable) abilities to pull these aspects of the story off in his own voice.

In the end, though, there’s a lot of fun to be had here. This isn’t a horror novel in the most traditional sense—these are sexy vampires in the Anne Rice tradition, but unlike Rice’s literary creations, Wheeler’s talent-vamps can have sex and often do—and the tension comes less from scares than from concern about what’s going to happen to a character you like. But this is very much the work of a writer who knows the horror genre well. There are nods to Anne Rice throughout, as well as to Stephen King, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, and even Lovecraft. In fact, this could almost be a long-lost Brite novel from before he moved away from horror and wrote Liquor and its sequels… which in itself is plenty of reason to justify tracking it down and checking it out.

Pangs
by Jerry L. Wheeler

"Cinematic and seductive from start to finish! A wholly unique addition to vampire mythology--one dripping with darkness and gay majick."-Tom Cardamone, author of the Lambda-award winning speculative novella Green Thumb and Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe

Unlike their blood brethren, Warner and Seth are vampires who subsist on talent. They have been enemies for centuries, competing to feed on artists with the most prodigious musical gifts, and country blues singer Wade Dixon is no exception. But the pursuit and capture of Dixon unleashes unexpected forces that carry these combatants from the earthly realm to a dangerous land of eternal night where they must work together or die alone.

"There's magic in the pages of Jerry L. Wheeler's Pangs, and it's not just the paranormal goings on that taunt, tease, and push his characters deeper into adventure. The prose enchants, exposing the reader to bleak wonders and radiant dread, while sparks of humor crackle through the narrative. With a charming and fresh voice, Pangs lures the reader from the intoxicating streets of New Orleans across a shimmering threshold into another, fantastical realm. The story offers the erotic and the horrific, the vicious and the sublime. It is entertaining in every way." - Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award and Bram Stoker Award winning author