AJAX BELL

Author of the Queen City Boys books

Tag Archives: alex jeffers


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This book is a wonder

While travelling, when I should have been giving all my attention to my loved ones, I sat down for a bit and started reading That Door Is a Mischief by Alex Jeffers. I meant only to distract for an hour, to start something I could pick up before bed later, but instead I read the whole book, cover to cover, in a day, to the detriment of everything I should have been doing.

Jeffers_ThatDoor_hi-rezI don’t know if I can be objective about this book. Like all of Jeffers’ stories I was pulled in to a bubble universe that I never want to leave. The biggest tragedy is that I’m not reading this book anymore. It is not, like the fairyland in the story, a universe I can literally climb inside, through some magic door, and stay there forever. More’s the pity, I would happily live with Liam and his dads, Harry and their made family, in this beautiful bubble universe that Jeffers created.

The fairyness of this story is presented so matter-of-factly you think: yes of course there are fairies, no need to make a big deal about it. Not a delicate, sweet fantasy tale, the book is at times dark, dirty, and horrible, the way life is. The reality of fairy-Liam, particularly as a teenager is rough, uncomfortable, and awkward, yet I wouldn’t miss a minute of it.

TDIAM is a love story above all else. More than a romantic love story, it is a love-of-life story, love-of-family, made and chosen. The story’s presentation of family is spectacular, inclusive, the future we all hope for where sexuality is irrelevant to love, to family building, and everyone can make the choices they want.

How long will it take me to be ready to talk about the central love story in this book? I don’t know if I’ll ever be over it. I’m still tearing up with the enormity of it days later. It’s a gut-punch, but breathtakingly beautiful as well. It’ll just leave you entirely breathless, but it will feel like a that first glow of oxygen after you’ve had the wind knocked out of you–like the sun in your chest, huge, glowing, unfathomably sweet.

I have recently written my own book and the conclusion of that writing was emotionally devastating. Living in your own head, with your beloved characters, dreaming them, breathing them, but at some point you have to let them go, to be done. That end left me so lonely without them. Finishing reading TDIAM came close to that loneliness. Where will I be without these characters? There is a hole in my heart shaped like them. If I have any complaint about this book it is simply that it does not go on forever and that eventually I had to close it. I wondered if I would be able to handle the ending, the last chapter was intense and emotionally rough, but Jeffers came through, perfectly, so that now I can dream always that these boys are as happy as they made me.

I don’t know how to recommend this book. It is certainly supernatural fantasy, fairies, fairyland and all, but it felt so real. The characters come off the page, like people you know, fallible, damaged and exceptionally beautiful people, exposed and broken and still lovable just like your own friends. The sense of wonder Jeffers creates when people really see Liam, see the world around them differently, stuck with me. If you were going to read a fairy story anyway, read this one. If you only wanted a window into the lives of people so real you think you might pass them on the street, read this one. If you want to utterly lose yourself inside someone else’s massive world changing love, then read this book.


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Beautiful to a reader, better to a writer

Miniature of Istanbul (Historical Peninsula)I few weeks ago I stumbled across Alex Jeffers’ Tattooed Love Boys in the Wilde Stories 2013 collection. I love short stories and speculative fiction but I find often that I enjoy a story while reading it, but forget it not long after shutting the book. Tattooed Love Boys stuck with me. Sure, it was about tattoos, beautiful boys, angels (maybe), and gender switching, which are basically the things I love most. But the writing in this story set a mood and tone that was what made the story stick with me. It had a dreamy quality that made the reader, like the characters, not question the weirdness.

Immediately I went out and got Jeffers’ The Padishah’s Son and the Fox which is both delightful and disgusting. Telling an ‘erotic’ fairytale with all the gruesome darkness of true fairytales, with many unexpected turns the story left me completely satisfied as a reader. The storytelling is lovely, giving you a genuinely visceral response, both positive and negative.

Though wonderful neither of these stories had the length and depth for me to completely immerse myself in, to forget myself in. Luckily the next I picked up was The Abode of Bliss. I read it in two sittings, interrupted only by the need to interact with my family and to sleep. Given the chance I would have read it straight through. Though I was emotionally overwrought when I finished it, so maybe it’s best that I had time to reflect on it when I finished (easily done as I was on a plane).

3597187161_1dcfb09bc4_oThe Abode of Bliss by turns made me laugh and made me weep. Reading it I felt both lonely and loved, and was filled with longing, both sexual and romantic. The prose is poetic though not overblown or contrived. It is evocative and heartfelt but with an emotional distance, as if the story teller is remembering, that allows careful observation. But still I felt close enough to be pulled into the remembered emotions, to cheer and cry for Ziya. I felt entirely inside his world, inside him, a character made up only of a words on a page.

This is how I hope to write. Some day I want to be practiced enough to feel confident that I can tell stories this intense, this clearly crafted, stories that sound this true no matter how made up they are. Here’s the thing about storytelling: it’s all made up, even when it’s true. As far as I can tell, Jeffers isn’t Turkish, (he says in his end note that he’s never been there) but somehow he manages to utterly transport me to Turkey. And carry me there inside the mind of character who feels completely authentic, so fleshed out as to be entirely real, utterly believable.

Jeffers’ books have reminded me that writing what you know is shit advice, it always has been. If people only wrote what they know we’d never have Madame Bovary, or War and Peace, we certainly wouldn’t have Star Trek or Harry Potter.  My own stories, at this point, are merely dirty little tales, with characters hopefully polished enough that readers will love them so much that they feel what the characters feel. They, at their core, stories of young men finding a sense of community in eras before my time. They are stories about things I have no experience of, having never been a young man in the 1980s. But these are the stories I have to tell, the characters who live in my head. So I will do my best to do them justice.

Reading The Abode of Bliss was pure joy as a reader, exactly what I needed for my vacation, to be entirely transported out of my own world. As a reader I couldn’t ask for more out a book.  As a writer I’m thrilled to find books like this that inspire me to try and make my stories much better than they are now.  Books that encourage me to keep writing the stories that come to me. Stories of cities I have never lived in, of people I am not and do not know. I will sleep tonight dreaming if Ziya in Turkey. I will wake tomorrow ready to better practice my craft, to more skillfully use words to bring readers into the world I created.