Execution, Texas: 1987

by D. Travers Scott

In the small town of Execution, Texas, during the sweltering summer of 1987, seventeen-year-old high school senior Seeger King finds himself lost in a series of deep memories, tragic precognitive visions involving his father and stepmother, his own mother's millennial obsessions, his friendship with his volatile girlfriend, Cordelia, and his obsession with Kent, a sophomore wrestler seemingly bent on seducing him. While his friends escape into drugs, fantasy and the ovewrought music of Marc Almond, Seeger must decide who to love, what to believe, and what action to take. Under Texas's looming state of mind, Seeger must tear through a shattered collage of myth and memory, searching for a reliable reality upon which to anchor his adulthood.

Genres: LGBT

211 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1997

About the author

D. Travers Scott is author of Gay Men and Feminist Women in the Fight for Equality: What Did You Do During the Second Wave, Daddy? and Pathology and Technology: Killer Apps and Sick Users. He has also published two novels: the internationally acclaimed Execution, Texas: 1987 and One of These Things is not Like the Other, winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Mystery. His first story collection, Love Hard: Stories 1989-2009 was published in 2009 from Rebel Satori Press / Queer Mojo. He has a PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California and is currently Associate Professor of Communication at Clemson University.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

(slight corrections made in August 2024)

The best thing about this novel is the title - well it made me go to a bit of trouble to track down and acquire a copy without spending enormous amounts of money on having it shipped to the UK, perhaps the lack of any copies this side of the Atlantic should have suggested there might be a reason - but if you are going to use a title like this you need a novel that will live up to it and this one doesn't. As a hook for attracting readers it might have been a marketing person's wet dream but that is about it.

Really terrible books have inspired me to some of my best reviews - this novel didn't, in fact what I associate it with is terminal boredom - it is 200 odd pages but I had barely made it halfway before I was struggling to overcome an all pervasive ennui that just made me want to give up on everything. How could something so terminally mediocre and awful have ever been published? Well reading the acknowledgements I found a clue, amongst those name checked are not parents, family or teachers (they are only generically remembered) but ten prominent writers (there may be more I only recognised ten - and three of them provided 'puff' quotes on the back cover) and a variety of trendy groups, organizations and publications, and who had published excerpts from this novel.

I couldn't help feeling that what I was holding was a monument to networking and influence building. I couldn't help regret that Travers Scott had not spent more time on reading, even if only the works of the authors he so determinedly cultivated, and practising his craft. It also didn't surprise me to learn that 'bits' of the novel had appeared in numerous literary magazines, it was easy to pick them out - segments of clever writing all of which failed to come together as a whole.

Just in case you imagine I am some snooty European who knows nothing about the USA let me say that I have read other authors who have written of the midwest and of the southern USA and been moved and astounded by their work. Don't read this drivel read:

'Pryor Rendering' by Gary Reed, published the same year as this novel and a novel of incomparable beauty.

'Lake Overturn' by Vestal McIntyre

'Send Me' by Patrick Ryan

'Mother of Sorrows' by Richard McCann

These novels are so far ahead of Mr. D. Travers Scott's efforts that I wonder I am doing them a disservice in mentioning them within this review. If any of Scott's awfulness reflects back on them I will be mortified.

[Larry-bob Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has the totally wrong cover art. It should be an illustration by Andy Dog or more new wave decadence courtesy Leigh Bowery or Pierre et Gilles (de Rais.) Not some shirtless generic cornfield boy -- Texas aside, this book isn't Country and Western, it's Goth. Are the Poppy Brite fans who need to read this thing going to find it? In this instance of the gender ambiguous 1980s, a bisexual guy and his girlfriend and a guy he has a crush on roam around in the ending days of highschool as change is in the wings. I felt a bit cheated that there wasn't a hetero sex scene. Psychic flashes, crazy hippy mom, it falls in place like real life. Your parents may be hypocrites and too right wing but you still love them. Look back at snapshots which only catch half of your weekly changes of plumage. So daring but not half as daring as you'd become. Relive it here or for the first time.

[cj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got this from the library on a whim because I liked the title. I liked the book, as well! It had a nervy kind of energy and brilliantly drawn characters. Suspect I would have adored it if I had found it when I was fifteen. It takes place during a summer between graduation and starting college, and it does all read sort of like an interlude, despite some of the Big Stuff happening - a kind of scuzzy summer dream/nightmare with a lot of drugs and a Marc Almond soundtrack. Which is fun, I think; and I really do like the title.

[Nicholas George · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read like a novel-length version of one of those New Yorker stories that drip with superb prose but fall a bit short in the plot-and-story department. Not that there isn't a story here. The main character is 17-year-old Seeger, a sexually conflicted high school senior who is at a critical juncture in his life (as are most 17-year-olds). He wants to leave the godforsaken town of the book's title and travel to exciting New York; he has the hots for a boy at school but is dating quirky Cordelia (who suspects his sexual interests aren't primarily in her); his kooky free spirit mother is at some undisclosed location preparing for an apocalyptic event she's seen in visions; and Seeger is having ominous visions himself--of his weak, schoolteacher father Abe and his evangelical Christian second wife Rhonda dying in a bloody car crash. The characters are all rich with detail and things happen but after all is said in done I was left with a "What's the point?" reaction. Seeger comes across as something of a confused cypher; I wanted to see more of a resolution of his hopes and dreams rather than the one-door-closing-and-another-opening ending I was given.