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Waterspout
A struggling painter. Reckless desires. One last chance.
Struggling painter Jimmy Traywick is running out of options.
Job, apartment, boyfriend, and gallery in San Francisco—gone. Retreating to a quiet town across the Bay, he’s hoping for a fresh start when a charismatic insider offers a shot at the New York art world.
Desperate to seize the opportunity, he begins painting the new lovers and friends who have pulled him into their orbit, transforming passion and chaos into a raw new body of work.
But when secrets surface and relationships fracture, he discovers too late that inspiration can come at a devastating price.
As Jimmy embarks on a precarious odyssey, he’ll learn that—
- Ambition demands more than talent
- Intimacy blurs the line between love and exploitation
- Resentment poisons everything it touches
Because some storms don’t pass.
Some storms drag you under.
Pillion meets The Goldfinch in this dark literary novel about art, ambition, and the volatile people who become our muses.
Struggling painter Jimmy Traywick is running out of options.
Job, apartment, boyfriend, and gallery in San Francisco—gone. Retreating to a quiet town across the Bay, he’s hoping for a fresh start when a charismatic insider offers a shot at the New York art world.
Desperate to seize the opportunity, he begins painting the new lovers and friends who have pulled him into their orbit, transforming passion and chaos into a raw new body of work.
But when secrets surface and relationships fracture, he discovers too late that inspiration can come at a devastating price.
As Jimmy embarks on a precarious odyssey, he’ll learn that—
- Ambition demands more than talent
- Intimacy blurs the line between love and exploitation
- Resentment poisons everything it touches
Because some storms don’t pass.
Some storms drag you under.
Pillion meets The Goldfinch in this dark literary novel about art, ambition, and the volatile people who become our muses.
- GenresLiterary Fiction
278 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 14, 2026
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July 15, 2026
Everyone Wants to Be Seen Until Someone Else Owns the Frame
A review of “Waterspout,” Troy Ford’s unruly novel of queer desire, damaged art, and gallery-speed exploitation
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 14th, 2026
Damage is not the opposite of beauty in Troy Ford’s “Waterspout.” It is one of beauty’s more dangerous solvents. Jimmy Traywick, the young painter at the center of this crowded-beyond-comfort, sexually unscreened novel, begins by trying to make art out of other people. He ends by learning that other people can make saleable material out of him with gallery-speed efficiency. Everyone wants to be seen until the lighting changes, the label goes up, and someone else is standing there with the price list.
Even before Jimmy has a usable story, rumor has started arranging him. In the prologue, he appears years later at the posthumous birthday party of Paul Allenson, the writer-patron whose attention helped ignite his career and whose appetite helped complicate it. Jimmy is sober, marked, recognizable and not, standing near Paul’s notorious portrait like an exhibit that has wandered a few feet from its wall text. A journalist approaches him about finally telling the story of what happened in California five years earlier. What follows is that story after reputation has dried, cracked, and hardened into a handle other people can grab.
Much begins with a little public ruin so precisely nasty it feels ceremonial. Jimmy has lost his job, his apartment, his boyfriend, and the café wall that had passed, with touching municipal optimism, for an exhibition space. When he arrives at Coffee Lab to remove his unsold paintings, a barista insults him, he nearly makes a scene with a hammer, and one self-portrait lands near a used condom in the street. There are cleaner artist-origin fables. Ford has better bad manners.
Enter Paul Allenson, visiting from New York, who notices the work, buys a painting, commissions a portrait, and opens a door to rooms Jimmy cannot enter alone: dealers, contracts, labels, people who know when a glance can become an introduction and when an introduction can become a price. Ford is too alert to make Paul merely villainous. He is charming, vulgar, predatory, lonely, funny, classed, useful with strings already attached, and almost tender when tenderness costs him nothing. His help is real. So is the toll. “Waterspout” knows that exploitation often begins not as a threat but as praise arriving at exactly the wrong vulnerable moment.
The Albany chapters let Jimmy’s new arrangement of risks gather around him: landlord, garden, job, bar, hookup, patron, child-to-come, locked trunk. He moves across the Bay into a studio above Kitty, his eccentric landlady; starts work at Albany Art; drinks too much; answers app messages; attends Dee’s absurd, filthy, affectionate drag-banjo orbit; and tries to turn barroom charge into canvases. The publisher’s comparisons are useful mostly as coordinates: Adam Mars-Jones’s “Pillion” for erotic abasement, Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” for art as talisman, burden, and passport. Ford’s own social electricity is closer, at moments, to Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” after several martinis and one very bad text thread.
Rather than polish Jimmy into an ideal sufferer, Ford lets him remain funny, selfish, bright, cowardly, tender, reckless, and frequently awful. He is a talented painter and a poor steward of other people’s pain. He eroticizes danger before he understands it. He mistakes attention for care, degradation for intimacy, and fascination for insight. Jimmy is exploited, yes, but he also looks at other people with a painterly appetite before he has earned the right to know what he sees.
In Ramon and Oscar, that appetite becomes perilous. At first Jimmy reads them through sex, fantasy, composition, and imbalance: Ramon is older, disabled, magnetic, resentful; Oscar is huge, sweet, seemingly submissive, and available to Jimmy’s wrong private story. Then the truth drops through the floor. Oscar is seventeen. Ramon is not his lover but the man who raised him and abused him. Because the reader has looked through Jimmy’s desire first, the correction comes with an unpleasant aftertaste. We were in the room, too.
Perhaps the most revealing subplot involves Vic, the young non-binary coworker who becomes Jimmy’s friend, lover, eventual co-parent, and one of his subjects. Jimmy’s “V” paintings are meant, in his mind, as inquiry, tribute, daring. To Vic, they feel neatly injurious: a body and identity converted into a problem of form before trust has caught up. That quarrel is the book in miniature. “Waterspout” is not content to ask whether bad people exploit others. It asks how even sensitive, intelligent, injured people can turn looking into taking when art gives trespass a flattering vocabulary.
Alcohol moves through the book as family inheritance, sexual permission slip, and rehearsal for disappearance – weather Jimmy can pour. His mother Marlys introduces him to vodka martinis through her devotion to Roger Moore, and the ritual becomes one more family rite with a trapdoor beneath it. His father’s old rifle, kept in a cedar trunk, first appears in a scene of grotesque suicidal playacting. Later, it becomes catastrophe. Ford’s best foreshadowing has this quality: comic, indecent, almost throwaway, then suddenly not throwaway at all. A prop becomes a verdict; a room becomes a crime scene; a habit turns out to be inheritance with teeth.
Prose is the book’s engine; at its best it growls, and now and then it floods. Ford writes in a fast, profane, socially observant style that favors accumulation over austerity. Sentences gather detail the way a crowded bar gathers noise: insult, brand name, body part, memory, joke, bruise. The diction is camp-literate, blunt, erotic, and frequently very funny. The book is not tasteful, and thank heaven; a salad fork would be useless here. Still, the sentences sometimes keep too many burners lit high. Wit, filth, grief, desire, satire, and panic can crowd the same paragraph until emphasis loses elbow room.
As a stylist, Ford is strongest when comedy and injury occupy the same breath without canceling each other. Dee’s banjo-drag performances, Marlys’s cigarette-ash cruelty, Feo’s immense gentleness, the grubby poetry of bars and alleys and kitchens and studios – these passages give the book its pulse. The detail is briskly local: bad restaurant décor, app patter, garden gossip, Happy Meal melancholy, the precise smell of a night that should have ended three drinks earlier. Its sense of the ridiculous is not cosmetic. It is how the novel keeps despair from striking a pose.
Design is not ornament in “Waterspout”; it is the fight over who gets the story. The prologue and interview frame make the novel less a linear account of downfall and survival than a contest over who gets to narrate a life once that life has become famous for the wrong reasons. Young Jimmy lives through appetite, confusion, and avoidance. Older Jimmy speaks from sobriety and hindsight without pretending either one acquits him. The journalist’s presence adds a further unease: even testimony can be packaging. The frame moves the pressure from event to possession: not only what happened, but who gets the keys to the telling.
Its richest reversal arrives when the canvases Jimmy makes from other people become canvases made from him. His paintings emerge from the people around him: Paul, Ramon, Oscar, Vic, strangers, lovers, himself. After the shooting, the direction of extraction reverses. While Jimmy is hospitalized, Paul and the dealer Dexter Bash turn damaged, crime-scene-adjacent work into the “Broken Spirits” exhibition. Black house paint covers, alters, consecrates, and conceals. The show sells. The wound gets provenance. The artist, still recovering, has become legible.
More brutal still, the turn is not only cynical. Jimmy really does have talent. Paul really does recognize something. Dexter really does know what buyers will see. The paintings really do matter. The scandal matters too, and the book refuses to pretend otherwise. Appetite does not need to invent suffering in order to exploit it. It only has to recognize the moment when suffering can be framed, titled, priced, and poured into glasses at an opening.
In the book’s softer registers, staying alive becomes practical rather than saintly. Feo, the enormous Russian restaurateur who calls Jimmy “cricket,” could easily have been reduced to rescue furniture. Instead he is allowed warmth, desire, bluntness, and patience. Vic’s pregnancy opens a family plot that resists conventional smoothing. Dee, in drag and out, is comic ballast and moral witness, both ridiculous and indispensable. Even Kitty, the landlady with her garden and history, gives the book a vision of domestic space that is fragile precisely because it feels lived in. Tenderness here is not a glow. It is feeding, driving, waiting, staying.
The violence arrives with terrible logic, and also with the faint clank of every planted object locking into place. Ramon kills Oscar and Kitty, shoots Jimmy through the eye, grazes Vic, and then kills himself. The scene gathers the father’s rifle, Oscar’s abuse, Vic’s pregnancy, Jimmy’s studio, Ramon’s resentment, the gaze motif, and the future gallery scandal into one funnel of consequence. It works. It also strains. Ford wants every current to rise into the title’s waterspout, and they do, but the funneling can be felt as design as much as disaster.
Ramon is the clearest instance of the book’s cost. He is frightening, eroticized, disabled, resentful, alcoholic, abusive, paternal, and finally murderous. That is a great deal of burden for one character to carry. Ford sees the display case; he also edges Jimmy’s story toward it. That does not undo the achievement; it states the toll. “Waterspout” is happily allergic to restraint. Its power and its problem are both excess: too much heat, too much convergence, too much pressure after the sky has already made its point.
On balance, “Waterspout” is an 81/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars. That score belongs to a novel with heat, nerve, and a central exchange sharp enough to leave a mark, not to a perfectly governed one. It is well above merely competent because its voice has force and its ending changes the meaning of what came before. It is not higher because the book’s appetite sometimes outruns its discrimination. Ford keeps adding pressure after the glass has already begun to crack.
Part of the bargain is that “Waterspout” asks for tolerance without offering comfort as a reward. Its audience will need to accept a protagonist who does not audition for virtue. It will also need some steadiness around sexual material with no polite screen, substance abuse, degradation, suicidal ideation, and violence. Readers seeking romance-shaped queer fiction may be startled to find something darker, funnier, dirtier, and less consoling. Those who want fiction to keep its hands clean should probably not stand too close to Jimmy’s studio. Wet paint is among the milder hazards.
One of the novel’s subtler accomplishments is its sense of space. Apartments, bars, restaurants, galleries, stairwells, bathrooms, beds, alleys, and studios become systems of permission and trespass. Who has a key? Who can enter? Who is watched? Who is exposed? Who owns the wall? The studio begins as refuge, becomes workplace, sex room, gallery-in-waiting, scene of violence, and later the place Jimmy returns to paint. Survival, in Ford’s vision, does not mean being delivered into an untouched room. It means learning how to work inside the haunted one.
Under the scandal lies the sharper pressure: the trade in damage that can be made to look true. No topical banner needs to be nailed to the cover. Ford dramatizes the machinery: a young artist’s class position, sexuality, injury, talent, and notoriety become mutually reinforcing assets once the right people know how to describe them. Artists have always turned life into form. Patrons have always wanted access. Audiences have always been tempted by blood under varnish. “Waterspout” is at its best when mapping that appetite, not denouncing it from a safe distance.
Lurking beneath the luridness is a sturdier tenderness than the novel first promises. The title promises a storm, and the book delivers one, but what lingers is not only wreckage. It is Feo feeding people, Dee showing up, Vic negotiating a family outside inherited templates, Jimmy learning sobriety not as sainthood but as maintenance. The ending does not wash him clean. It gives him work, children, love, scars, money, guilt, and a studio full of ghosts. In other words, a life, which is always less tidy than a verdict and harder to frame.
Only at the end does the novel’s churn find its plainest shape. Jimmy has become successful, but that is not the point; he has survived, but even that is not enough. What matters is that he keeps painting in the room where survival became necessary. Ford leaves him there, not redeemed into calm but steadied into motion, looking with one eye toward a world that has already looked too greedily at him. From shore, “Waterspout” has shimmer: queer comedy, art-world intrigue, erotic candor, family improvisation, the glittering mess of a life becoming work. Farther out, the undertow becomes harder to ignore. The novel is overfull, sometimes overlit, occasionally too eager to aim every injury toward meaning. But it knows the risk inside its shimmer. It knows that a painting can be a rescue, a theft, a confession, a sales object, a memorial, and a trap.
Somewhere in the finished work, the water is still turning below the surface.
A review of “Waterspout,” Troy Ford’s unruly novel of queer desire, damaged art, and gallery-speed exploitation
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 14th, 2026
Damage is not the opposite of beauty in Troy Ford’s “Waterspout.” It is one of beauty’s more dangerous solvents. Jimmy Traywick, the young painter at the center of this crowded-beyond-comfort, sexually unscreened novel, begins by trying to make art out of other people. He ends by learning that other people can make saleable material out of him with gallery-speed efficiency. Everyone wants to be seen until the lighting changes, the label goes up, and someone else is standing there with the price list.
Even before Jimmy has a usable story, rumor has started arranging him. In the prologue, he appears years later at the posthumous birthday party of Paul Allenson, the writer-patron whose attention helped ignite his career and whose appetite helped complicate it. Jimmy is sober, marked, recognizable and not, standing near Paul’s notorious portrait like an exhibit that has wandered a few feet from its wall text. A journalist approaches him about finally telling the story of what happened in California five years earlier. What follows is that story after reputation has dried, cracked, and hardened into a handle other people can grab.
Much begins with a little public ruin so precisely nasty it feels ceremonial. Jimmy has lost his job, his apartment, his boyfriend, and the café wall that had passed, with touching municipal optimism, for an exhibition space. When he arrives at Coffee Lab to remove his unsold paintings, a barista insults him, he nearly makes a scene with a hammer, and one self-portrait lands near a used condom in the street. There are cleaner artist-origin fables. Ford has better bad manners.
Enter Paul Allenson, visiting from New York, who notices the work, buys a painting, commissions a portrait, and opens a door to rooms Jimmy cannot enter alone: dealers, contracts, labels, people who know when a glance can become an introduction and when an introduction can become a price. Ford is too alert to make Paul merely villainous. He is charming, vulgar, predatory, lonely, funny, classed, useful with strings already attached, and almost tender when tenderness costs him nothing. His help is real. So is the toll. “Waterspout” knows that exploitation often begins not as a threat but as praise arriving at exactly the wrong vulnerable moment.
The Albany chapters let Jimmy’s new arrangement of risks gather around him: landlord, garden, job, bar, hookup, patron, child-to-come, locked trunk. He moves across the Bay into a studio above Kitty, his eccentric landlady; starts work at Albany Art; drinks too much; answers app messages; attends Dee’s absurd, filthy, affectionate drag-banjo orbit; and tries to turn barroom charge into canvases. The publisher’s comparisons are useful mostly as coordinates: Adam Mars-Jones’s “Pillion” for erotic abasement, Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” for art as talisman, burden, and passport. Ford’s own social electricity is closer, at moments, to Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” after several martinis and one very bad text thread.
Rather than polish Jimmy into an ideal sufferer, Ford lets him remain funny, selfish, bright, cowardly, tender, reckless, and frequently awful. He is a talented painter and a poor steward of other people’s pain. He eroticizes danger before he understands it. He mistakes attention for care, degradation for intimacy, and fascination for insight. Jimmy is exploited, yes, but he also looks at other people with a painterly appetite before he has earned the right to know what he sees.
In Ramon and Oscar, that appetite becomes perilous. At first Jimmy reads them through sex, fantasy, composition, and imbalance: Ramon is older, disabled, magnetic, resentful; Oscar is huge, sweet, seemingly submissive, and available to Jimmy’s wrong private story. Then the truth drops through the floor. Oscar is seventeen. Ramon is not his lover but the man who raised him and abused him. Because the reader has looked through Jimmy’s desire first, the correction comes with an unpleasant aftertaste. We were in the room, too.
Perhaps the most revealing subplot involves Vic, the young non-binary coworker who becomes Jimmy’s friend, lover, eventual co-parent, and one of his subjects. Jimmy’s “V” paintings are meant, in his mind, as inquiry, tribute, daring. To Vic, they feel neatly injurious: a body and identity converted into a problem of form before trust has caught up. That quarrel is the book in miniature. “Waterspout” is not content to ask whether bad people exploit others. It asks how even sensitive, intelligent, injured people can turn looking into taking when art gives trespass a flattering vocabulary.
Alcohol moves through the book as family inheritance, sexual permission slip, and rehearsal for disappearance – weather Jimmy can pour. His mother Marlys introduces him to vodka martinis through her devotion to Roger Moore, and the ritual becomes one more family rite with a trapdoor beneath it. His father’s old rifle, kept in a cedar trunk, first appears in a scene of grotesque suicidal playacting. Later, it becomes catastrophe. Ford’s best foreshadowing has this quality: comic, indecent, almost throwaway, then suddenly not throwaway at all. A prop becomes a verdict; a room becomes a crime scene; a habit turns out to be inheritance with teeth.
Prose is the book’s engine; at its best it growls, and now and then it floods. Ford writes in a fast, profane, socially observant style that favors accumulation over austerity. Sentences gather detail the way a crowded bar gathers noise: insult, brand name, body part, memory, joke, bruise. The diction is camp-literate, blunt, erotic, and frequently very funny. The book is not tasteful, and thank heaven; a salad fork would be useless here. Still, the sentences sometimes keep too many burners lit high. Wit, filth, grief, desire, satire, and panic can crowd the same paragraph until emphasis loses elbow room.
As a stylist, Ford is strongest when comedy and injury occupy the same breath without canceling each other. Dee’s banjo-drag performances, Marlys’s cigarette-ash cruelty, Feo’s immense gentleness, the grubby poetry of bars and alleys and kitchens and studios – these passages give the book its pulse. The detail is briskly local: bad restaurant décor, app patter, garden gossip, Happy Meal melancholy, the precise smell of a night that should have ended three drinks earlier. Its sense of the ridiculous is not cosmetic. It is how the novel keeps despair from striking a pose.
Design is not ornament in “Waterspout”; it is the fight over who gets the story. The prologue and interview frame make the novel less a linear account of downfall and survival than a contest over who gets to narrate a life once that life has become famous for the wrong reasons. Young Jimmy lives through appetite, confusion, and avoidance. Older Jimmy speaks from sobriety and hindsight without pretending either one acquits him. The journalist’s presence adds a further unease: even testimony can be packaging. The frame moves the pressure from event to possession: not only what happened, but who gets the keys to the telling.
Its richest reversal arrives when the canvases Jimmy makes from other people become canvases made from him. His paintings emerge from the people around him: Paul, Ramon, Oscar, Vic, strangers, lovers, himself. After the shooting, the direction of extraction reverses. While Jimmy is hospitalized, Paul and the dealer Dexter Bash turn damaged, crime-scene-adjacent work into the “Broken Spirits” exhibition. Black house paint covers, alters, consecrates, and conceals. The show sells. The wound gets provenance. The artist, still recovering, has become legible.
More brutal still, the turn is not only cynical. Jimmy really does have talent. Paul really does recognize something. Dexter really does know what buyers will see. The paintings really do matter. The scandal matters too, and the book refuses to pretend otherwise. Appetite does not need to invent suffering in order to exploit it. It only has to recognize the moment when suffering can be framed, titled, priced, and poured into glasses at an opening.
In the book’s softer registers, staying alive becomes practical rather than saintly. Feo, the enormous Russian restaurateur who calls Jimmy “cricket,” could easily have been reduced to rescue furniture. Instead he is allowed warmth, desire, bluntness, and patience. Vic’s pregnancy opens a family plot that resists conventional smoothing. Dee, in drag and out, is comic ballast and moral witness, both ridiculous and indispensable. Even Kitty, the landlady with her garden and history, gives the book a vision of domestic space that is fragile precisely because it feels lived in. Tenderness here is not a glow. It is feeding, driving, waiting, staying.
The violence arrives with terrible logic, and also with the faint clank of every planted object locking into place. Ramon kills Oscar and Kitty, shoots Jimmy through the eye, grazes Vic, and then kills himself. The scene gathers the father’s rifle, Oscar’s abuse, Vic’s pregnancy, Jimmy’s studio, Ramon’s resentment, the gaze motif, and the future gallery scandal into one funnel of consequence. It works. It also strains. Ford wants every current to rise into the title’s waterspout, and they do, but the funneling can be felt as design as much as disaster.
Ramon is the clearest instance of the book’s cost. He is frightening, eroticized, disabled, resentful, alcoholic, abusive, paternal, and finally murderous. That is a great deal of burden for one character to carry. Ford sees the display case; he also edges Jimmy’s story toward it. That does not undo the achievement; it states the toll. “Waterspout” is happily allergic to restraint. Its power and its problem are both excess: too much heat, too much convergence, too much pressure after the sky has already made its point.
On balance, “Waterspout” is an 81/100, which translates to a Goodreads-compatible 4/5 stars. That score belongs to a novel with heat, nerve, and a central exchange sharp enough to leave a mark, not to a perfectly governed one. It is well above merely competent because its voice has force and its ending changes the meaning of what came before. It is not higher because the book’s appetite sometimes outruns its discrimination. Ford keeps adding pressure after the glass has already begun to crack.
Part of the bargain is that “Waterspout” asks for tolerance without offering comfort as a reward. Its audience will need to accept a protagonist who does not audition for virtue. It will also need some steadiness around sexual material with no polite screen, substance abuse, degradation, suicidal ideation, and violence. Readers seeking romance-shaped queer fiction may be startled to find something darker, funnier, dirtier, and less consoling. Those who want fiction to keep its hands clean should probably not stand too close to Jimmy’s studio. Wet paint is among the milder hazards.
One of the novel’s subtler accomplishments is its sense of space. Apartments, bars, restaurants, galleries, stairwells, bathrooms, beds, alleys, and studios become systems of permission and trespass. Who has a key? Who can enter? Who is watched? Who is exposed? Who owns the wall? The studio begins as refuge, becomes workplace, sex room, gallery-in-waiting, scene of violence, and later the place Jimmy returns to paint. Survival, in Ford’s vision, does not mean being delivered into an untouched room. It means learning how to work inside the haunted one.
Under the scandal lies the sharper pressure: the trade in damage that can be made to look true. No topical banner needs to be nailed to the cover. Ford dramatizes the machinery: a young artist’s class position, sexuality, injury, talent, and notoriety become mutually reinforcing assets once the right people know how to describe them. Artists have always turned life into form. Patrons have always wanted access. Audiences have always been tempted by blood under varnish. “Waterspout” is at its best when mapping that appetite, not denouncing it from a safe distance.
Lurking beneath the luridness is a sturdier tenderness than the novel first promises. The title promises a storm, and the book delivers one, but what lingers is not only wreckage. It is Feo feeding people, Dee showing up, Vic negotiating a family outside inherited templates, Jimmy learning sobriety not as sainthood but as maintenance. The ending does not wash him clean. It gives him work, children, love, scars, money, guilt, and a studio full of ghosts. In other words, a life, which is always less tidy than a verdict and harder to frame.
Only at the end does the novel’s churn find its plainest shape. Jimmy has become successful, but that is not the point; he has survived, but even that is not enough. What matters is that he keeps painting in the room where survival became necessary. Ford leaves him there, not redeemed into calm but steadied into motion, looking with one eye toward a world that has already looked too greedily at him. From shore, “Waterspout” has shimmer: queer comedy, art-world intrigue, erotic candor, family improvisation, the glittering mess of a life becoming work. Farther out, the undertow becomes harder to ignore. The novel is overfull, sometimes overlit, occasionally too eager to aim every injury toward meaning. But it knows the risk inside its shimmer. It knows that a painting can be a rescue, a theft, a confession, a sales object, a memorial, and a trap.
Somewhere in the finished work, the water is still turning below the surface.
August 14, 2026
WOW. For better or worse, I've never read anything like Waterspout. I hesitate to use the word addictive to describe the way it reads, but I really did have to take breaks at times to stop myself from burning through it. The unique, well-developed characters in this book go through some of the darkest shit but also experience truly heartwarming moments of community. A wild ride that had me alternately cackling and muttering "oh shit" from start to finish!
Thanks to the author for putting this story out into the world, and of course to the publisher for the ARC!
Thanks to the author for putting this story out into the world, and of course to the publisher for the ARC!
July 24, 2026
Boiling Waterspout down into a tidy two-sentence summary strikes me as impossible. Part thoughtful coming-of-age, part cozy slice of life, and part lurid telenovela, Troy Ford’s novel strolls through a community that includes users, manipulators, backstabbers, and even a tragic monster or two, but also artists and allies of every shape, size, skill, and sensibility. That sounds like too much for 300 pages, but perhaps the greatest achievement of Waterspout is that its sense of community never wavers. A notion of found family illuminates a pleasant, though sometimes thorny, path through a story packed with sex, alcohol, and moral quandaries. It’s a nourishing read and a surprisingly fun read that I stopped trying to put down entering its final act.
Ford’s protagonist, the emerging painter Jimmy Traywick, is a perfect docent for this colorful world. Jimmy, a gay artist searching for style and inspiration, didn’t grow up with affection and encouragement, but he doesn’t wear that hurt like a sandbag around his neck. Jimmy struggles to gain traction in the art world, and his romances ebb and flow with the Bay Area sunrise, but Jimmy knows what men he’s drawn to and the sex he likes. He pursues both without the suffocating shame heaped upon the previous generation.
At times, I found Jimmy’s sexual appetite harrowing. So often, he landed in precarious places, on the edge of a blackout among eager strangers, and I legitimately worried for him, flipping forward with unexpected urgency. But this is a world Jimmy knows intimately; acts that shock me center just another night for him. Though he does make mistakes, falling in with the occasional creep, the drama Ford engineers in Waterspout spills from navigating relationships and ambition, not sex. As the novel proceeds, sex becomes a window into Jimmy’s growth, too, representing maturation when surprising circumstances ask things of him he never would have considered. What he seeks then reflects his evolving desire for balance and attachment.
But Jimmy is merely one of the memorable figures in Waterspout. The cast of characters Ford brings to life is wider than his cast in Lamb, but nearly all possess nuance and dimension. Except for Jimmy’s bitter chain-smoking mother Marlys, nearly everyone else we meet hugs a letter in LGBTQ, but the diversity of personality, proclivity, and ethics within that group is vast. Art connoisseur Paul is slick and slimy, a gray fox with dollar signs in his eyes, but the burly restauranteur, Feo, is cuddly and protective, a source of stability and security. Dusty Davenport, a drag queen with a knack for parody songs, steals every scene, providing a delightful dose of comic relief and fierce affection that contrasts with young Oscar and haunted Ramon, the handyman tandem Jimmy hooks up with whose joint story gets no banjo accompaniment.
Perhaps my favorite character in the ensemble is Vic, a fellow artist and graphic designer who’s immediately smitten with Jimmy. Our protagonist paints them for a series he’s trying to sell to a dealer in New York, and Jimmy proudly shares those canvases with his muse afterward, expecting praise for a clever, knowing portrayal. I won’t spoil what happens, but I found Vic’s response—not to mention subsequent Jimmy’s—to be illuminating.
One of the reasons that scene about art and identity between Vic and Jimmy stood out to me owes to my own position as a reader of Waterspout. I have immeasurable respect and empathy for the community Ford builds his novel around, but like Jimmy, I have blindspots. I consume a lot of queer media—Girls Like Girls and Lilly and Dunkin were two of my previous three reads—but I’ve never before read anything as unencumbered as this novel. I anticipated another story drenched with tragedy, like Lamb, packed with woe and distress. But Waterspout, though tinged by the underlying sadness of a world that only reluctantly extends acceptance, struck me as remarkably optimistic. This isn’t Call Me By Your Name—because Jimmy isn’t a teenager nor a lovesick first-person narrator—but I finished Ford’s book heartened in the same way I did André Aciman’s. I closed it feeling…happy.
That’s an out-there thing to say about a novel that features as much violence, rough sex, swindling, and juicy, pulpy drama as Waterspout, but it was my takeaway. I didn’t cry during my read; I did chuckle, gulp, and cringe, and my eyes went wide many, many times as I read things on the page that sheltered-straight-me had never seen put in print. But I found warm contentment when it ended, my only tears surfacing when I reread the prologue and swelled with pride—for Jimmy the artist whose life I’d just seen unfold, yes, but also for Ford, who brought those experiences to life.
I had fun reading Waterspout in the same way I did Project Hail Mary, People We Meet on Vacation, and Axiom’s End earlier this year. That Ford can conjure a story, characters, and community that entertain and excite without skirting the realness of the uneven world all exist in marks a remarkable achievement.
Which is to say, Waterspout is a remarkable achievement.
Ford’s protagonist, the emerging painter Jimmy Traywick, is a perfect docent for this colorful world. Jimmy, a gay artist searching for style and inspiration, didn’t grow up with affection and encouragement, but he doesn’t wear that hurt like a sandbag around his neck. Jimmy struggles to gain traction in the art world, and his romances ebb and flow with the Bay Area sunrise, but Jimmy knows what men he’s drawn to and the sex he likes. He pursues both without the suffocating shame heaped upon the previous generation.
At times, I found Jimmy’s sexual appetite harrowing. So often, he landed in precarious places, on the edge of a blackout among eager strangers, and I legitimately worried for him, flipping forward with unexpected urgency. But this is a world Jimmy knows intimately; acts that shock me center just another night for him. Though he does make mistakes, falling in with the occasional creep, the drama Ford engineers in Waterspout spills from navigating relationships and ambition, not sex. As the novel proceeds, sex becomes a window into Jimmy’s growth, too, representing maturation when surprising circumstances ask things of him he never would have considered. What he seeks then reflects his evolving desire for balance and attachment.
But Jimmy is merely one of the memorable figures in Waterspout. The cast of characters Ford brings to life is wider than his cast in Lamb, but nearly all possess nuance and dimension. Except for Jimmy’s bitter chain-smoking mother Marlys, nearly everyone else we meet hugs a letter in LGBTQ, but the diversity of personality, proclivity, and ethics within that group is vast. Art connoisseur Paul is slick and slimy, a gray fox with dollar signs in his eyes, but the burly restauranteur, Feo, is cuddly and protective, a source of stability and security. Dusty Davenport, a drag queen with a knack for parody songs, steals every scene, providing a delightful dose of comic relief and fierce affection that contrasts with young Oscar and haunted Ramon, the handyman tandem Jimmy hooks up with whose joint story gets no banjo accompaniment.
Perhaps my favorite character in the ensemble is Vic, a fellow artist and graphic designer who’s immediately smitten with Jimmy. Our protagonist paints them for a series he’s trying to sell to a dealer in New York, and Jimmy proudly shares those canvases with his muse afterward, expecting praise for a clever, knowing portrayal. I won’t spoil what happens, but I found Vic’s response—not to mention subsequent Jimmy’s—to be illuminating.
One of the reasons that scene about art and identity between Vic and Jimmy stood out to me owes to my own position as a reader of Waterspout. I have immeasurable respect and empathy for the community Ford builds his novel around, but like Jimmy, I have blindspots. I consume a lot of queer media—Girls Like Girls and Lilly and Dunkin were two of my previous three reads—but I’ve never before read anything as unencumbered as this novel. I anticipated another story drenched with tragedy, like Lamb, packed with woe and distress. But Waterspout, though tinged by the underlying sadness of a world that only reluctantly extends acceptance, struck me as remarkably optimistic. This isn’t Call Me By Your Name—because Jimmy isn’t a teenager nor a lovesick first-person narrator—but I finished Ford’s book heartened in the same way I did André Aciman’s. I closed it feeling…happy.
That’s an out-there thing to say about a novel that features as much violence, rough sex, swindling, and juicy, pulpy drama as Waterspout, but it was my takeaway. I didn’t cry during my read; I did chuckle, gulp, and cringe, and my eyes went wide many, many times as I read things on the page that sheltered-straight-me had never seen put in print. But I found warm contentment when it ended, my only tears surfacing when I reread the prologue and swelled with pride—for Jimmy the artist whose life I’d just seen unfold, yes, but also for Ford, who brought those experiences to life.
I had fun reading Waterspout in the same way I did Project Hail Mary, People We Meet on Vacation, and Axiom’s End earlier this year. That Ford can conjure a story, characters, and community that entertain and excite without skirting the realness of the uneven world all exist in marks a remarkable achievement.
Which is to say, Waterspout is a remarkable achievement.
August 24, 2026
Waterspout is a profoundly moving, deeply complex story. Troy Ford's rendering of the misery of alcoholism is harrowing, and his mastery of flash-back/flash-forward invites his readers deep into the interior world of his protagonist. I was gripped from the get-go, and stopped in my tracks by the powerful landing.
July 23, 2026
Real Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: Pillion meets The Goldfinch in this dark literary novel about art, ambition, and the volatile people who become our muses.
Jimmy Traywick is running out of options. Job, apartment, boyfriend, and gallery in San Francisco—gone. Retreating to a quiet town across the Bay, he’s hoping for a fresh start when a charismatic insider offers a shot at the New York art world.
Desperate to seize the opportunity, he begins painting the new lovers and friends who have pulled him into their orbit, transforming passion and chaos into a raw new body of work.
But when secrets surface and relationships fracture, he discovers too late that inspiration can come at a devastating price.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Ambition's a cruel taskmaster. It forces people into actions they'd otherwise overthink their way out of, like trading sex for fame. It's a terrible price to pay for a a commodity that loses value when you lose interest. Money...assets...jewels...their value is more durable.
It doesn't stop people from making that bargain. For millennia people have traded sex for tangible items and intangible things like gods and power and fame/notoriety. Jimmy Traywick did that. It worked...until it didn't.
That's the thing about Faustian bargains: Wanting something badly enough to ignore your own misgivings about it is its own reward. Funny word to use, isn't it. Not funny-ha-ha but funny-hmmm. It's a bad reward, but a real one, to set and pursue a goal to the single-minded exclusion of doubt and fear. Jimmy, like other ambitious people, desires at a more intense level than most of us. He's not stupid, wait yes he is, he's not dumb because he sees Paul Allenson in 3D, shadows are there, they point to things that aren't open, aboveboard...and he takes the proffered bargain anyway.
It's a choice. A choice he made. Now we meet Jimmy in the aftermath. He still owns his choice, its mark is on him for good and ever. The story you're reading is the story of making that choice, choosing that fate knowing it will be costly but not what exactly the cost will be.
It's always fascinating and not a little enlightening to read stories about people who are more intense about their lives, their goals, the desires than we-the-reader are. We're looking in on a train wreck, watching the rescue operation be hit by flash floods, the director with the radio coordinating everything get hit by lightning, the ambulances fall into sinkholes on the way to the scene...and we-the-reader sit comfortably in our chair in the air conditioning thrilling to it all.
Ain't reading grand?
Author Ford is an unkind man with a depraved soul. Goddesses please bless him for showing it to us. Jimmy goes through the wringer and comes out flattened but never flat and featureless.The same is less true of those around him, or this would be five stars with a yodel of rapture. It's a tough balancing act, taking time away from our PoV guy to limn some depth for the supporting players. It's a thing all too often left undone. I don't think it was left undone here, Author Ford's not careless or unskilled. It was part and parcel of the choice to tell the story with its focus resolutely on Jimmy. It was a lot to put onto one character, and that one character was rather less nuanced than I'd've needed for him to be to sit back in my chair with the book open on my lap with a slightly dazed expression on my puss.
It's a really involving tale, once I opened it I didn't close it willingly; it never once bored me or made me wish to heck he'd get bloody on with it; but it explored depths I didn't find that deep, so it's not my idea of perfect.
It very much is perfectly entertaining and, not for nothing, really begging to have a movie draped over it. Get you one and see if I'm wrong.
The Publisher Says: Pillion meets The Goldfinch in this dark literary novel about art, ambition, and the volatile people who become our muses.
Jimmy Traywick is running out of options. Job, apartment, boyfriend, and gallery in San Francisco—gone. Retreating to a quiet town across the Bay, he’s hoping for a fresh start when a charismatic insider offers a shot at the New York art world.
Desperate to seize the opportunity, he begins painting the new lovers and friends who have pulled him into their orbit, transforming passion and chaos into a raw new body of work.
But when secrets surface and relationships fracture, he discovers too late that inspiration can come at a devastating price.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Ambition's a cruel taskmaster. It forces people into actions they'd otherwise overthink their way out of, like trading sex for fame. It's a terrible price to pay for a a commodity that loses value when you lose interest. Money...assets...jewels...their value is more durable.
It doesn't stop people from making that bargain. For millennia people have traded sex for tangible items and intangible things like gods and power and fame/notoriety. Jimmy Traywick did that. It worked...until it didn't.
That's the thing about Faustian bargains: Wanting something badly enough to ignore your own misgivings about it is its own reward. Funny word to use, isn't it. Not funny-ha-ha but funny-hmmm. It's a bad reward, but a real one, to set and pursue a goal to the single-minded exclusion of doubt and fear. Jimmy, like other ambitious people, desires at a more intense level than most of us. He's not stupid, wait yes he is, he's not dumb because he sees Paul Allenson in 3D, shadows are there, they point to things that aren't open, aboveboard...and he takes the proffered bargain anyway.
It's a choice. A choice he made. Now we meet Jimmy in the aftermath. He still owns his choice, its mark is on him for good and ever. The story you're reading is the story of making that choice, choosing that fate knowing it will be costly but not what exactly the cost will be.
It's always fascinating and not a little enlightening to read stories about people who are more intense about their lives, their goals, the desires than we-the-reader are. We're looking in on a train wreck, watching the rescue operation be hit by flash floods, the director with the radio coordinating everything get hit by lightning, the ambulances fall into sinkholes on the way to the scene...and we-the-reader sit comfortably in our chair in the air conditioning thrilling to it all.
Ain't reading grand?
Author Ford is an unkind man with a depraved soul. Goddesses please bless him for showing it to us. Jimmy goes through the wringer and comes out flattened but never flat and featureless.The same is less true of those around him, or this would be five stars with a yodel of rapture. It's a tough balancing act, taking time away from our PoV guy to limn some depth for the supporting players. It's a thing all too often left undone. I don't think it was left undone here, Author Ford's not careless or unskilled. It was part and parcel of the choice to tell the story with its focus resolutely on Jimmy. It was a lot to put onto one character, and that one character was rather less nuanced than I'd've needed for him to be to sit back in my chair with the book open on my lap with a slightly dazed expression on my puss.
It's a really involving tale, once I opened it I didn't close it willingly; it never once bored me or made me wish to heck he'd get bloody on with it; but it explored depths I didn't find that deep, so it's not my idea of perfect.
It very much is perfectly entertaining and, not for nothing, really begging to have a movie draped over it. Get you one and see if I'm wrong.
July 15, 2026
Full disclosure: Troy is a friend, and I interviewed him about this book on my show. Fuller disclosure: every word below would be here regardless.
The first thing to tell you about Waterspout is that it’s funny—barroom-funny, back-of-the-throat funny, the kind of funny that only survivors seem to have on tap. The second thing to tell you is why the funny is there. In this book, comedy is a flotation device. Everyone in it is treading water, and the ones who can still make you laugh are the ones who haven’t gone under yet.
Jimmy Traywick is twenty-four, five-foot-nothing, gifted, broke, and drinking himself smaller—a Fresno kid exiled from San Francisco to a walk-up in Albany, where the BART hums past and the neighbors downstairs will change his life twice. Around him, Ford builds one of the great supporting casts in recent queer fiction: Marlys, the mother whose telephone monologues (grout, gun buybacks, Roger Moore) are little arias of oblivious cruelty and stranger love; Dee—Dusty Davenport, the Banjo Queen—who steals every scene he’s in and turns out to be the book’s moral center in a platinum bouffant; Vic, Feo, Kitty, and Paul Allenson, the New York patron whose attention is the most expensive free thing Jimmy will ever accept.
The structure is the quiet masterstroke: the California narrative is interrupted, every so often, by interview transcripts from years later. You always know Jimmy survives something. You spend the whole novel finding out what, and what it costs—a waterspout is a column of sea that appears out of nowhere and can flatten a boat, and the title is a promise Ford keeps. In this way, it's reminiscent of "Lamb", Ford's earlier novel (which I also loved).
And here is the thing I keep circling back to as a gay man of a certain generation: this book holds two eras of gay life in one frame—the AIDS-shadowed world its elders survived and the app-era world Jimmy drinks his way through—and it refuses the easy villain at every turn. Addiction is the weather system of this novel. Nobody escapes it untouched, and nobody in it is reduced to it.
Near the end, Jimmy says art is like the sea: most people get a day at the beach, sailors learn the depths, and only those lost at sea really understand it. Ford has been out on that water. Waterspout is what he brought back.
Five stars. Read it, then hand it to someone.
The first thing to tell you about Waterspout is that it’s funny—barroom-funny, back-of-the-throat funny, the kind of funny that only survivors seem to have on tap. The second thing to tell you is why the funny is there. In this book, comedy is a flotation device. Everyone in it is treading water, and the ones who can still make you laugh are the ones who haven’t gone under yet.
Jimmy Traywick is twenty-four, five-foot-nothing, gifted, broke, and drinking himself smaller—a Fresno kid exiled from San Francisco to a walk-up in Albany, where the BART hums past and the neighbors downstairs will change his life twice. Around him, Ford builds one of the great supporting casts in recent queer fiction: Marlys, the mother whose telephone monologues (grout, gun buybacks, Roger Moore) are little arias of oblivious cruelty and stranger love; Dee—Dusty Davenport, the Banjo Queen—who steals every scene he’s in and turns out to be the book’s moral center in a platinum bouffant; Vic, Feo, Kitty, and Paul Allenson, the New York patron whose attention is the most expensive free thing Jimmy will ever accept.
The structure is the quiet masterstroke: the California narrative is interrupted, every so often, by interview transcripts from years later. You always know Jimmy survives something. You spend the whole novel finding out what, and what it costs—a waterspout is a column of sea that appears out of nowhere and can flatten a boat, and the title is a promise Ford keeps. In this way, it's reminiscent of "Lamb", Ford's earlier novel (which I also loved).
And here is the thing I keep circling back to as a gay man of a certain generation: this book holds two eras of gay life in one frame—the AIDS-shadowed world its elders survived and the app-era world Jimmy drinks his way through—and it refuses the easy villain at every turn. Addiction is the weather system of this novel. Nobody escapes it untouched, and nobody in it is reduced to it.
Near the end, Jimmy says art is like the sea: most people get a day at the beach, sailors learn the depths, and only those lost at sea really understand it. Ford has been out on that water. Waterspout is what he brought back.
Five stars. Read it, then hand it to someone.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 26, 2026
Waterspout is a vibrant and evocative portrait of a young queer artist at the early stages of his career. We follow Jimmy in his early twenties in San Francisco, with interview excerpts from later in his life complementing the narrative and giving further perspective. This framing device worked really well and added an interesting layer to Jimmy's story.
Ford doesn't shy away from the messier, darker corners of his characters' lives, exploring addiction, desire and identity. There were some pretty heavy moments, but I felt Ford tackled them expertly and they didn't feel superfluous.
Some of my favourite parts were the character interactions, particularly Jimmy's relationship with his mother and the way Ford explores their complicated relationship through interactions rather than explicit exposition.
My favourite element of the novel (other than the wise & enigmatic Dee) was Ford's use of art as a meaningful narrative device. We learn a great deal about Jimmy and his understanding of the people around him through the art he creates.
I would have loved to spend more time unpacking Paul, still trying to get my head around him! But there was still plenty to enjoy throughout the novel.
Overall i felt it was a clever and thoughtful story and i’m keen to check out more of Ford’s work.
Thankyou to Troy Ford and NetGalley for the ARC
Ford doesn't shy away from the messier, darker corners of his characters' lives, exploring addiction, desire and identity. There were some pretty heavy moments, but I felt Ford tackled them expertly and they didn't feel superfluous.
Some of my favourite parts were the character interactions, particularly Jimmy's relationship with his mother and the way Ford explores their complicated relationship through interactions rather than explicit exposition.
My favourite element of the novel (other than the wise & enigmatic Dee) was Ford's use of art as a meaningful narrative device. We learn a great deal about Jimmy and his understanding of the people around him through the art he creates.
I would have loved to spend more time unpacking Paul, still trying to get my head around him! But there was still plenty to enjoy throughout the novel.
Overall i felt it was a clever and thoughtful story and i’m keen to check out more of Ford’s work.
Thankyou to Troy Ford and NetGalley for the ARC
Review of advance copy
I jumped at the opportunity to read Waterspout. In a sea of MM romance/romantasies, it was refreshing (and a relieving) to find another author writing about a gay man navigating real life. The good, the bad, the ugly, the messy of it all. The story doesn’t shy away from sexual kinks and substance use; however, Jimmy’s indulgence in both is presented matter-of-factly. It’s just what he does. The cover art and title hint at one of Jimmy’s favorite activities—okay, maybe more like a scream—and it doesn’t take long for Troy Ford to deliver. But again, he’s not heavy-handed with it. It’s frank. It’s honest. But it’s not porn—it’s life. I appreciated the restraint.
The humor hits exactly where I needed it to. Lines like “If a bear dumps a twink under the golden arches, and nobody hears…?” made me laugh out loud. And Ladybugs’ Picnic was exactly the kind of deep-cut, Gen Z pop culture reference I love to read and write. (IYKYK)
The time shifts from the recent past, to the distant past, and then to an interview in the future was a bit jarring at first. Once I settled into the rhythm, it made sense and paid off in the end.
The humor hits exactly where I needed it to. Lines like “If a bear dumps a twink under the golden arches, and nobody hears…?” made me laugh out loud. And Ladybugs’ Picnic was exactly the kind of deep-cut, Gen Z pop culture reference I love to read and write. (IYKYK)
The time shifts from the recent past, to the distant past, and then to an interview in the future was a bit jarring at first. Once I settled into the rhythm, it made sense and paid off in the end.
Review of advance copy received from Author
I loved this! Basically, it's a candy-colored kaleidoscopic survey of the modern san francisco gay scene, presented through the eyes of one slutty twink. In the vein of Tales of the City and Queer as Folk: quite sexually frank without ever getting pornographic, but also fantastically lurid and soapy, especially in the second half, as the plot twists start to add up.
Mostly it's a glorious romp, but if this book can be said to have a message, it might be that there is nothing under the sun that can't be turned into a fetish, if you squint just right and put in a little elbow grease. Any body type, any bodily function, any personal history, any quirk of personality, any personal failing, any threat of personal danger or disaster -- what's stopping you from fucking your way through it all? Nothing but cowardice. Hallelujah!
Even when plot events turn quite dark, there's an irrepressible queer joy running through this narrative that had me rooting for all the characters, no matter their flaws or foibles.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Mostly it's a glorious romp, but if this book can be said to have a message, it might be that there is nothing under the sun that can't be turned into a fetish, if you squint just right and put in a little elbow grease. Any body type, any bodily function, any personal history, any quirk of personality, any personal failing, any threat of personal danger or disaster -- what's stopping you from fucking your way through it all? Nothing but cowardice. Hallelujah!
Even when plot events turn quite dark, there's an irrepressible queer joy running through this narrative that had me rooting for all the characters, no matter their flaws or foibles.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Review of advance copy received from Author
3.5** This one was a little out of my depth. While it was a decent book, it unfortunately wasn't the best for me. It all begins at a funeral, Jimmy Traywick a struggling painter chats up with a journalist.The deceased, Paul was Jimmy's "agent" & sometimes lover. Paul was a well known philanthropist & the journalist wants to do a piece on Jimmy & their life together. We delve into Jimmy's dark past & learn the meanings of his painting. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
August 6, 2026
Waterspout is so freaking good that I called in sick from work so I could stay home and read the whole thing in one riveting sitting.
Mr Troy Ford has created an eclectic mix of characters to populate this LGBTQ+ novel. And my-oh-my has he put his main character in some rather saucy-page-turning situations.
Much like his first novel Lamb, Ford has weaved beautiful prose with an engaging narrative that I just couldn’t put down.
Do yourself a favour and buy this book — NOW! :)
Mr Troy Ford has created an eclectic mix of characters to populate this LGBTQ+ novel. And my-oh-my has he put his main character in some rather saucy-page-turning situations.
Much like his first novel Lamb, Ford has weaved beautiful prose with an engaging narrative that I just couldn’t put down.
Do yourself a favour and buy this book — NOW! :)
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC.
While the story ultimately wasn't a perfect match for my personal reading preferences, I appreciated its thoughtful exploration of queer community in San Fransisco and the atmosphere it created. Readers who enjoy character-driven literary fiction with reflective themes will likely find a lot to appreciate here.
While the story ultimately wasn't a perfect match for my personal reading preferences, I appreciated its thoughtful exploration of queer community in San Fransisco and the atmosphere it created. Readers who enjoy character-driven literary fiction with reflective themes will likely find a lot to appreciate here.
August 27, 2026
(ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)
The San Francisco setting makes it easy to make comparisons to Tales of the City. There are elements in conversation with Tales of the City like found family, melodrama, and humor. The darker aspects of the story resonated more with me. The protagonist, Jimmy, is the type of character Dennis Cooper would tear apart (literally). A flawed character but not aggressively flawed. At times the character felt too naive.
I have conflicted feelings about it overall. I would oscillate between being pulled in and being repelled. I do not know if that was intentional or not. The author is definitely not trying to please everyone. I suspect there are plenty of people who would love what I hated and hate what I loved. I do think there was a strength in specificity. The dialogue also worked well for me when I read it in the fashion of a Cole Escola or a John Early. Parts felt like a perfect camp tone and then I would feel a little lost in what the tone was supposed to be. I also had such a good time in the darker and hornier moments that I was annoyed with some of the lighter found family aspects. It's not one note. Clearly, I wanted it to be something it wasn't.
The story is anchored with an interview device. It provides foreshadowing in the beginning but mostly devolves into exposition delivery by the end.
There were many moments I wanted more of. There were a few extended segments I would not have chosen if I had a choice.
I would read another one of his books... especially if it had darker promises.
The San Francisco setting makes it easy to make comparisons to Tales of the City. There are elements in conversation with Tales of the City like found family, melodrama, and humor. The darker aspects of the story resonated more with me. The protagonist, Jimmy, is the type of character Dennis Cooper would tear apart (literally). A flawed character but not aggressively flawed. At times the character felt too naive.
I have conflicted feelings about it overall. I would oscillate between being pulled in and being repelled. I do not know if that was intentional or not. The author is definitely not trying to please everyone. I suspect there are plenty of people who would love what I hated and hate what I loved. I do think there was a strength in specificity. The dialogue also worked well for me when I read it in the fashion of a Cole Escola or a John Early. Parts felt like a perfect camp tone and then I would feel a little lost in what the tone was supposed to be. I also had such a good time in the darker and hornier moments that I was annoyed with some of the lighter found family aspects. It's not one note. Clearly, I wanted it to be something it wasn't.
The story is anchored with an interview device. It provides foreshadowing in the beginning but mostly devolves into exposition delivery by the end.
There were many moments I wanted more of. There were a few extended segments I would not have chosen if I had a choice.
I would read another one of his books... especially if it had darker promises.
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