Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders: An Improbable Community

by Samuel R. Delany

"Samuel R. Delany is not only one of the most profound and courageous writers at work today, he is a writer of seemingly limitless range."
––Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE HOURS

Like his legendary HOGG, THE MAD MAN, and the million-seller DHALGREN, Samuel R. Delany’s major new novel THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE NEST OF SPIDERS—explicit, poetic, and philosophical—propels readers into a rural, gay future—with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men.

"One of the best novels by anyone that I have read in quite a long time. Indeed, I would go so far as to say (as I already put it on Twitter) that it is the best English-language novel that I know of, of the 21st century so far.
"Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders tells the story of Eric Jeffers and his life partner Morgan 'Shit' Haskell. Eric is white, though he has been brought up mostly by his black stepfather; Shit is black, though he has been brought up mostly by his white father. We meet Eric and Shit when they first meet, as teenagers; and we follow them for seventy years, until extreme old age. The location is a kind of backwater, a (fictional) small town on the Georgia coast, with little going on economically except for the summer tourist trade. The novel starts more or less in the present, in 2007 when Eric is just a few days shy of his 17th birthday; and it ends in the 2080s, when Eric is in his nineties. To a degree, the novel is science-fictional; we hear of future cultural ferment (the 2030s sound a lot like a freer and more advanced 1960s), of changes in social mores (though homophobia hasn’t disappeared, same-sex marriages are legal everywhere, and pretty much taken for granted); of terrorist nuclear attacks, of colonies on the Moon and Mars, of gas-free automobiles, of new telepresence and virtual reality technologies, and so on. But all of this happens in the background, and only affects the main characters at second hand (as they live their lives in a backwater, and are largely unconcerned with contemporary media). The emphasis remains firmly on the uneventful happenings of everyday life."
--Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University

"A deeply affecting chronicle of a lifelong partnership, THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE NEST OF SPIDERS is by turns generous, unsparing and bursting with life (and sex) in all its difficult, rousing, primastic splendor. A truly staggering achievement, this moving novel underscores why Delany remains essential reading and why American letters would be the poorer without him."
--Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Science Fiction, LGBT, Speculative Fiction, Gay, Gay Fiction

818 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2011

About the author

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Reviews

[Robert Dunbar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sex: I'm doing it wrong.

[Larou]

I am a huge fan of Samuel R. Delany’s early Science Fiction novels, Nova and Dhalgren in particular, but up until now I had only ever ventured as far as Triton and never had read anything of his later work (although I do own a copy of most of it, I just had not gotten around to read any of it). With Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (his first novel in five years) just having been released, it seemed like a good start, and a nice complement to read his latest after having finished one of his earliest (The Fall of the Towers) only a few months ago.

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is markedly different from Delany’s early work (which is only to expected, considering that several decades have passed since then), the most surprising divergence being (for me at least) as how much of a comparatively subdued affair the later novel comes across. Books like Babel-17, Nova or The Einstein Intersection are like bright, shiny jewels that dazzle with the brilliance of Delany’s writing and vibrate with a sense of adventure. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, by contrast, although longer than those other novels put together (I was reading the Kindle version, but Amazon gives 804 pages for the paperback), appears on first sight almost pedestrian – there is no plot at all and the prose seems serviceable but not particularly impressive on first look. And while the new novel marks in some way a return of Delany to Science Fiction, that aspect remains weirdly understated – events begin in 2007 and then continue for about seventy years from there, but as a the novel takes place almost exclusively in a small rural Utopian community barely touched by greater events or even technological progress, the SFnal aspect only takes place at the margins of the narrative, momentous events are merely reported second hand by visitors or auctorial commentary, new technologies are only used by minor characters, often to some bewilderment of the protagonists.

Not at all understated, but very much in the reader’s face for much of the novel, is the other genre Delany has been writing in, namely pornography. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders has a lot of sex, and subastantial parts of it are likely to be unsavoury to many – in fact, the narrative seems explicitely designed to contain at least one thing for each individual reader that would gross him or her out. If snot-eating does not do it for you, Delany’s fetish for dirt might (which, something I found rather interesting, he consistently seems to associate with masculinity, while cleanliness is considered feminine), or the piss-drinking, or the bestiality, or the incest, or the liberal use of the n-word…. truly, there is something for everyone here.

This might sound as if reading the novel was a slog, and I have to admit that is what I was afraid of during the first few chapters – somewhat to my surprise, though, those fears turned out to be entirely unfounded. Yes, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is a novel that is entirely without a plot, and yes, a large part of it consists of very explicit sex scenes, many of them describing things in loving detail that I am at best indifferent about and at worst disgusted by… and yet, and yet…

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders grows on you, its sequence of everyday non-events and promiscuous sex scenes develops a certain lilting rhythm that lulls you and draws you in, until you find yourself hanging on every detail, accentuated by the dim, but intensely glowing light of the novel’s prose. Delany’s writing, though less flashy than in his early works, is still a marvel to behold, quite visceral when he describes a piece of a snot at a level of detail I do not think it has ever been described at before, and achingly beautiful when he describes the sun setting on the ocean. And as you read on, you find yourself actually enjoying the sex scenes even if you don’t share a single kink, you start feeling comfortable among the denizens of the Dump, and, most important of all, you come to like the novel’s weird, misfit protagonists, even to love them. And love, when everything is said and done, is what Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is all about.

The novel consists roughly of three parts (the transitions somewhat concealed by their slowly blending into each other) – youth / maturity / old age or sex / love/ death. Love is very much at its centre, the roughly seven decades it describes are the time its protagonist Eric Jeffers and his lover Morgan Haskell (commonly known as Shit) spend together as a couple. That is a very long time, and the book is very good at making the reader feel the way time flows, how it extends and contracts, and how Eric’s and Shit’s relationship changes through the years. It is doing a particularly excellent job at differentiating how the passing of time is experienced differently at various stages throughout life, having a tendency to go by faster as one ages. (And as an aside, here and in other cases Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders shows a depth and nuance of psychological insight that Delany’s earlier novels – that were more interested in exploring archetypes than in describing real humans – did not possess.)

Everything that happens in this novel is set in relation to, cast in the light of Eric’s and Shit’s love, and this is particularly important in regard to those elements that will appear revolting to most readers. I have read several reviews whose authors advise readers to hang on through the first, pornographic part of the novel in order to reap the rewards for their endurance in the form of emotional payoff during the second half (and in particular the ending, which it has to be said, is indeed one of the most moving pieces of literature you are ever likely to read). I do not think that is quite true, though, or rather it short-changes what this amazing novel does, which is to appropriate disgusting or otherwise questionable acts and even the hate speech of racial slurs, pulling them in and weaving them into the strands of a language of love and desire. The acts and words are given a new meaning, are transformed into expressions of deep affection when done or uttered in a context of profound love.

Then it is a measure of the strength of that love just how heterogenous the elements it incorporates are, and it takes a love that lasts over more than seventy years to transmute disgust into desire, hate into love. And of course it takes a great writer to be able to pull this off which Delany has proven himself once again to be with this novel. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders asks the reader to share in this language of love, but it does not put it as a demand, it rather extends it as an invitation, for among everything else this is a very gracious novel. It might also very well turn out to be one of the greatest love novels of the 21st century.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a tough book to read; I put this down many a time for something else, as the minutely-described sexual perversions of the main characters -- whose 70-year-long relationship is the lodestone of this novel -- simply become overwhelming. You really have to work at liking these guys ... And then when suddenly the years and decades begin to slip away for the characters, you get a glimpse of the immensity of Delany's project: what is a good life? How does one live it? How do you make a place for yourself in the world? And how do you convey the enormity, the breadth of a single life lived in the course of a work of fiction, let alone a couple and the entire community they are enmeshed in? By the end, you have lived and breathed the lives of Shit and Eric, so the inevitable ending packs an emotional force that leaves one reeling. Is this Delany's magnum opus? I think so; I think it will stand the test of time to become as great a landmark as Dhalgren. It is a perfect amalgamation of Delany's gay and SF sensibilities -- and, yes, this is an SF novel, every bit as political as Triton (but not as polemical, and far more humane).

This is Eric to Shit, one of the many extraordinary declarations of love, at 14553-59 of 20075 in the Kindle version:

You're too much of what I want - and what I always wanted. You look too much like I want a feller I live with to look like. You act too much like that feller. Your farts and your burps and your B.O. and your asshole when you ain't wiped yourself too good, and - hell, your damned snot - taste and smell too much like what I want it to taste and smell like. So do your damned feet - when you wear shoes long enough to work up a stink. And you treat me too much like I want to be treated. Your piss and your tonsils and your asshole all taste too much like his were supposed to taste like. That's cause you are ... him. You, I mean. That's all.

What an extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

[David M]

Just found this review, now I have to read it

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2012_...

That reminds me -- speaking of characters, it's difficult to empathize with a father and son named Dynamite and Shit who frequent bathhouses together and are lovers. Along with their abusive friend Black Bull and his sex partner whom he keeps in a collar and beats.

People have trouble relating to this sort of thing? LOL. I had no idea. Well, you know, I really have to stretch my empathy muscles to care much about the latest case of adultery between a distinguished older professor and his brilliant female grad student.

*
On second thought, having read about 10%, jesus christ, what's up with all these homos running around eating each others' cum and boogers and shit? I regret ever having in any way associated with these people.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah... Is there anything better in a reading experience: no emotional connection but cold respect for hard work on the author's part?

I mean to say that, just because something evidently took a lot of work, doesn't make it a good book. To some readers. Unfortunately.

Certainly to fill an 800 pg tome with little other than sex scenes sexy to no one takes, uh, a very particular yet dubiously practical skillset.

Spoilers from here on, maybe. I'm still typing.

Much like Dhalgren, this is one of Delany's efforts to give the reader the experience of being in a subculture. In Dhalgren, his characters live as if in a separate city, one in which communications from the outside come seemingly at random and without information, as if some second invisible city is overlaid over the same place, its citizens living in a different world, in the same place. Now how cool an effect in a novel does that sound? Almost too interesting to be as tedious as Dhalgren is! And that’s something that drove me to finish this book too, in a weird way: I was just in awe of how boring it was. Got all the way to pg 500 without skimming! You’ll never learn how impressive that is because hopefully you won’t read this book.

Hilariously, I read this thing Garth Risk Hallberg wrote on Dhalgren where he was interested in what about it was boring him. Come on, mate. And I don’t even think he worked it out. Or at least worked out that boring people is a very, very bad thing. Given how interminable City on Fire was!

So in this book, we see how two garbagemen miss out on the world at large. As time propels them into the future, they’re too busy fucking to notice who the president is, to summarise. So that’s basically all that happens.

“Hey did you read about that thing?”
“Nope! We were fucking!”
“Wow! A sculpture by this century’s greatest—”
“Sorry I was otherwise occupied while you learned what that is.”
“I think everyone remembers where their tongue was when that horrible future terrorist bombing happened.”
“I don’t, though you can presume it was in my boyfriend’s unwashed asshole. Would you like a description? So…”

Towards the end, it’s hinted at that the subculture in which the central lovers existed is studied by classrooms and so on, which leads to the occasional invite, but other than that, life for these two men basically consists of each other, and their unchanging quotidian. And since we read this story from their perspective, given how much they know themselves and what they enjoy, it is questionable how much outside culture has to offer them, or how often world events really affect them—apart from in one case where the incident was so large that it did. An interesting antidote to contemporary FOMO culture.

(And, Jesus: “Morgan Haskell” is purportedly the name of the protagonist’s lover, according to the back cover blurb—except he goes by “Shit” for the whole book. As if the ridiculous sexual descriptions or fantasies or planned sexual escapades or commentaries on past sexual encounters that took up every page weren’t ridiculous enough.)

Given Delany’s predilection, in other books, for techno-awe and garrulous pontification on subjects in disciplines that he himself has invented for the sake of his books (total genius when he wants to be), I appreciate the difficulty of this task: minimal outside notice-ification and only descriptions through the dialogue of blue collar workers? Impressive, but not the most interesting thing to read. And I guess it is an easier sci-fi task, lending itself to a more believable world, since you don't reveal your hand by over-inventing.

It might even be a metaphor for the writer’s life. All we ever see of writers is when they emerge from their nests to try and formulate words about their words, often failing. And then they’re back to it. Their unseen life is what life mostly is for them. Is that enough? Well, that���s the question of this book. A compelling question. Not 800 pgs compelling. Hey, but it could be infinitely compelling, depending on the words on those pages. In this case it’s only about 150 pgs compelling.

And considering that about 98% of this book is just sex or talking about it… How did you make that dull? For one, nothing in the book—neither its 98% nor its 2% was all that evocative. There wasn’t often a sense of smell for example (at least for anything I wanted to smell.) And scenes were set poorly.

Ugh, and the seeming ambivalence towards paedophilia and incest? Future classrooms filled with naked children? A good friend of mine explained to me that there's such a thing as being too open-minded. For Delany, as I picked up on in The Motion of Light in Water (a great book), his open-mindedness stems from growing up as a homosexual in an era when it was still seen as a mental illness. There was one largely good outcome of this on his writing: he thinks about concepts from first principles, almost as if there was no other thinking on a subject, drawing his own conclusions based on his own experience and studies. This is what contributes to his originality as a writer—but there are areas into which that thinking should not go. I don’t know how to say this in a non-condescending way, but, given how opinions on homosexuality have changed in Delany’s lifetime, how would he know what’s acceptable and what isn’t? You may also, in a more hands-off fashion, say that it’s his job to project that thinking into those taboo areas and offer them for the reader to consider without necessarily condoning anything that his narratives portray. I don’t quite agree.

So a man decides to work as a garbage man his whole life, and he’s in an open relationship with another garbage man and that man's father, all three of them engaging in sex at seemingly every opportunity, and with everyone else who'll have them (the poorer their personal hygiene, the more gratuitous their activities, the better. Detailed descriptions abound.) Is it possible that this might constitute the happiest life for those involved? Phew... If I'm really stretching myself (mentally)… Say, for argument’s sake, you squeeze a “Maybe” out of me on this point, this book then expects me, I think, to draw the following conclusions:
- Therefore we should judge everyone less about the way they live their lives
- What constitutes the best future may involve things that are utterly taboo today being commonplace, just as, perhaps, homosexuality once was
- Therefore no one is normal.
Well this is exactly the irritating “Look into this child’s innocent eyes and tell him about the fiscal policy you’re about to exact upon his poor parents!” style of political debate that’s so common nowadays. Is this story an exception or not? If so, does it prove the rule or break it? Inconclusive to the point of meaninglessness.

I kept going because I read that the last 30 pages made people cry. I didn’t feel connected to the central relationship in the book, so, no. I was more doing the same thing I did with Dhalgren, which was finishing it just to make sure I didn’t like it. There were some thoughts on old age towards the end. Like a handful of choice aphorisms. A payoff of sorts, but not big enough to constitute a novel of this size. I sat and talked to Juan afterwards with a little more concentration than usual, given this book’s reminder that, yes, it all comes to an end faster than you realise. But short stories have given me the same reminders much faster. And this could’ve been a novella for sure. A compelling one, read by many more people.

There are some comments in this book on Spinoza’s Ethics, that it can’t be understood on a first read but you can’t quit and go back until you’re done. I had to imagine Delany wrote that because he was referring to the book proper. It’s possible, but I doubt I’ll ever go back to this. I seriously can’t imagine anyone other than myself ever getting through this, firstly, and certainly not a second time, and never that they would enjoy either read.

As a character says in this book, the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom—but first you have to venture through the valley of the nest of spiders. Well, we stayed in one of those three domains for the whole damn book. Hint: it’s the one it says on the cover.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to say better things about this novel, because Delany is a hero of mine...but it's bad. Firstly, I understand the theoretical underpinnings--this is moral, theoretically sound, pornography. I get that Delany's point is that it is ridiculous for us to say it is okay for someone to lust after one body part and yet feel disgust about others. So he leans heavy on the extreme sex, playing on disgust to force us in to a situation where we have to see that. The problem is that the endless scenes of sex go from being titilating to tedious, and they never stop. Ultimately, this is the problem of a character like Morgan Haskell--after a while, the reader comes to recognize that Haskell has nothing useful to contribute to any scene he's in, and that all he ever does is initiate sex or try to provoke other characters with sexual language. I get that Haskell is supposed to represent a primal force in male sexuality, but I found myself dreading any scene he was in. Another major problem is that the evolution of the world around the two characters is part of the main point of the book...which is fine, except that Eric and Morgan pay so little attention to the world outside. The march of time becomes merely background noise rather than an interesting study for us as readers. Lastly, and most disappointingly, we've already seen this relationship in Delany's work before. Eric and Morgan are Marq Dyeth and Rat without any of the subtlety and interesting explorations of being-ness that Dyeth and Rat dealt with. I think that this novel would have been much, much better at a third of the length--cuts that would have been no problem, had he only kept 1 out of every 5 sex scenes. I wish I could recommend this, but I can't--go read The Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand, instead.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that takes porn serious, even after it stops being porn.

This is a book in which the main characters get everything they want, living largely outside of electoral politics, scientific developments (it's a sci-fi novel, but most of the sci-fi elements happen without the characters being directly affected by them), and economics (as their ways are basically paid for), until they grow old (most of them) and die. And the question is: What sort of life can you forge in a post-scarcity, post-want world? Especially a post-scarcity world that is not a cornucopia, that does not eternally provide you with more, more, more, but still offers you more than enough? What sort of novel can you have when there are essentially no obstacles to overcome and no conflict to drive the reader from one page to the next?

The answer seems to be, at first, an onslaught of hedonistic pleasures, but while that lasts for a while (perhaps quite a while), it's the sustained respect that emerges from these pleasures -- even the ones involving bodily waste, shame, or pain -- and their accessibility that provides an answer: It's really a novel about luxuriating in people and relationships, not unlike how porn is about luxuriating in sexual pleasures and excitements.

It's an interesting experiment, and one that feels like it's operating in a very different way from most novels; it's perhaps Delany's most successful pornographic novel (although they all take up the challenge of taking pornography seriously in such different ways, it's unfair to say).

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Viewed as an exercise, this is an extremely challenging one: Delany set himself the task of tracing a couple throughout their entire adult lives, during which time (seventy years) virtually nothing - in conventional plot terms - happens. They live inside a social experiment bankrolled by an offstage zillionaire, so their basic food/shelter/healthcare needs are provided for, and there's next to no conflict either within or from outside their community - practically everyone they meet is as improbably good-natured as they are. So what is there to do? It's sort of a spin on Freud's idea of sublimation - if people were allowed by society to have sex all day every day (with brief breaks for food and sleep), would they? (Spoiler alert: Delany's answer is, more or less, yes.) The book is structured so that the early years (starting from just before the couple meets) are described exhaustively, and the pace gradually accelerates, so by the time the characters are in their forties the years are flying by - in itself a comment on how aging changes our perception of time. Anyway, the book is more interesting to think about than it is to actually read, for two reasons alluded to above: 1) Exhaustive detail; and 2) No conflict.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

At 804 pages, this is easily the longest book I've ever read and it was sprawling, titillating, gloriously boring, tediously explicit, shocking and thoughtful and endearing. A history of the love of one interracial gay couple, their friends, their families, their sexual exploits (which are likely to challenge the biases of most readers), the book sprawls out to consider human nature, our place in the universe, what it means to live in the world, and how memory shapes and twists and changes our present circumstances. It's powerful stuff.

Reading it was truly an accumulated taste and experience--the book covers something like sixty years in the protagonist's lives and it's astonishing how Delany's prose style changes pace as the characters age and their own perceptions of time and life change accordingly. It's not for everyone--but it's a worthwhile read for those who are up to clambering into this big, messy, lovable tome. It will stay with me quite a while; of that I'm certain.

[Macartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. A beautiful love story. Sweeping and epic but also so simple and intimate. Brilliantly follows characters and a town over some 70 years, resulting in the best description and exploration of aging and gentrification/development I've ever come across. Graphic, in-your-face, unapologetic scenes of sex, sex, and more sex; the sheer volume and sustained presence of which has an effect of almost rewiring perceptions of sexual mores, of good and bad, of hot and not. An embodiment and exploration of theory, particularly philosophical theory, unlike any other fiction I've read, like only Delany does and can do: both ideas and Ideas underpin and guide this love and sex story. There are some flaws of course, but they are vastly outnumbered and almost trivial ultimately. This book only cements my previous opinion: Delany is a genius and the best living writer in the English language.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish this one--didn't make it much past 100 pages. I "get" that this is an amazing work in various ways, and I'm not put off by the sex at all; I also get that there is a payoff in later chapters. I am not willing to work that hard for the payoff. Maybe someday.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

I glanced through the beginning of this & it's awful. It might have a point, but I'm not going to wade through gross gay porn to find it. I don't mind sex in a novel if it has a point, but there didn't seem any point save just how gross he could be.

[retard chamber · Rating 5 out of 5]

To preface this I have to mention my introduction to Samuel R. Delany’s writing. In 2015 I began a personal journey into the world of transgressive/pornographic literature, something that, at the time, I linked to the part of me that has always been drawn to the grotesque side of art. My feelings towards de Sade and Sotos felt similar to my love of the August Underground and Vomit Gore trilogies or the harsh noise of Whitehouse or Sutcliffe Jugend. I was surrounding myself with sickness and perversion glorified for the sake of... what? A personal test maybe? I didn’t put much time into considering the “why,” I just knew I liked it nasty. At that time, one of the books at the top of every “Most Disturbing Books” list was Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg, which I quickly purchased and devoured. The pages of that book, written in the late ‘60s and unpublished until the ‘90s, were filled with the most irredeemable and ghoulish characters outside of Saló’s libertine elites. The book was vile, violent, hateful, and (to my impressionable, always-online mind) extremely problematic, filled with rape, pedophilia, graphic copro- and uro-philia, not to mention all the dick-cheese. I was repulsed, but I loved it and recommended it to anyone who would listen (few did). But like the rest of the filth I was consuming at the time, I never took a moment and considered what kept me so rapt in my reading, never wondered why the tragic glimpse into the life of Cocksucker and Hogg impressed me so, and (most tragically) never deigned to investigate the rest of Delany’s work.

Fast forward to 2020, my reading schedule has slackened as it tends to, most of my time in plague isolation is spent on Doordashed food and Nintendo Switch. Any reading I do is either comics or beating my head off of Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson, a great novel hasn’t passed through my life in years. During this time, through my observation of a certain fragrance-reviewing, reactionary rabble-rousing podcast, Samuel Delany once again came across my plate. This time it was something more current, and something that seemed to promise a bit more substance than the secretion-soaked haunted house of Hogg. This “something” was Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, a book that I now place among the absolute greatest works of art I have ever experienced.

When this book arrived in the mail I was intimidated, to say the least. Coming in at nearly 800 pages, and full of the graphic brand of homoeroticism that only Delany can deliver, this book is an undertaking. I won’t venture to explain the full scope of the story as that has been done to hell and back. I will simply say it is an epic journey into the future of America with the least socially acceptable gay couple imaginable, Shit Haskell and Eric Jeffers. In a time when the banner of the LGBT community is flown loud and proud by big business and government, mainstream stories of gay men and women in America seem to rarely differ from those of the straights. Which, if I may speak out of turn, translates to a tangible loss of the fire that made queer culture so earth-shatteringly important just 50~ years ago (fittingly when Hogg was originally penned). This book is not one of those stories, this book is as queer as anything has ever been and will not waste a moment trying to make you comfortable with its tastes.

The vast cast of characters of “Nest of Spiders” are almost all gay (the only exceptions being Eric’s parents, his mother’s boyfriend, a hateful old man, and a few randoms here and there) and almost all (at least in the first half) are constantly fucking each other. I say “fucking” because that’s what they say, there is no pretense to the relationships of the Dump’s citizens, no polite censorship of their desires. They want to fuck and suck and drink and eat each other’s shit and piss and snot. Which they do, nearly constantly, frequently in large groups of varying ages and races, sometimes in the middle of traveled roads, once on the altar of the Interdenominational Church that spreads anti-gay propaganda. They also use something the story’s largely behind-the-scenes benefactor, Robert Kyle, calls “culturally invested language.” This means that (much as in Hogg, and Dhalgren to a slightly lesser degree) all the black folks are “niggers” and all the whites “crackers,” these are used constantly and most frequently (though not always) as terms of endearment, with Eric from the beginning wishing he could be black, and Shit happily obliging and reassuring him and everyone else that “that nigger (Eric) is blacker then me!” This language is rarely used to demean anyone, and instead serves to level the playing field. By using “nigger” as merely a common feature of speech for both black and white folks, it loses it’s power to harm. So much so that when a character pops up who does use it in a negative way it just seems antiquated and limp (not to mention that one of the only characters who does this ends up being the sex slave of a disabled black man later in the story).

Another main transgression of this story, and the one that seems to scare the most people off, is all the piss-drinking and shit/snot-eating. The way this is used however is perhaps the most potent statement about the nature of real human love that this book makes, and after reading I can no longer see it something ugly or disgusting. Eric and Shit’s relationship starts on his first day in Diamond Harbor, when 16-year-old Eric stops off for a quick group-sex session in a truck stop restroom while his father waits in the car for him. It is in this restroom that he sees Shit for the first time, blows him (and Dynamite, the man we later discovered is Shit’s father), and witnesses him picking his nose and eating the snot he pulls out. This is established prior as a main kink of Eric’s, as well as his biggest shame, the thing everyone in his life has told him was abnormal and unseemly. Following this, hardly a day goes by that Shit and Eric don’t explore the insides of each other noses, but it still takes Eric years to break the compacted shame he has put on his desire. Though this feels like a gross-out tactic at first, the reasoning behind it is beautifully communicated by (illiterate, possibly mentally challenged) Shit at a later point as simply the kind of thing we should do for the people we love if they want it done.

The theme of accepting and embracing socially unacceptable activity among consenting parties comes up repeatedly through the story, and stands as what I see as the book’s grand statement on not only gay, but human rights. A hugely moving bonding moment involves the BDSM master of the community, Black Bull, bringing one of his “messages” to Dynamite to clue him in that Eric needs to be fed piss regularly in order to feel loved and accepted.

Another massive theme is the presence and importance of age-gap relationships in the gay community. Eric starts the story (as previously stated) at age 16, and from the beginning engages in frequent sexual activity with older-to-much-older men. The characters Jay and Mex also speak of their “puppies,” young men and boys that they take under their wings and expose to all manner of sexual exploration, so long as they are interested and consenting. These “puppies” included Shit, who speaks often of how he “loved getting his dick sucked when he was little,” and how “it was the only way to shut him up!” (These statements seem to have a touch of hyperbolic humor to them, though perhaps that is just my own discomfort manifesting). This theme seems to get glossed over or denigrated in other reviews I have read, which is simply unfair to the author. There is a clear message from Delany that the sexual exploration of young gay men is something that should be considered and accepted if one seeks to become truly “woke” about queer culture, and to my mind the animosity this is met with by most PC folks is indicative of how much the narrative has been hijacked since the early years of gay rights. The closest thing to a mainstream expression of this tenet in recent memory is the disturbing image of Armie Hammer eating Timothée Chalamet’s cum-peach, though the age gap in Call Me by Your Name is also largely ignored/explained away. At any rate, if you’re ever going to take the red pill on that topic, “Nest of Spiders” will be the work that washes it down.

This level of transgressive, pornographic activity persists throughout the story, much as it does through Hogg, but it quickly becomes apparent that the intent is not to shock but to show the variety of ways that people can and do express their love. This led me to a realization about why I had loved that earlier, uglier work so much. Hogg was a work of truth (albeit a less endearing, far more nihilistic version), the truth of Delany’s experience as a gay black man in society and the repression and misunderstanding he has experienced. It is not disgusting; it is beautiful and poignant and makes Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders the absolute powerhouse it is. As a straight, fairly vanilla man, nothing about this book is overtly erotic to me, but the passion with which Delany pens these scenes is absolutely conveyed and hits like a truck.

In addition to being a “pornutopic” epic, “Nest of Spiders” is also a prosaic work of speculative science fiction. A feature that, were it not referenced on the back cover, would not become apparent until well into the book. The first half of the story takes place between 2007-2012~, with the lives of the young protagonists drifting lackadaisically by in the way they do for most young people. Around the halfway mark, however, we see a small jump into the future, and with increasing frequency we see more and more jumps, farther and farther ahead. We get a brief chapter outlining the Three Bombs catastrophe of the “Wonder Decade” of the ‘30s, wherein bombs are set off in California and India (Hollywood and Bollywood, respectively. Wonder why those were targeted...), with a third recovered and defused in Brazil. This happens in a decade that sees the rise of female presidents and the beginning of a new sexual liberation movement, as well as the starting growth of a lesbian colony off the Georgia Coast. The colony itself built by the community with the use of new nanotechnology that makes it as simple as Lego blocks. This all plays out in magnificent fashion, as Delany’s sci-fi always does, but in truth it is merely a backdrop for the growth in love and understanding between the protagonists.

Throughout all of this utopian futurism, women and girls start wearing shirts with holes cut for their breasts, the new sexual liberation movement is in full swing and society seems to be seeing actual progress in the arena of acceptance, but the increasingly antiquated relationship between the rapidly aging Shit and Eric and their peers at the Dump still has to be partially obscured for risk of upsetting someone. Before they move to the island of Gilead to serve as handymen for the lesbian colony, the pornographic theater they run (which serves as a bastion for open gay sex of all varieties) is shut down numerous times out of prejudice against the libertine activities within. The most clear example, however, of this disconnect between the reality of queer relationships and the mainstream-accepted queer culture comes late in the story when the now 80+ year old couple agrees to be interviewed by a 20-something lesbian sociology student on the island. During these interview sessions Eric has to defend himself and his old friends from accusations of satanic practices and evil magic at-play in the Dump community of the 2010’s (a myth propagated by one of the few straight characters who as a child, at a funeral on the island, saw the frightening chimerical statue that serves as the story’s physical expression of its values and themes and a picture of Dynamite sodomizing a pig when he woke up from a nap and explored the old house the wake was being held in). But more importantly, Eric still feels the need, 70 years into his relationship with Shit, to hide the fact that Shit’s father was also a partner of theirs, and that both of them engaged in wild sexual activity as minors. The judgment and disdain the young woman allows to show through in their conversations stands as a tragic reminder that, although society moves ever-forward and we self-congratulate for our growing acceptance, some people and their desires will always remain fringe in mainstream culture.

I take this as the ultimate statement of this massive and beautiful novel: love is and always will be the most important and powerful force of the human race. We may advance our technology to unseen heights and raise our social consciousness to a point where we no longer see nudity as an explicitly sexualized thing, but without love at the core of our ventures all of that growth would ring hollow and superficial. The love between Shit and Eric and Dynamite and Jay and Mex and Black Bull and Whiteboy and all the rest, with all of its graphic and uncomfortable moments, is the heart beating at the center of this story. You can choose to look over the ugly pieces or explain it away in whatever manner serves to keep your comfort zone intact, but I believe if you read this book and truly allow its messages into your heart and mind, you will not be able to deny that love. It will build you up, it will destroy you, it will shock you and make you sob, and you will never be the same. This is a beautiful book, this is my favorite book, please read it with an open mind and I hope it will become yours as well.

[Joey Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's funny that goodreads ate my long review of this TWICE, because in some ways, I'm really undecided about what to write about this 800 page filthy faggot porno love story about getting old.

So here are some thoughts:

* So much snot. Gross. Not nearly as much scat as other reviews would make you think.

* If you liked The Mad Man you need to read this. And to know that it's a bit like a riff on the section where Leaky describes his childhood. Yes every second word is "nigger" and there is loads of incest and piss guzzling. And yes people have sex with dogs.

* I don't quite understand the tone of the first few hundred pages, it reminded me of YA fiction - so many lessons to be learned. SO DIDACTIC.

* I need to think about what Delany is saying about community and ageing and the future a lot more.

* If you want to read a book where someone creates a community just for homeless black faggots in the South of the US, where there is a ton of really dirty sex then I'm not sure what else you can read. I love the little utopia Delany creates, where a philanthropist buys the truck stop so people can keep having sex in the toilets there (and all the rest). It's a bit like he's fictionalising the public sex utopia he theorises in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

* I'm still confused as to why there is SO much detail about everything. It drove me a bit mad to read endless sentences about how the car was being repaired, the coleslaw was being made, the backpack was being packed with soldering rods etc etc. Is this a sci-fi thing?

* I really loved the 50 year long love story in this and I loved the way he makes sex a central part of a social world. Yup I cried at the end. Yup I loved this book.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll preface this by saying that, as a gay man with certain…piggy proclivities, I found about 3/4 of the sexual perversions in the book to be titillating, and the other 1/4 to be breaching every single “hard limit” I have.

I wouldn’t recommend it for the squeamish or for most folks really, but it sure did do a number on me, and I won’t stop thinking about it for a while.

Such a fascinating examination of aging, memory, impermanence, the passage of time, queer community, and non-monogamy.

Most of all, I think has a lot to say about what it means to have lived a “good life”, all told through the eyes of an extremely perverse, taboo, communicative, and healthy non-monogamous gay couple. We’re watching time advance from the present to the far future through the eyes of luddite homos who mostly ignore technological advances and have chosen a simple-yet-abundant life. The first half of the book covering the couple’s late teens and 20s, and the second half covering the rest of their lives at increasingly rapid pace is a sad and poignant reminder of time, mortality, and aging

I loved it - you probably shouldn’t read it.

[Vladimir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially disturbing, eventually illuminating. Though vastly different from Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, TVNS is Delany's closest novel to the 1984 masterpiece. It is also his best long work since then.

[Jo Walton]

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/05/a-go...

[Akiva]

Rating this book is a meaningless exercise. It is appalling, astonishing, stomach-churning, beautiful, often in rapid succession. It is designed to push your buttons and make you think about what you consider taboo. And worse(?) than that, parts of it are quite tedious.

I almost gave up half way through. The first half especially is largely an endless sequence of detailed descriptions of the characters engaging in sexual perversions. And Delany of course is a genius level stylist so they are presented vividly. Everything is presented happily and consensually, and while some of what set off my gag reflex is probably harmless, there is, among the many things I prefer not to dwell on, pedophiliac incest.

But as the book goes and the characters age and it moves from the present into the future, the volume of the perverse goes down and it becomes a quiet portrait of two quiet people in love that time is passing by. I didn't think it was possible for this frankly gross book about such unambitious people to become so sweet and sad. I don't know if the whole book needed to be what it was to tell that story (okay, it definitely did not, ugh), but there's something to be said for the sheer degree of difficulty Delany has given himself and the project of examining how taboos change.

I can't in good conscience tell anyone to read this book, even more than I already don't recommend Dhalgren, but I'm glad I read it and for better and worse, I think it will stick with me.

[Rachel Grey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Delaney book I've ever successfully finished, and I think it will be my last, because I think he finally did something he's been trying to do for a long time and I am now 100% done. That said, yes, I'm glad I read it. (Masochism, anyone?) Yes. Fine. I'm glad I slogged through the hundreds of pages of ghastly booger-eating sex with its long, long descriptions of head cheese and salt and armpit stench and all the rest. I wish Eric hadn't been a young man for quite so long... half the damn book!... but once the acceleration finally begins, it's a ride that only gets better. In the end -- well, there is only one possible end for a lifelong relationship, and the reader feels it in their soul despite the sheer amount of work it takes to BECOME invested in these characters. Or, of course, possibly because of that work. Authors know as well as anyone that we tend to rationalize what we do, and that effort spent on someone will generally lead us to care about them.

I appreciate Delaney's point regarding gross sex; what do the specific activities matter, in the presence of love and enthusiasm, when the relationships between people are the real point? Part of me petulantly wishes he could have gotten it across with fewer repetitive, crusty examples of the specific activities, but maybe he couldn't have. Certainly, now that it's over, I'm willing to sit with the notion that it may have been necessary. It's clear to me that we needed the long, slow beginning in order to viscerally feel the acceleration, the faster and faster flow of time that the characters themselves remark upon. (Again, did it have to be that slow? Maybe...)

The story is utopian in that the basic needs of the main characters are more or less met throughout the book, although they live extremely simply; and in that technology advances and humanity seems to probably be moving in the direction of more tolerance socially (while exploring more of the solar system) as time goes along, although Eric and Shit ignore most of this and it simply happens around them. Bad things do happen along the way though. And I disagree with some other reviewer who notes a lack of conflict; somehow I perceived plenty of conflict, though the tensions ebb and flow and come from different directions over time. Much of it was the characters against themselves. And some of it, admittedly, was me trying to figure out how Eric stays with Shit despite Shit's infuriating refusal to learn to read.

I also appreciated the characters' (extremely raw, but sincere) treatment of ethics in sex. This ranged from sexual health -- as AIDS testing and condom use was normalized, even eroticized -- to whether it's possible to have ethical sex with children, with animals, with one's own father. These are thorny topics that take incredible bravery and, perhaps, spare time, to tackle. And Delaney's characters do it, with some very different perspectives in display across genders and generations. This is even before getting into the tamer and easier subjects, like how to carry on with an open relationship while keeping one's primary life partner happy. (It's near the end, and on these topics, that Shit finally brings intelligent insights to a few conversations.)

As for the writing, well. Prepare to swing back and forth between simple descriptions of unwashed body parts and then, without warning, "October’s breeze whispered in the nearer, then the further grasses."

I learned more about Spinoza than I expected, which was rather lovely, and I legitimately hope the 2030s really are a Wonder Decade in which there are many advances and women begin to go around topless. Read this book if you, like me, have met Chip Delaney in person and liked him very much, and want to ponder sex and mortality for a while.

[Restfulsimulation · Rating 5 out of 5]

“On the boat, shoulder-to-shoulder, they leaned together. Somewhere at the indistinguishable horizon, in minutes the sun was due to seep across the sea.”

[Sidney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I am only 64 pages into this book but I feel so many mixed emotions about this piece of literature that I HAVE to write this review right now, from a hotel room in Philidelphia, a city in which I do not live at the moment.
About 5 hours ago I wandered into the Penn campus and just so happened to saunter into their bookstore. I found a section labeled "$1 books" and this one caught my eye. I read the back. Maybe I didn't read into it enough but my first impression was this book is about gay life in the 2000s. As an LGBT person who was alive in the 2000s, this interested me. Boy was I wrong.

This book is about a 17 year old boy "discovering his sexuality", and by that I mean he's been participating in highly perverted acts with older men. When I say "perverted acts" I do not mean just sexual relations, I mean incredibly unsanitary, unsafe, and honestly disgusting at times sex acts. This book is, from what I've read, 50% or more incomprehensible graphic unsanitary sex . If you're into that, this book is for you. I am not. I found it pretty disgusting.

I am by no means a literary scholar but in my opinion this book could be classified as a coming of age story, where the main character has mixed feelings about his sexuality. He doesn't want to consider himself gay, because that word for him aligns with more feminine roles and "bitchy" behavior, which he isn't into.

Now am I going to finish this book? I don't know. But here's my reasoning for giving it 3 stars instead of 1:

1. I found this in the PENN BOOKSTORE. This is an ivy league school affiliated book apparently. There's gotta be something I'm missing.

2. This book has recieved multiple awards, which is beyond my comprehension, and
3. The writer is apparently a sci-fi writer, and I've heard this book is a sci-fi book. How? I have no god damn idea . But I want to find out.

Overall this book is possibly, and excuse my French, the most fucked up piece of literature I have ever personally read. Do I recommend it? Well, unless you have a fetish for excrement and general filth, no. I don't. Maybe I'm missing something here, maybe a point is trying to be made, but I just don't know. I'm going to sell this book after I finish it, if I ever finish it, which honestly I don't know if I will. You're welcome. Momento Mori.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

In simple terms, one theory for what seems to be the acceleration of time over the progression of life is that time itself tightens, in mathematical proportions, to the total span lived: a decade to a twenty-year-old is a significant chunk of their life, and thus slower than the same decade to a person of sixty. Delany’s large and insanely powerful novel drives this theory home.

A teenager, moving from Atlanta to Diamond Harbour, on the Georgia Coast, has a crazy encounter with nearly every character in the novel, in the toilet of a truck stop, begins to settle into his new life, and soon falls in love. The story of Eric and Shit, and of the other men who live in The Dump-- an area established by a rich, black, gay philanthropist, for the similar-minded to inhabit-- spans the boys' first meeting in the back of Turpens and picks up steam, moving faster and faster as the pair live, work, and fuck their way into the future. Because this is a Delany book, the sentences are astounding. Power dynamics, food, economy, race, memory, and gender concerns all weave, with a high, benevolent intelligence, throughout the book. And, because this is a Delany book, the huge amounts of sex (diminishing, as time speeds up, as sex does), is primarily gay, with predilections that can stop, I’d imagine, many people in their tracks. Valley of Spiders goes beyond the scope of our species, beyond our guidelines of appropriate ages. There’s gallons of piss and lots of snot. There’s incest. And there’s joy and belonging in a community of support and generous love.

The first half of the book details a languid summer; the second tries to reconcile where that summer’s gone, and how did it get twenty years, thirty years, sixty years into the past. The scenes of the characters in their old age are harrowing. By then, our world has become Delany's postulation of a future, which is a treat for anyone who, like me, grew up with Nova, Triton, and all his other gems percolating around in their head.

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is the best book I’ve read in ages. There are lives within, the frailty and laughter, the sex, the loss, and the mortality. Just fucking great.

[Gareth Schweitzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very long, very readable book. Delaney’s “predictions” for the near future are of interest. As is his focus on Spinoza’s Ethics.

It is essentially a story of a life long partnership of two promiscuous, uneducated, rural gay men and their “utopian” community, initially set up by a black gay philanthropist to support poor gay black men.

One of the more striking elements in the book is that they live very uncomplicated lives, and only when they are older and ”less active “ are we party to some of their inner struggles and conflict.

Delaney seems to be presenting a kind of benign “ideal” where only death is a real threat.

Is a modest rural life, detached from the vagaries of societal change within an “ideal”, supportive community and an emphasis on the physical, the way to go?

In line with the body of Delaney’s work, large tranches of the book are to do with gay sex. Incest, bestiality, S&M, coprophagia, anasteemaphilia and gerontophilia amongst others are addressed.

The nature of these and the emotional impact on participants is not explored in great detail other than preference, and that there are several long term relationships here which are stable and loving.

And it is this element of down playing the sensational that pervades the novel... the majority of characters lead quiet, peaceful and uneventful lives.

If you are not phased by a Sadean preoccupation with gay sexual practices, this is an interesting read.

[Cpt Skyhawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, if you're looking for a "traditional" Delany SF story, this ain't it. (It really ain't much of a "traditional" anything!)

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is largely a tale of the lives of two men, in a relationship, as they spend their years growing older together throughout the 21st century. Like in quite a few Delaney novels, the larger world is mostly a backdrop to the emotional journey of the main characters, and this book is no exception -- you will spend 80-85% of your time reading about these two men eating meals, going about their daily work, and their many, many sexual escapades.

Oh boy -- if you have any timidity about reading scenes involving graphic gay sex, you may want to skip this book. I'm not talking about just "normal" gay sex either (prong A into slot B), but really... really... weird stuff.

That being said, the tale of their relationship is very touching, and especially if you're younger, seeing a couple's relationship grow and mature, and even stay loving well into their sixth decade together is nice to see. (There is no Singularity in Delaney's novels, that I know of -- you live, you experience life, you die. End of story.)

[Geoffrey Dow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been meaning to give this novel the review it deserves for a couple or three years now; and sooner or later, I'll do so.

For now, I'll just say it is one of the best science fiction novels and one of the best novels that I have ever read. It is a sexually explicit, very funny and deeply movie story of the sort of people that fiction very seldom visits: men who are manual labourers at the best of times, and often homeless in our world.

And more: Delany humanizes characters who in most fiction would be portrayed as monsters, full-stop.

Be warned, if you find portrayals of vanilla gay sex offensive, then Delany's explorations of coprofillia (among other, er, unconventional practices) will offend you profoundly. Similarly, if you are unable to distinguish between fiction and reality, you will find this novel disturbing and upsetting.

All that said, I repeat: This is one of the best works of fiction I have ever read, a late masterpiece by the author of such classics as Dhalgren, the Neveryon series, and Trouble On Triton.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

THROUGH THE VALLEY... starts in 2007 and shoots decades into the future; I read four or five hundred pages before I saw anything recognizably "science fiction" which speaks, I think, to Delany's phenomenally subtle world-building.

Trigger warnings for basically anything sexual (specifically including sexual violence, incest, intergenerational sex). As with THE MAD MAN or HOGG, best not to read over lunch. As with THE MAD MAN or HOGG, expect to be personally challenged on pretty much every page.

As I'm reading, I am continually reminded of Delany's injunction to us, his students, to "widen the circle of compassion" to include whatever characters might be considered too other, too abject, and I'm in awe of how Delany does just that here, dealing with extremely difficult material.

More to come!

[Jamie Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keep reading. The first few hundred pages lay the groundwork for spectacular things to come. Not for the sexually squeamish or prissy, but if you can wade in and let yourself be carried along to the poetic, transcendent conclusion you will find it well worth the time.

[intet_ · Rating 4 out of 5]

STILL ANOTHER DAY-off morning, when he woke in Dynamite's bed, with Shit's arm flung over him, from the empty sheet on his left, Eric realized Dynamite was already up. Turning his head, he saw, through the open porch door, sunlight fall over the cracked and blistered porch rail.
“Hey–!” Dynamite called from the outside. “Get up and come on out here. Come on, now! Get on out–take a look at this!”
Stretched across the foot of the bed, Tom lifted his head, looked over one paw, then put his muzzle back down.
Sleepily, both boys untangled themselves and slid off the bed, naked, then walked out the side door onto the uneven boards. In the ratty undershirt he'd slept in that night, Dynamite was down among the tall growths beside the porch. He beckoned them. “Come on. I wanna show yall.”
As they went down the steps on bare feet, Shit first, Eric following Eric realized, without pants, Dynamite was himself naked from the waist down.
“Get on over here, now–and look.” Dynamite dropped to a squat before the ferns.
Shit said, “What the fuck you goin' on about this early in the goddam mornin'?”
“Come on,” his father said. “Hunker down here.”
The sun had cleared the cabin's corner. Morning gold–it couldn't have been much after six-fifteen–burned through the fronds bending about them.
It was cool, with direct sun making a warm spot on a shoulder, a hip.
Eric squatted. On tickling stems, dew wet his buttocks, his thighs.
Beside him, with a forward gesture of his big hand, Dynamite said, “Can you see her, there?”
Behind them, Shit, too, dropped to a squat, a hand supporting himself on Eric's shoulder, the other on his father's. “Damn,” Shit said. “If you wasn't such a good fuck, I'd take Eric and go get my own cabin so at least for a couple of mornin's a week I could get some real sleep.”
“No, you wouldn't,” Dynamite said. “You get off on watchin' your brother here suck my dick too much.”
“Oh that 'brother' thing gets him all excited.” Shit took two squatting steps forward. “Kinda turns me on, too.”
“I know.” Dynamite glanced back. “That's how I can always getcha up to fuck me.” Eric glanced down, where grinning Dynamite jogged his knee. “Why would he wanna give that up to be a hermit?”
Two tall fronds leaned widely apart. Between scalloped threads, a grand web rayed silvery lines from its center. Toward the middle, the dozen strands lost their precision. Hundreds of dewdrops caught along its lines, a third like diamonds in direct sun, another third in shadow became pearls, and still others, where reflected sunlight from the window behind them poured through its lattice, became prisms. Up on the left, in one patch, a marauding cricket had gotten snared, torn some lines, and been enveloped with white, while the net had been repaired around it. Yet most of the matrix was symmetrical perfection–or, better, symmetrical perfection adapted to its asymmetrical firmament. Eric shifted his weight–and dozens of dewdrops all over the morning web flickered and flashed. Prisms shook myriad colors.
Yellow and black stripes on her less-than dime-sized abdomen, the spider, having crawled halfway toward the center, paused to move a blackl leg, slowly, in a welcoming gesture, four, five, six times–for exercise, for relief, or some arachnoid dance–before crawling further on the bright lattice.
Eric glanced back at Shit. “You see that …!”
“Yeah ...” Shit's voice was lower than Eric's.
Was that, Eric wondered, wonder?
“Back when I was seven or eight,” Shit said, “you took me out to show me one of these, and I though it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever fuckin' seen–and I still do.”
“You remember that?” Dynamite asked.
Shit just grunted.
Eric said, “I never seen that before … I mean, up close, with dew on it.”
In the chaos that overtook its center, in the irregular boundary, and in the rhythmic order between center and rim, each thread with a line of droplets, it was a glimmering polychrome glister.
Behind him, after a confirming squeeze of his shoulder, Eric felt Shit stand. His voice came from above: “I'm goin' inside an' make you fuckers some coffee. 'Cause I sure want a cup.” He heard Shit move away, back to the steps.
Off in the brush, Eric heard Uncle Tom moving–whose interests were food, sex, rubs, and hugs, with all of which, Eric figured, they were pretty generous.

151/633

[Stian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been returning to this novel on and off for the last two years. When I started it, I was a fledgling PhD candidate struggling to negotiate English university bureaucracy while straddling with the complexities of settling into a new city. It was a rough period. Now I’m three years in, hopefully done with my PhD by the end of this year — finishing Through the Valley seems like an apt, albeit odd, entry into the new year.

Especially since Through the Valley is so much a novel about time and the experience of time; so much a novel about experiences of intimacy in a myriad of forms, and it’s intricacies. It’s a novel written with so much love that reaching the end feels like losing someone dear.

Still, this is a novel at times difficult to read. A self-professed fable, the novel spans some 70 odd years in the life of Eric and Shit at The Dump — a utopian society primarily for black gay men founded by Robert Kyle. Starting of as trash collectors, then running a pornographic film theatre together, until The Dump is no longer a gay commune and they become caretakers at an island primarily inhabited by lesbians, Eric and Shit spend close to an entire lifetime together, figuring out how to love, their sexual fantasies, and each other. The difficulty stems primarily from the range and diversity of their sexual encounters, sexual acts that are described in great detail that, at times, may be challenging.

Yet this isn’t a pornographic novel. Indeed, the power of Delany’s novel — and his other fiction — stem in part from his matter-of-fact descriptions of sexual acts. There is rarely any judgment, rarely any valorisation (except, perhaps, Delany’s occasional displays of interest in hands) of the acts that occur. These are men — primarily — with venues afforded to them, and with similarly inclined lovers (often strangers) where and with whom they get to experience and experiment sex and intimacy. Where other writers are urged to make sex sexy, often to the detriment of the realities of sex — mess, miscommunication, objects of desire (whatever these may be), love and (too often) mutual respect — making it glossy or intricate, Delany is painfully aware of sex as an expression of love. Be it between strangers or partners or close friends, sex isn’t just power — except when expressions of power is the desired object — but also care, in Delany’s own terms, contact.

Sex is, therefore, not the only driving force of the novel. As time passes and Eric and Shit age, their sexual drive slows down as time speeds up. At the end, their sexual abilities are reduced by chronic illnesses, and the novel becomes an intricate meditation on history (indeed, on what it means to be part of history) and love, memory and sex. Although Eric and Shit have always defied several socially constructed sexual imperatives, they find new ways of experiencing sex and love — contact, again — in their old age.

Needless to say I shed a tear at the end, and it’s one of very few novels I’ve longed not to finish, that I’ve found comfort in, that I’ve struggled with, so much so that reading the novel is like an experience of contact. If I could choose, this would be one of very few books I’d ever read, over and over; it proved to me that reading, which I think is mostly a bad habit, can bring about something good, something utterly beautiful (if I’m allowed to wax lyrical about this book). All pointing back to the idea of contact, again. I feel slightly hollow now that it’s all over.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Delany, I’ve read most of his stuff, and I really liked this book.

But if you’re not already a Delany fan, or you haven’t already read a lot of his books, this is really not the best place to start. It’s long and sometimes slow, and it’s expensive to get a copy of in print. Plus, some of its best bits are particularly interesting in comparison to his other texts. So, first, here’s a few alternate suggestions:

Nova and The Einstein Intersection are both short, lovely works of science fiction.

Heavenly Breakfast is a truly delightful piece of memoir.

If you really want to read something disgusting and pornographic, Hogg has a lot of similar material in that regard, and that’s faster paced and under 300 pages. (Through the Valley offers an interesting counterpoint around the ethics of “nasty” sex.)

And if you really want to read 800 pages of Delany, Dhalgren is his most famous work and is honestly just a bit better than this one.

Or read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which is a denser book, but a fascinating look at the porn theaters of Times Square and Delany’s personal experiences with them. (Through the Valley has material clearly based on those experiences.)

Or read Triton. Or Babel-17. Or the Fall of the Towers series. Or the Tales of Neveryon books. Or The Motion of Light in Water. Or Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Or Phallos. Or his short stories.

That said, this book also has a lot of really fascinating stuff going on it. A few points:

Chapter 90 was left out of the printed book, which seems weirdly fitting since a number of Delany’s fictions focus on lost or distorted texts and narratives (see Dhalgren, Phallos, the Neveryon series).

While Hogg includes a lot of assault and rape, Through the Valley focuses on characters that are consciously engaged in the question of how to have ethical, consensual sex. There’s still a lot of incest and sex with minors, though, plus some intense BDSM, because, well, that’s the sex the characters are trying to figure out if it’s possible to have ethically and consensually.

Although the book is disgustingly pornographic, characters do use some safer sex practices. Delany simultaneous normalizes these practices, for example by mentioning HIV testing expectations very casually, and eroticises them, for example by having characters repeatedly fawn over one man’s used condoms.

There’s also a lot in the book about healthy communication in relationships, like expressing sexual desires and navigating agreements around non-monogamy.

The first hundred pages take place over a few days. The next couple hundred take place over a year. The next hundred take place over a decade. By the end of the book, seventy years have passed. It wonderfully captures the way experiences of time dilate with age. And Delany comments on this explicitly in the text. It makes sense that he wrote this as an old man himself.

This book was published in 2012. The plot starts in 2007. The first few hundred pages read, more or less, as contemporary fiction. Then the story takes us into the future, and the book subtly shifts towards science fiction, with substantial social and technological change taking place that the main characters are often somewhat oblivious to or uninterested in.