Pervatory

by R.M. Vaughan

LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023
A novel about a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness. When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love. Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire … RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us.

Genres: Queer, Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

Published November 14, 2023

About the author

Richard Murray Vaughan was a Canadian poet, novelist and playwright.

Reviews

[Patrick Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew RM Vaughan as an art critic and boy! did he take no prisoners! He even wrote a book summing up his views: Contemporary Art Hates You. Says it all. I remember reading that he had to decline an invite to an art event in Saudi Arabia because they wouldn't let him bring his pills. So he wrote a book called Insomnia. Again, says it all. Pervatory was pieced together from his notes after his death a couple of years ago. Berlin. Sex. Obsession. He spares nothing and no one, including the reader. He died as he lived and wrote, on the edge. Absolutely worth the read.

[Not Sarah Connor Writes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to the Literary Review of Canada for sending me R.M. Vaughan's posthumous novel Pervatory to review for them. You can read my full review on their Substack, Bookworm, here!

[Caitlin Holloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a perfect read for me. Not only do I famously love queer fiction, Berlin as a setting and unreliable narrators, this story took that and pushed it to its furthest extent. The protagonists’ descent into madness was so well written and so interesting to read that I struggled to put this book down. The fact this this was also posthumously published and the manuscript was found unfinished made this book just so complex and enticing, I absolutely adored it.

[Florencia · Rating 1 out of 5]

i was really intrigued by the synopsis of this book and wanted to read a queer fiction book that wasn’t super mainstream but boy was this a waste of time. the narrator goes off on so many tangents without having many coherent thoughts and the author really played into the whole “suffering artist” vibe that just felt like such a cliche. i also hate how the ending was all attributed to a mental health issue. like really? so unoriginal and stigmatizing. overall the storyline was quite boring and i was unimpressed

[Jean-Michel Dugal · Rating 4 out of 5]

fight club but for gay kinky sex

[Jay Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love a queer trip

[b]

I think, perhaps due to its incomplete nature, its very nearly finished casting, people should go read Richard’s first novel, SPELLS, to get a handle on the wow and flutter of truth and indeterminacy. The protagonist of SPELLS could have grown up to be MHH in Pervatory with a minimum of retrofitting or clever explainery (which RMV was plenty capable of)

Though SPELLS was incredibly opaque, a ripe lichen choking out sight lines. Pervatory is in turn skeletal, lithe, limber. Both are melancholy and lonely and bitchy (Richard’s strengths are all underlined by bitchiness, to our benefit).

This novel ends with a dispelling of the magical forces by virtue of institutionalization, but it’s hard to believe that regular cops and psychic cops (counselors police thought, not to dismiss the profession but by and large they’re they’re to maintain order and they’re not there to heal people) could reliably find dog shit if their feet were made up of dogs’ assholes, nonetheless find a body or verify the veracity of a man being haunted in such a way as by love, and so the ending is still in flux for me; that RMV offers such a simple out from the events of the novel in a psychological brief feels like bait, like it’s there for the people who don’t want to believe to let themselves out. But just as they teach The Turn of the Screw as a vehicle for theory, for explaining things away, performing readings as paranoid as possible, I always thought the most interesting question wasn’t “well what if the governess is crazy? That’d explain this theory I have about class!!”, rather, the question “why does no one believe this woman when she tells us what’s happening to her?” That’s a more generative question I think. All these nasty English programs teaching people to sniff out the crazy when the very power of the text comes from refusing tidiness.

And however much I love pretty well all the stuff he wrote, Richard didn’t write a lot of novels, so I’m not sure he was sure how to stick a landing; I’m also not sure if there’s a handful of times ‘the novel’ has let a writer stick their landing in the last hundred years, whether or not not the writer had published 10 novels or 3 novels or 1 novel or none.

It’s hard to read this without thinking about Richard’s suicide. It’s hard to read this and see all the nascent iterations, stop start nubs of themes, however sufficiently finished I think the book is (as ‘finished’ as any other novel I’ve flipped through from Coach House in the last decade). It’s hard for me to reconcile that two separate Coach House employees have told me this book is bad and it was getting published out of weird grief and not because it should have been, and that I can’t tell if they read this book cynically or they their other publications too optimistically.

I think there’s probably an essay in here about the pointlessness of so much art at hand, or the expiry date that pointless, monied artists impose on the rest of the profession. In addition to other questions of aging queer desirability. And how money undergirds all of it. I think there’s a lot more I could pull from this book but really all I want to do right now is sit here and feel bad that we don’t get another book by Richard, and that I don’t even see a collected for his poetry on the horizon anywhere (would love to hear I’m wrong on this front). I just wanna sit here and pout, and I think he might have endorsed that behaviour.

[Michael Belcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5–A travelogue wrapped in a love story, haunted by the occult. “Pervatory” is guided by the increasingly delusional Martin Murray Heather, “a professional contrarian.” Bear-hugged and willingly mauled by his lover, Alexandar, with his mixed English, its guttural, direct, big-hearted, and hilarious jumble.

In the first half of the novel, exploring a Berlin both pleasure-soaked and banal where Martin now lives and looking back at a cloying, pretentious Toronto from where he’s fled, I found myself endlessly intrigued, laughing out loud (rarely does a book get me to laugh out loud) and cringing in equal measure. Line after line sparkling with observational astuteness and cynical wit, so that even when challenged or disgusted, I felt compelled to read on, knowing that the author would guide, explain, conjole—like the one at the party who has you slapping your hand over your mouth or shaking your head, but whose side you never want to leave.

The second half of the novel steadily lost the intensity of my interest. The extensive tarot readings, though they are a part of the book’s dissecting style, grow tedious, as does the use of five evocative descriptions when one or two would suffice. And Vaughn’s brilliant examination of the real slides into the magical realist sensationalism of an “All of Us Strangers” or “Beau Is Afraid.” Like those films, it’s increasingly unclear if these surreal elements are attempting to coalescence into a convincing depiction of madness, or if they’re the diverting ravings of an author at play—then all hell breaks loose.

Ravings or not, I will take what Vaughn has left us with gratitude, for his gifts were manifold and his vision singular.

[K. S. Oszlai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audacious... What a pleasant surprise.

Pervatory is a gem. It's sharp and seductive and relentless. Vaughan writes like it's theatre. He plays with contradictions, and surprises you with plot twists when you least expect it. It's campy as hell.

I didn't expect to connect with this as much as I did, but Pervatory caught me off guard and I enjoyed every second of it. I'll be thinking about this one for a while. 10/10

[Phoebs · Rating 1 out of 5]

A tired monologue from the most dull, miserable, judgemental character. Not even his psychotic demonic delusions made him interesting. This book tried soooo hard to be symbolic and intellectual, but it was just nonsensical bullshit, I could skip whole paragraphs and not miss anything crucial. The fact that this was post-humously published does not make me like it more, SORRY

[Jendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hallucinatory, horny, hilarious, homosexual horror story.