In the City of Shy Hunters: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tom Spanbauer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2001

For ten years, critics and readers have been eagerly anticipating the next novel from Tom Spanbauer, one of the most brilliant, inventive writers in America today. In June Grove Press will publish In the City of Shy Hunters, Spanbauer's most ambitious work to date. Set against the stark urban landscapes of Manhattan in the 1980s, the novel offers a vivid portrait of New York's fascinating demimonde of junkies and drag queens on the verge of its collapse, just as AIDS is starting to decimate the city's gay population. In the City of Shy Hunters opens in 1983, when William Parker, Spanbauer's most memorable and winning character yet, moves from Jackson Hole to Manhattan, desperate to escape the provincialism of the small western towns in which he has spent his entire life. Impotent, afflicted with a stutter, and struggling with his sexuality, Will is shy and insecure. In New York he finds himself surrounded for the first time by people who understand and celebrate his quirks and flaws. As he slowly learns to accept himself, he becomes wrapped up in one of the most unforgettable romances in recent literature, a love affair with a volatile, six-foot-five African-American drag queen and performance artist named Rose. But even as he grows close to Rose and the others, Will must watch as they are taken from him as AIDS grows from a rumor into a full-scale epidemic. Meanwhile, tension is also mounting between the police and the squatters in his local park -- until a vicious riot breaks out, providing Will with an opportunity for a heroic, transcendent act that will leave readers shaken, fulfilled, and changed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An expertly drawn, starkly authentic, early-1980s Manhattan provides the setting for this sprawling novel by Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon). It tells the story of Will Parker, a young man from Jackson Hole, Wyo., who comes to the "Wolf Swamp" of New York in search of his boyhood first love, Charlie. After Will secures a seedy apartment, a bevy of tough, typecast but blissfully genuine New Yorkers immediately materialize. Among them are drug-addled Ruby and her Indian sidekick, True Shot; Fiona, the tenacious waitress who robustly trains Will at his new restaurant job; and "Shakespearean drag queen" and upstairs neighbor Rose, with whom he falls in love. But while dramatic temperaments and sequined wardrobes are being sorted out, AIDS, gay fiction's great leveler, has already begun claiming victims. Spanbauer's rapid-fire narration and clipped sentences generate a surprising amount of tension and gritty emotion, as does his vibrant, dead-on dialogue and keen sense of place. The high points come along the trajectory of Will's awakening sense of self, first when Rose drags him to his first Gay Pride parade and then, as years pass and the plague intensifies, when he witnesses the sudden death of friends. This is a big, brazen, histrionic work of fiction, one that pays respectable, if unsentimental, homage to a devastating period in gay history. However, the overstuffed plot crammed with a swirling pageant of madcap characters (even a dance-floor cameo by Elizabeth Taylor) and a brewing imbroglio concerning squatters rights may exhaust readers before the epic tome reaches maximum velocity. (June)Forecast: Spanbauer fans will expect a more cohesive effort, but this is a fitting opus for Gay Pride Month. The book's striking turquoise cover art and Spanbauer's name in red will attract readers' attention, as will a 14-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

One can't help being leery of this latest work from Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, LJ 10/1/91). Is it just another AIDS story concerning the early plague years? But after a few pages one realizes that it is not. Will Parker moves from Idaho to Manhattan in search of himself and his childhood best friend (and first sexual partner). Will isn't dumb, but he isn't educated either, and he lands a crummy job as a waiter and an even worse apartment. His new family of friends more than make up for this, and Will sets out to find out about life. Just as everything seems to be settling into something comfortable, he begins to lose friends and co-workers to drugs and AIDS. Unlike other "early AIDS" novels, this one acknowledges that AIDS touches all classes, races, religions, and sexual orientations. Excellent characters (real New Yorkers), great writing, and a new twist on an over-used plot recommend this book for most libraries, though some readers might want a more conventional ending. T.R. Salvadori, Margaret E. Heggan Free P.L., Hurfville, NJ
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (June 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116914
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116918
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,108,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just Perfect, June 14, 2001

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Stephen McLeod (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the City of Shy Hunters: A Novel (Hardcover)

To paraphrase William Parker, the narrator of this amazing new novel, You're going this way, something happens, then you're going that way.

If you haven't read *The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon*, then you're in for an extra treat because you can now read two wonderful novels. Reading *In the City of Shy Hunters* over the last week has been a beautiful, joyous, heartbreaking experience. Unless you are a really tiny-hearted person, you will probably fall in love with this book, just as the book's narrator, Will Parker, "William of Heaven", tells you right off the bat that he has fallen in love with you. (He means it.) The vision that informs this book (as well as TS'searlier books, but here on a near epic scale ) is unlike any other in American fiction. It is huge, mystical, generous, "sexually haunted," erotic, and deeply spiritual.

If you believe in the power of books and poems, music and art in general to reflect and renew what Wallace Stevens called "the voice that is great within us," then you will be glad that Tom Spanbauer is in the world, and grateful for his generosity and hard work as a writer and as a human being. Please read this book. *Mitakuye iyasin!*

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Been waiting for this a long time, June 19, 2002

By 

Lawrence E. Wilson (Mayfield, East Sussex, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the City of Shy Hunters (Paperback)

This is the long-awaited new novel by Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, a novel which got me into semi-deep trouble when I selected it for a book discussion group once. Spanbauer is just NOT an easy author. Not for suburban matrons, no, no, no... Definitely a stylistic challenge (there are no quotation marks anywhere, so you have to parse it out in your head as you read) and the material and setting have certainly been used before (the joys and agonies of New York City at the beginning of the Age of AIDS), but there's a definite attraction meshed in with all its difficulties. The flashbacks to the narrator's strange, abusive childhood in Idaho are lovely and touching, and the characters are nothing if not memorable---performance artists, homeless people, wannabees and waiters. There are multitudinous references to Native American and Western American culture---Stranger in a Strange Land goes 80's, told in a late 90's style---which inform and propel the narrative and the characters' motivations.

It's not like anything all that stellar actually happens---Will is looking for a childhood friend who got a scholarship and moved to NYC years before---and his quest is filled with blind alleys and, of course, with self-discovery. There's a good deal of violence and queasy-making descriptions of edgy sexual encounters and acres and acres of humankind's-inhumanity-to-humankind, but there's also a warped beauty to the whole thing and moments of sincere love. Imagine Tales of the City directed by Sam Peckinpah in a benevolent mood...

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tom Spanbauer is one of the greatest living story-tellers!, June 4, 2001

By 

MrBlisster "MrBlisster" (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the City of Shy Hunters: A Novel (Hardcover)

I waited, and waited, and WAITED for the release of this, Tom Spanbauer's third novel (all good things to those who wait!). A lot has passed in the 10 years since the release of Spanbauer's incredible "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but by some ethereal craft, he has managed (again) to bring his readers to a very special place he knows, and we love--where things exist, dream-like/life-like, on several planes at once. Here, he again shares with us stories of a few more of those who are, and always will be there--loved by us. If you believe in magic, and in the pathos that life brings to all of us, then you, too, will fall deep (hey! even deeper than that!) into the story of what happens to sweet, sweet William, and the people he knows and loves. The joy and sorrow of modern American living and loving plays out on these pages like an ancient Greek tragedy--it is the stuff that timeless tales are made of. It is the stuff of eternity...