Furnace Creek

Part coming-of-age story and part novel of erotic discovery, part a queer
take on Southern Gothic and part a detection-mystery thriller: Furnace Creek
teases us with the question of what Charles Dickens' Pip might have been
like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced
the explosive social issues-racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay
rights, class struggle-that galvanized the world in those decades.
Like Dickens's Pip, Newt Seward yearns to escape his small-town upbringing
in the mountains of Virginia. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a
summer spent working for an eccentric old bachelor with a mysterious past,
conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's worldly visiting niece and
nephew-these events set the stage for a surprising announcement that
launches the youth on a journey of sexual and moral discovery, one that
takes him to prep school in New England, bohemian digs in Rome, and
discovery in Paris-all before he returns home to life's many expectations
and disappointments.
This inventive response to Great Expectations quickly leaps beyond the frame
of Dickens' masterpiece to become a gripping contemporary meditation on the
perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.