Once again Jim Grimsley has a way of grasping your attention to a story making you read as fast as you can. These plays are wonderful and really stay with you as you wonder why characters did certain things. Especially after I finished reading Mr. Universe, I still had so many unanswered questions. I got so pulled into the story that I could imagine the muscle man standing there in front of me.

Jim Grimsley has a wonderful talent as an author and regardless of your background all of his books are wonderful!! His writing style is fantastic and his books are never predictable. He has a way of describing things in such detail that while you are reading one of his books you actually think you hear the characters talking out the words. Keep up the great writing and I will be looking for the next book of yours soon!

This is indeed a well-written book. It combines a Proustian dredging through the mystery of time and memory with a Faulknerian sense of the harsh poverty of the South and its effects on the human soul as well as Faulkner's own sense of the mysteries of human memory, all written down with touches of fine lyricism.-The problem is, and I realize that I'm in the minority in this opinion, that it's impossible for an author to combine these fine traits and have any hope of getting his work published without mangling, yes mangling, it into a "mystery" where it can rest comfortably in that section in Barnes and Noble and be sure to sell. Proust and Faulkner, with their sense of the artist's obligation to be true to his calling, to not retrench their work to fit the marketplace, wouldn't stand a chance in this day and age. I wish Mr. Grimsley had the luxury to explore more into the psyches of the characters (which he does so well), I wish he would give full-rein to his lyricism and, above all, I wish he didn't have to fit this into the genre of "mystery."-All life is a mystery.-But then the book would be at least as long and complex as a Faulkner novel. And how many of you reviewers would have bought it?-No, the work will not be regarded as a masterpiece. What "mystery" is? The simple truth is that they don't cover the grand swath of light and dark in the human soul (though Mr. Grimsley does his best) because they have to fit into a formula, which by definition limits their scope, however gracefully, as is the case here.-This book is a good page-turner, as most mysteries are, and (as other reviwers have noted) Mr. Grimsley has an acute insight into the feminine perspective, as embodied by the character of Ellen Tote. All this being said, I'm afraid the book will be forgotten in ten years time, replaced by other "mysteries."

Even though I make it a point never to review books online, I cannot resist with My Drowning. If you find most contemporary fiction unexciting, as I do, and if you are looking for work that takes risks, is devoid of sentimentality, avoids the all-too-trendy irony, and tells a story in spare but careful prose written by an author who pays attention to the subtlety of language and syntax, then read this book. I mean what I am about to say: This book should have won (or at least been a finalist for) the National Book Award. It's that good.

Wonderful story of a dirt-poor Southern white family. So captivating I didn't want to put it down. Easy to read. While of a depressing nature of lifes struggles, verbal and physical abuse, it was not so depressing as it had me in tears, as often is the case with me and sad stories. This may be in part because the character realizes the abusive behavior is not acceptable and doesn't repeat it in her own life. Main character has a wonderful narritive voice and it is hard to believe a male author has captured the essence of an innocent girl so well.

This book has a voice like no other. I have read all of Grimsley's books and loved them all, but this is my favorite. Grimsley combines present tense and second person to create an utterly unique narrative character, Danny Crell. Neither Danny nor Jim Grimsley flinch away from any event in Danny's life, no matter how horrible or violent. The result is a realistic and terrible story told with unparalleled clarity, simplicity, and detail. Grimsley has such a good grasp of proportion, one almost regards him as a photographer rather than a writer. This is one of those books you fall into as if down a well, and don't emerge from until it's over. . .if then.

Although only 200 pages, this book packs an emotional wallop that is unforgettable and stays with you for days. Danny Crell (whose later life is featured in Mr. Grimsley's Comfort and Joy) tells his story of family abuse as if in a long dream. Highly recommended with a truly shocking ending.

I came to this book after reading the unedited pre-release copy of "Comfort and Joy". Dan, the child hemophiliac of "Winter Birds" becomes the adult survivor and lover of Ford in "Comfort and Joy." In "Winter Birds" Grimsley paints the most agonizing pictures of what must be the most dysfunctional family of recent literature. A beautiful and excruciatingly painful read! Even the Thanksgiving snow cannot erase the agony of the unremitting suffering that permeates the book. River Man is Grimsley's "Everyman", a symbol of hopeful endurance. The taught style of the prose and its cryptic language grip the reader as much as the savagery of the story itself. The two novels will become inseparable companions, completing each other with hope as relentless as the torment and struggle that propels and sustains that very self same hope. If the two works should become part of a future tryptych, a little "softness" would be a relief. Bravo to Mr. Grimsley for such a fine read, again. Comments refer to the paperback edition. Fortunately most readers will have read "Winter Birds" first. It works much better that way since it clarifies Dan's actions of the second novel.

This book, like most of Grimsley's, is one you can fall in love with. Appropriately enough, it's a book about love--almost. More than love, it's about being a teenager, and to be a teenager is to not quite fit in. Dream Boy, then, is a beautiful book about not ever quite fitting with the world. The first of Grimsley's novels to openly explore a gay relationship, it stays very close to what one's first same-sex love is often like, and what growing up and life are like.

Like almost all I have read by Jim Grimsley, it's a book you can read in one sitting, and its sense of proportions is breathtaking.

However, towards the ending (which I liked), Grimsley has too many emotional threads to tie together. While he manages it quite admirably, this is why I don't think Dream Boy is Grimsley's best. Both Winter Birds and My Drowning seem to end at their inevitable stopping points; the novel (not the story, which goes on after we stop watching it) just ends, and that's it, and it's perfect. Dream Boy doesn't quite reach that point. It's lovely, it should be read, but if you want something divinely shattering, read his Winter Birds.

Dream Boy may have been early Jim Grimsley, but I read it after absorbing his "Comfort and Joy" and "Winter Birds": now I can see why it gained so much attention as a promising beginning novel....the subsequent "diaries" of Grimsley's characters are as stunningly mature as this little beginning novel promises.

Style. Grimsley has style - his own method of finding obscure characters, making them completely believable, giving them life beyond the last page of his books. Dream Boy is a book for the widest audience, not just another good story about same sex relationships. Delivering the delicate vulnerability of discovering the joy and the terror of love and physical attraction has rarely been so well related. The magical ending, suggested by the title of the book, leaves us, the reader, to decide what really happened, much in the fashion deMaupassant stories. This is a fine little novel with a very large messsage that needs and deserves our attention.

I've never been the "reading" type, especially when it comes to modern gay literature. Being a young gay man I have too easily put down many gay themed books for being typically sarcastic, venomous, too political, or just plain boring. Luckily, this book made its way into my life by chance and I am forever grateful. From the minute I flipped open the front cover (hesitantly, mind you) I found myself smirking in anticipation, reading further in shock, and sighing with inevitable delight.

A select few may share the opinion that this book is "underdeveloped", for whatever "their" reason. But, that is where its beauty thrives. This is a simple story about the most basic of human emotion, and the wants and needs that surround...a love story.

Jim Grimsley is so amazingly clever with words. An innocent walk through a field, a first kiss, or even a scattering of dinner plates becomes a grand event unto itself. Quite the dream.

I could ramble on about the wonders within this book, but read it for yourself, and relive your teen years...they way the could have been.

Thanks Jim. "Amen" :-)

Although _Comfort and Joy_ shares characters with an earlier work by Grimsley, _Winter Birds_, the two novels could not be more different. Whereas the earlier work is a dark, harrowing tale of violence and domestic abuse, the present novel chronicles the hesitant, tender romance between a grown-up Dan Crell, coping with hemophilia and HIV as well as the scars left by his upbringing, and Ford McKinney, a handsome doctor from a rich family. They meet at the hospital where Dan is an administrator and Ford is a resident, fall in love and struggle with the issues so many gay male couples face: intimacy, money and their families. Though occasionally there is clumsy expository dialogue, surprising for a writer as skilled as Grimsley, and a false note or two in the romance, ultimately the author convinces the reader of his central argument. The contrasting holiday scenes in the Atlanta household and the humble residence of Dan's mother, now remarried, in South Carolina show that the rigid gentility of Ford's well-to-do Atlanta family constitutes its own kind of domestic abuse. One roots for the survival of this unlikely couple, and is uplifted by the ambiguous but hopeful ending. I read the earlier _Winter Birds_ some time after finishing _Comfort and Joy_ and realized that, despite the dramatic contrast in tone between the two, knowing the former adds depth to the later story and increases one's appreciation of both works.

Readers of Jim Grimsley's earlier novels--"Winter Birds," "Dream Boy," and "My Drowning"--might be surprised by the title of his new novel, "Comfort & Joy," for there is little of either in his other writings. But this one has both as Dan Crell and Ford McKinney put their fragile, unlikely relationship to the test of coming out to their families--because they refuse to spend another Christmas apart.

Grimsley's style is unadorned and understated. His familiar gothicism is replaced by a modern South with conflict set amidst affluence--the conflict of two men's vastly different backgrounds and their families' vastly differing expectations of them. Their pasts constantly threaten to swallow up their chances. Dan is an HIV+ administrator in the Atlanta hospital where Ford McKinney is completing his residency. (Readers of Winter Birds remember Danny, the hemophiliac child who narrates the drunken binges of a father who terrorizes his family with violence just short of murder.) Ford is the privileged, only son of old Savannah gentility: his parents have his life planned. Like grandfather and father, he'll be a physician and marry into Country Club society. They even pick the girl. When Ford insists he'll make his own choices and may not be the "marrying type," they still don't get it.

Dan's mother isn't exactly comfortable with her son's homosexuality, but her life on the brink of disaster has taught her that what counts is the love between herself and her children. That Danny is gay could never diminish her love for him, and when he brings Ford to her trailer in the back woods of North Carolina, she welcomes them.

As divisive as the strain between Ford and his family is, the most intense struggles are waged within the lovers themselves as they fight against their own cultures and natures. Both have pride bred in the bone, and Dan's dirt-poor heritage and hemophilia along with Ford's inability to conceive how money could be an issue often threaten to undo them.

"Comfort & Joy" is about uncovering the self and discovering a relationship. While every gain is forged in pain, it is a book of hope--a story ending on the day after Christmas full of tidings of comfort and joy.

Finding this book, withot prior knowledge of the author or his other works, was an act of serendipity. Seldom is one given the opportunity to read of characters so well drawn,so real and so fragile, that when finishing the book, one is sadded by the loss of such friends as these. Mr.Grimsley has written of human emotions, not just those of gay men and women. If the exotic characters of Ethan Mordden's New York Greenwich Village stride over our lives, Grimsley's tip-toe down the hallways of our minds in endearing but no less memorable footsteps.Familiar topics are presented here,HIV,phobias,rejection,fear,love and indeed hope. Yet, each are given a fresh approach that blends so well with the spare but oh so poignant writing. A hint: upon finishing the book, re-read the first chapter. Truly it will complete a circle; almost as if the book never ends.I held my copy close to my heart when I finished reading, and promised myself to return to it in a year and a day.

I must say I approached this one with both curiousity and trepidation; I've read most of Jim Grimsley's novels - Winter Birds, Comfort and Joy, Dream Boy - and found them well-written, engrossing, unusual, even masterful. But Kirith Kirin is a huge departure for Grimsley, who has crossed a line most authors won't: from 'literary' fiction to genre fiction, in this case fantasy. I wondered, starting the book, if he'd pull it off. Verdict? He stumbles in places, and Kirith Kirin is not up to the level of his other novels, but there's some good stuff in there. In short - it reads like a lot of the better first novels do, and as long as you can read it without dwelling on either its flaws or the fact that it *isn't* a first novel, it's quite enjoyable.

But let's go back to those flaws for a second. First on that list for me was the main romantic relationship in the book, between Jessex, the farmboy-turned-magician-turned-savior-of-the-world, and Kirith Kirin, the virtually immortal king. Jessex is *15* for most of the book. For me, the disparity in ages - thousands of years old v. 15 - was too great. Sure, Jessex was willing, but the relationship seemed to me to be coming too close to pederasty. And the rationalizations offered by Jessex, as the narrator, weren't really enough to make me comfortable. (I also found myself wondering why Kirith Kirin, who has lived for millenia, couldn't find the wisdom and self-control to keep his hands off Jessex long enough for him to start shaving.)

Another problem with the book is the length. It's 500 dense, closely printed, oversized pages. Now, I've read some great books of that length, books that needed and deserved to be that long, but Kirith Kirin isn't one of them. It begs for some judicious editing. In places, the excess verbiage drags the pace of the book down considerably - in particular, it seemed to me there were areas where Grimsley could've omitted his detailed descriptions - with things like travel itineraries, for example, and the many ordinary days the characters spend on horseback.

However, the book has some great strengths, too. Despite a rather standard-issue plot (one that shows Grimsley's familiarity with fantasy literature, I might add), there is some true inventiveness in Kirith Kirin. In particular, the magic system and magic use stood out as an order of magnitude above what most fantasy books have to offer; for once in my life, I read an entire book in the genre without hearing any echoes of the Dungeons & Dragons magic system.

Also, Grimsley displays his usual command of the language despite the padding effect. Even the excess prose is a pleasure to read, especially in a genre like fantasy, where the writing isn't always of a high order. He also takes the opportunity to do some additional explorations of his usual themes - isolation, for example - and images.

Overall, there's a lot more of Grimsley in this book than I had feared, and a lot less of the derivative stuff that fills a lot of fantasy novels. Although it did seem to me that the author hadn't quite settled into the genre, the book is very readable, and I expect that if Grimsley continues with the fantasy experiment, we should be seeing marvelous stuff in a book or two. So, in the final analysis: if you can give the author a bit of slack, you'll find a book that lives up to the genre, and in places goes beyond it.

I want to start by saying that I've read just about everything Jim Grimsley has thus far written, so when I learned he was writing a strictly "genrefied" fantasy book, I was a bit curious (not to say skeptical). Like Grimsley (in his authorial comments above), I grew up reading Sci-Fi/Fantasy but more or less abandoned it for more "classic" (read: literary) fiction. This isn't to say I am denigrating genre fiction, as Jim has proved to me (via Kirith Kirin) that you can go home again.

Kirith Kirin is vintage Grimsley with a twist, and I hear echoes of his other works coursing through this novel. It's ostensibly the coming-of-age story of Jessex, a 14-year-old farmboy who is prophetically called to become the saviour of the mystical world of Aeryn Along the way, Jessex discovers he is especially adept at magic, of which he is taught by three ancient "sisters" known as the Diamysaar. He also discovers that he loves, and is loved in return by, the soon to be prophetically-decreed king, the eponymous Kirith Kirin. Typical of the genre, there are inevitable conflicts involving battling magicians, armies of quasi-humans (called Verm) engaging the forces of Kirith Kirin, and the like. Through it all, Grimsley's prose shines beautifully. There is as much imagistic influence from Dream Boy and Comfort and Joy (particularly the emphasis in Kirith Kirin on singing) as there is from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Samuel Delaney.

Having said this, there are of course caveats. Kirith Kirin is quite long (472 pages, plus glossaries and appendices) and sometimes tedious. The echt pedophiliac relationship between Jessex and Kirith Kirin (of which David Tedhams, in his June 2000 Lambda Book Report review, voiced concern) is utterly superfluous. Ironically Grimsley, perhaps showing his own Southern propriety, even apologizes (through Jessex) for "too much information" after their first erotic encounter.

This isn't Grimsley's first foray into sci-fi/fantasy (his short story in Nicola Griffith's anthology Bending the Landscape and his play Math and Aftermath are the most obvious predecessors) but it certainly is his longest and, perhaps, most ambitious. I'm a great fan of Jim's writing and would eagerly recommend any of his books, including Kirith Kirin. I would also be interested to see if he continues in this genre. Well done, Jim!

For a start, let me say this book is very well written. Like Dream Boy, the prose is well constructed, and has a similar dreamlike quality at times. The story itself is slightly different to the standard fantasy fare, notably with the interest in dualism, which at times seems to border on obsession. It has a bittersweet, elegaic quality to it, reminding me of the same sort of atmosphere that is so prevalent in The Lord of the Rings, which marked that book out from its many clones that followed. Also interesting is the portrayal of the relationship between Jessex and Kirith Kirin. It is not even described as 'gay' as such. It is simply a relationship based on love, the gender of the 2 is shown to be irrelevant.

As for flaws... the characters are a little sketchily drawn, but this seems to be a feature of Grimsley's writing. He provides the framework, and we fill in the details. The magic system was well described but seemed self-indulgent: the depth of description made me glaze over on occasion, and did not seem strictly necessary. As for the supposed 'pedophilia', I would direct the reader to the contents page, which states that the year of Aeryn is substantially longer than our own, making Jessex at least 18 in our terms at the time he first slept with Kirith Kirin.

Overall, an original fantasy well worth giving your time to. Will reward with ideas that people like Terry Goodkind can only wish they could write about.

Was Jim Grimsley half-asleep when he wrote this novel? His fiction is usually powerful and moving, and I love his work, but Boulevard is a depiction of characters we don't care about in a plot that goes nowhere, but, thankfully ends eventually. A supreme disappointment. Read anything by him but this half-hearted effort.

Jim Grimsley writes well - WINTERBIRDS, COMFORT AND JOY, DREAMBOY all attest to that. His way with language is sure, his insights into the minds of his variously troubled characters is on target. For this reader BOULEVARD does not slip into his usual category of novel development. This novel is more four novellas loosely joined. Yes, he once again has been able to conjure up a credible, likeable main character in Newell - the too often portrayed kid from the country who enters the city of evil and is consumed by it. As long as that narrative stays on course this novel reads well, if tired. It is the suppporting cast that begs question as to relevance. Instead of being additive to the narrative each of the other characters tends to a story within a story. Interesting people, yes, but tangential instead of integral.

But all novelists are allowed an aside now and then, a different turn similar to an olio act on the old stage, placed as comic relief for serious dramas. Grimsley does capture a seedy stench of the endless day/night called New Orleans. He understands the South and furthers the Tennessee Williams flavours. We all await his next novel, as surely this outing is just a out-of-town tryout for what he really is capable of writing.

After reading Jim Grimsley's four other previous brilliant novels; WINTER BIRDS, DREAM BOY, COMFORT & JOY, and MY DROWNING; I was thrilled to hear his fifth novel, BOULEVARD, was out. Here's a writer who can grab your attention by weaving a story that is so interesting it is impossible to put down.

This is the story of a naïve pretty, gay boy, Newell, who leaves his hometown of Pastel, Alabama for the big city, in this case, the French Quarter of New Orleans. It's the late 70's, an era of sexual excesses, drugs, partying and discos. This small town boy looses his innocence in short order. He finds an apartment, gets a job in a restaurant, gets fired right away for not putting out for the owner, and then by a stoke of luck, or is it, finds a new job working in a seedy adult bookstore. Here he finds his niche, quickly improves the business for the owner, and transforms himself from a shy country boy to an experienced, handsome, gay Narcissus, who uses his new found sexual appeal to his full advantage. Grimsley vividly develops all the other characters in the story, feeding our imaginations with many colorful characters. There is; Miss Sophie, a wise ugly and old transsexual; Mark, Newell's new drugged out boyfriend; Jack, a sadist who preys on Newell; and Mac, the big fat, ugly manager of the adult bookstore. And, of course, Louise, Newell's landlady, who's having an illegal affair with......well, you will find out. She knows it is wrong and has a hard time putting an end to the affair.

The descriptions and details of the New Orleans French Quarter, which include the street life, the bars, the parties and the people, and the events that unfold, are laid out in beautiful, poetic detail. I believe Jim Grimsley to be the true literary genius of the Southern gay fiction story. Some readers may be offended by details of Newell's sexual liaisons, and erotic, darker side of his steamy affairs, but it is just a reflection of that era and what it was really like in late 70's. This story is both frightening and titillating at the same time, with a real surprising twist. Do Not Miss This One. It will bring Grimsley many new fans. Highly Recommended!!! I look forward to reviewing his sixth novel.

Joe Hanssen