Resurrected Review: Trash Sex Magic, by Jennifer Stevenson

This is a review I wrote back in 2004 for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, a quite impressive webzine devoted to, er, reviews (and essays, etc.) of Science Fiction. It was founded by John Frost, and lasted until 2010. I contributed a couple of pieces.

Trash Sex Magic was Jennifer Stevenson's first, and it came out from Small Beer Press. She published a few more novels for Ballantine in 2008: The Brass Bed, The Velvet Chair, and The Bearskin Rug. I read the first couple of those and found them light sexy fun. They are paranormal romance with mystery elements. Since then most or all of her many novels have appeared from Book View Cafe, and seem to be in a similar mode, and are set (mostly?) in the same paramormal version of contemporary Chicago, called Hinky Chicago.

Resurrected Review: Trash Sex Magic, by Jennifer Stevenson

a review by Rich Horton

Jennifer Stevenson, a Chicago-area writer, has published a few short stories, but Trash Sex Magic is her first novel. It is set near the Fox River, in a version of Geneva, Illinois (called here Berne or perhaps Rimville). A real estate development is going up, but a few trailer owners who are about to be displaced are holding out.

The story is made up of a complicated, one might say organic, web of interactions among a large cast. Perhaps the main character is Raedawn Somershoe, a young woman living among the trailer park holdouts. Rae holds the group together, earning most of their money, acting as something of a voice of sanity. The rest of the locals' lives are intertwined, like vines or tree roots, with Rae's life. There is her older but still aggressively sexy mother, Gelia; and Gelia's main squeeze, an elderly black man named Erny Brown. There is the extended Gowdy family: Cracker Coombs, their disreputable uncle; King Gowdy, the straitlaced son who has just returned from Alaska and wants to take Rae away from all this; Cracker's basically feral twin children, Mink and Ink; and King's brothers: Willy, who is coming to terms with his homosexuality, and Davy, a rather simple teenager.

The outsiders represent the real-estate company. Central among them is Alexander Caebeau, a Bahamanian construction worker, heartsick at tearing down beautiful trees to put up ugly buildings, heartsick even more because he's missing his home island, and falling very quickly in love with Rae.

John Fowier is a sleazy executive, scared by the sudden seductiveness of Raedawn, plotting a backhanded way to get the holdout properties for his development. And Suzy Wohnberg is John's associate, bitterly aware that the price for advancement in the company will be sleeping with John.

All of the above seems not at all fantastical, but we soon gather that Gelia and Raedawn have somewhat "elemental" powers. Many of these powers revolve around a huge tree that the two women each treat as a lover (each jealous of the other). There is a perhaps tragic family secret concerning the tree. The plot action is precipitated by the construction workers cutting down this tree. Somehow Alexander Cabeau, as he is drawn to Raedawn, also finds himself taking on treelike characteristics. And the elemental powers of the Somershoe women and their extended family manifest in other ways—the Fox river is rising, and moving in unexpected directions, and foxes turn up in other curious ways.

The novel takes place over the course of only a few days. It's told from a dizzying variety of viewpoints. I do think the multiplication of viewpoints is a bit excessive—for example Davy's and Willy's stories seem mostly superfluous. It resolves rather definitely, though, leaving a few acceptably dangling threads. I enjoyed the novel throughout and read with interest and involvement. It's a strong first novel, a wild book, well-imagined and well-written, with absorbing characters.