Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of What the Dead Remember

What the Dead Remember
ConeyIslandHigh avatar reviewed on + 25 more book reviews


"Harlan Greene's pognant novel of gay life in the South captures the sexual awakening of an unamed narrator over a period of successive summers spent in Charleston, South Carolina. Just thirteen when he first arrives, the boy wanders the dream-haunted streets of the old city, feeling lonely and restless. Finally, however, he comes to the beach, where he meets a group of golden boys as beautiful as the models he has seen in the BVD ads in the Saturday Evening Post. And here he also meets and is befriended by the older, slightly retarded boy, Stevie. He is drawn back and forth between them...but the next summer he decides: Stevie is no longer a part of his life, for now he has steamy, dangerous afternoons of sex and thrills with the very boys he once dreamed about. When he leaves Charleston...he expects never to return--a mistake that proves to be his ultimate downfall. Boldly conceived and lushly written, this haunting story conjures of memories of an imperfect adolescence and an inescapable vulnerability to a lover's lies."