Gay Rebel Scum

Posted by Jenny Hamilton

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The best thing about Alexandra McCollum’s Into the Midnight Wood is that its protagonist and his love interest are both very irritating people. As a society, I fear we’ve forgotten that romance works best when there’s friction between the two leads. I don’t mean they have to be bickering constantly, or that there needs to be some carefully contrived plot conflict to drive them apart in the third act. I mean that when two people—of different upbringing and character, with different schedules and life goals and conversation styles—attempt to bring their lives together, things do not go swimmingly every moment of every day. People have weird, annoying little habits. We eat at different times from each other. We have different relationships to punctuality. We clash into each other’s sensitive spots before we have learned where they are found. The connection point of a happy ending feels good because it resolves the points of disconnection that came before.

I have found this problem fairly endemic to the romcomantasy (eh? eh?) subgenre to which McCallum’s debut belongs. Oh, I am so tired of reading book after book where nobody has ever done a single thing wrong, or, even if they have, it was all a terrible misunderstanding. I cannot bear these characters with personalities as smooth as Ken dolls, who run dear little retail shops in interchangeable Fantasylands and placeless middle Americas, unbothered by problems of inventory or human frailty. I am going to chew right through the bars of my enclosure, and go rampaging all around the countryside, if I am called upon to read one more book where a character’s big secret finally comes out, and the other character is like: “No problem, babe, I know your heart, and I understand that, while you initially had a scheme to sabotage my dreams, you changed your mind over the course of our courtship. Due to the trust we have built together, I understand this perfectly without your having to explain it.”

Not once more. If I read this sort of thing again, down will come the power lines. To the incinerator with the paper stores. The printing presses I will break like the Luddites of old. Chomp will go my teeth upon the spindly fingers of the TikTok tastemakers or whoever’s responsible for this. A romance is just so much more interesting if the two love interests have personality traits … I was going to finish this sentence with something like “that don’t mesh perfectly without effort,” but really I will just let the sentence end at “traits.” A romance is much more interesting if the two love interests are recognizable as alive human people. I would like us to get back to that, please.

David, the protagonist of Into the Midnight Wood (and this is a single-POV romance, refreshing in this era of dual-POV supremacy), has been living with, and frustrated by, his hot chaotic roommate Meredith for five years. And I would also be annoyed with Meredith: Meredith sleeps with all their third roommates so it’s a revolving door of third roommates; he leaves mugs and glitter all over. He wanders into the dangerous magical woods at the edge of their property and gathers herbs and chats to the Midnight Mice with very little regard for the possible sinister forces that lurk in the forest. You may argue that Meredith is a manic pixie dream girl, and I shan’t disagree with you, but McCallum is not shying away from the real material conditions of living with someone like this. Mugs. Mugs everywhere! Never the trash taken out or the dishes done! Meredith I would kick twice, sharply, in the shins.

David is also kind of the worst. He’s that difficult combination of judgmental and resistant to change that means he’s constantly complaining to himself about circumstances he has every ability to alter should he so choose. He’s gotten into a habit of tossing not-very-nice banter at Meredith. He gets so locked in to a given life goal (getting a promotion at work) that he lets himself lose track of the emotions of the people around him. On a day when he was not wearing a button-up and couldn’t fact-check me, I would say to David, “Why do you always have one of the middle buttons on your shirt askew? Is that a fashion thing?”; and then he would be stressed about his button-up shirts forever afterwards.

Is this a good book? I don’t know. What even does it mean to be good? The fantasy elements could be more clearly delineated. Non-humans live and conduct their business alongside humans, but this seems not to have materially affected geopolitical history, since Wales and Appalachia still exist. David and Meredith live on the edge of the Midnight Wood, a magic forest where time and space don’t follow the usual rules. I found its parameters and personal relationship to Meredith confusing, but possibly in that way common when the author has several further books in mind, perhaps ones that will feature Meredith becoming ever more powerful and unearthly at the periphery of other people’s love stories. (I would endorse this, by the way. (This would rule.)) But within the confines of this one book, I couldn’t tell you with a gun to my head what purpose, for example, the Midnight Mice serve in maintaining the forward march of time.

I can say with certainty, though, that I did not welcome the return of the implied-Black best friend (Meredith’s) who punctuates more of his sentences with the words “you feel me?” than is strictly natural. He’s there mainly to be protective of Meredith. This is, I admit, the mandated role of the best friend in a romance novel, but the author’s discomfort with writing a Black character is so palpable that you wish they’d just not bothered. I can’t propose a fix for this—it’s weird when white authors populate books with only-white characters, and quite often, as here, it’s weird when they very uncomfortably don’t. (The ideal solution would be to address the problem at the root by eliminating white supremacy, but I suppose that’s beyond the scope of this book review.)

Into the Midnight Wood is good, at least, in its ability to supply the chief thing I care about from a romance: a pair of characters trying to get their emotional houses in good enough order to be in love with each other. Like everyone, like all of us, they are both a little bit terrible. I am so starved in general for romance protagonists who are a little bit terrible that I did not care that the specifics of David and Meredith’s story arc were heavy-handed. One of the novel’s precipitating events, for instance, is that a psychic gives Meredith a charm to reveal hidden things, which means that he gets less good at concealing his depression and self-worth issues from David. Elsewhere, the reasons why David and Meredith end up hosting an event for Meredith’s terrible family, giving David a front-row seat to how these jackasses treat him, are contrived. And you know what? I don’t care. Great. I love it. Gimme.

Likewise, McCollum is stellar at writing conversations in which the leads are plausibly, but consistently, misunderstanding each other. It’s one of the harder stunts for a romance novel to pull off, because the failure mode leaves readers complaining that the whole conflict could have been resolved or avoided if the characters had just had one single conversation with each other. David and Meredith can’t stop having conversations. It’s just that they’re not hearing what the other person is telling them. Here’s their discussion right after the first time they have sex, about midway through the book:

David stood abruptly. “You forgot to give me the speech, you know,” he remarked as he pulled his boxers back on.

Slowly, Meredith got to his feet. “David, I—”

“No, no, it’s all right,” David forestalled him. “I know it by heart: I’m not in love with you. I’ve got no plans to fall in love with you and this isn’t going to change that, and t’s all right if that means you’d rather not do anything.” Even if it was a bit late for that last part now…. “As you said, the two of us together—could you even imagine? The very idea is absurd.”[…]

After a silence that lasted a beat too long, Meredith gave a lopsided smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course it’d never work, would it? You and me, we’d be at each other’s throats every minute. S’pose you’ll be wanting the shower? You can go first, I’ll put the kettle on.”

This works because McCollum has set this up from the beginning. We’re well aware that Meredith always gives this little speech to people he sleeps with, because it’s a conflict that comes up in the book’s very first scene. So I don’t need much persuading that David would think of himself as the latest in a long line of sexual conquests, and that Meredith would take this little speech to mean that David doesn’t want him. It’s good! It’s elegant! This is the content the people (me) desire!

I also deeply appreciated the book’s casual resistance to tidy (boring) scripts around sex and gender. Meredith wears dresses and sparkly clothes and flower tiaras, and there’s a running gag that he’s allergic to labeling himself as one thing or another. David takes a moment for a pronoun check about midway through the book, which I really loved. It’s rare to read about two characters with years of familiarity between them checking in about pronouns, outside of the context of a coming-out story. When they have penetrative sex, they also have a quick check-in about who will be doing what, ruffling David’s instinctive assumption that they both mutually understand he’d be topping. Here again, the warmth of my positive response may owe less to what this book is doing, and more to what other books are not. It felt really refreshing to be reminded that even quite compatible people can’t read each other’s minds or magically intuit each other’s preferences. Having these conversations is what building intimacy looks like.

I’m going to say something now that will sound like an insult; but walk with me, because it will turn out to be a very high compliment, albeit current trends in publishing will be catching some strays along the way. Into the Midnight Wood is not for everyone. You could say that Meredith is too twee, that David spends too much time being a jerk and not enough time redeeming himself, that it’s aggravating when these two characters won’t just talk about their feelings. I would know what you meant. I wouldn’t argue. But Into the Midnight Wood feels like the book the author wanted to write. I didn’t, perhaps, realize until I was midway through it how badly I’ve needed that.

So many of the books in the cozy romantasy space (I know I said romcomantasy before, but I’ve lost the courage of my convictions since then) feel like cynical marketing strategies between two covers, books that endeavor to capture the largest readership by making their plots and their characters as anodyne as possible. I crave books with enough specificity that I can say they are not for everyone; the alternative, I think, is books that are not for anyone. Books that are, essentially, for the algorithm.

Real people are annoying, and you may carve that on my tombstone. Alexandra McCollum need not visit my grave to learn this truth. Refreshingly, they already know.

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