A coven of witches and queer men on vacation converge in Blair Fell’s “Disco Witches of Fire Island,” an explosive and melodramatic novel that blends gay romance, evil forces, and gay nostalgia into a fun, memorable reading experience ideal for summer vacation.
In the late 1980s, Armenian-American Joe Agabian, 24, boards a ferry to cross the Great South Bay from Long Island. For the first time, he plans to spend an exciting summer working on Fire Island, thanks to a spontaneous proposal from his bestie Ronnie Kaminski, a blond, long-haired Polish-Swedish hottie who’d just been fired from his night security job the previous winter.
The “gaytopia” of Fire Island is the grand destination; bartending through the summer is the plan. In a perfect world, this arrangement would make any gay boy click his heels and pack his bags, but Fell has bigger plans for his characters and immediately throws a rusty wrench into the plot: Ronnie not only doesn’t meet Joe at the dock upon his arrival, but has failed to arrange a place to stay or line up any bartending jobs for them, either.
Coming to Joe’s rescue is Howie Fishbein and his housemate Lenny D’Amico, both seemingly sweet-natured housecleaners who reside on the Island year-round and immediately offer temporary accommodations to Joe.
Their increasingly odd behavior about his age, appearance, and unexpected presence on the island float over Joe’s head, but in reality, both Howie and Lenny are witches, part of the five-member coven whose mystical dancing rituals have the power to protect men from the Great Darkness, a malevolent force with powers to lure men (or employ other men to do their evil bidding) to their deaths by suicide.
Having lost his partner, Elliot, to AIDS several years prior, Joe’s life, still in mourning, is at particularly high risk for doomsaying depression, and as the great dark evil descends and gets to work on the partying men of Fire Island, the Disco Witches all have their spell work cut out for them.
Can they save Joe in time from a horrific fate? Could the super sexy Fergal the Ferryman step in and save our hero from drowning in misery during the “dark summer of the soul” at the hands of the Great Darkness? In the end, disco always makes everything better, as it’s always done.
Fell cleverly keeps the character-driven chapters short, succinct, and playfully flamboyant, propelling the book along at a brisk pace with the action strumming along. The author channels the 1980s era perfectly and tosses in all the disco-soundtracked, drag-sequined, sweat-saturated, raised boardwalk-ed Cherry Grove Meat Rack-cruising details of a hot, humid summer on Fire Island to beautiful effect.
The supernatural witchy elements are handled with surprising dexterity and a knowing sense of spooky realness, particularly for certain readers familiar with how dark hexes can clash with the positive energies, good fortunes, and protective blessings dispatched by works of white magic.
Set in 1989, it’s a forgone conclusion that the book will include the heavy essence of the AIDS epidemic, which Fell resonantly captures with grace, black humor, authenticity, and the kind of nostalgia which many of us would prefer to forget. But HIV does indeed play a significant role in this novel as it unifies its characters in ways nothing else possibly could.
While all the campy, fiery, frothy, witchcraft-generated dramatics might seem like too much candy-coated queer fiction to a casual observer, there is so much more here as Fell’s novel has oceans of heart, honest emotion, meaning, and community spirit to spare.
Blair Fell will discuss his novel with author Jim Provenzano at Fabulosa Books, 489 Castro Street in SF, on Sunday, May 18, at 5pm. www.fabulosabooks.com
‘Disco Witches of Fire Island’ by Blair Fell, Alcove Press/Penguin-Random House, $19.99
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