Follow the adventures of a gay, teenaged, virgin geek with uncontrollable hormones in this smart and funny coming-of-age novel.

All too rarely you read a wonderful book that is so sexy, so true-to-life, and so laugh-out-loud funny you want to tell the world. Conversely, the book means so much to you that you just want to hug it to yourself and keep it secret. Add to this list The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second by Drew Ferguson (Kensington), a book so joyous I read it in one sitting – I couldn’t bear to put it down. It’s Ferguson’s debut novel although his short stories have appeared in various gay journals such as James White Review, Blithe House Quarterly, etc. and three of them are available to download on his website.

Charles James Stewart II, a gay, 17-year-old, virgin geek with poor self-image but is skilled as a soccer goalkeeper, has a supportive straight stud mate, Bink, and a hyper-critical dad, a wannabe Illinois Attorney General, whom he calls First and who is less than happy about his son’s sexual preference.

Coming-of-age novels/plays/films always go down a treat with gay men and this one is exceptional. It charts, in diary form à la The Diary of Adrian Mole, a tumultuous period in Charlie’s life during which his family almost disintegrates. He is having severe problems controlling his sex drive, falls in love with sexually experienced but haunted Rob, a new boy from Manhattan, and has to navigate the usual shoals of high school life

Although the book is not sold as erotica (and what’s with the cheat notes at the back of the novel for book clubs?), its sex scenes are highly erotic as well as achingly funny in that teenage lust way many of us lived through. But for all Charlie’s teenage erections (has there ever been a hero before with five inches?) Ferguson captures beautifully the indiscriminate and rampant nature of hormonal attraction. Charlie’s  self-deprecating geekdom is what makes this book so agonisingly real but also such a delight.Ferguson, though, does not eschew tragedy and his exploration of the everyday ordinariness of death catches in your throat.

A very different Charlie began life in a short story called Star as a secondary character but was seen as a bit of an arsehole. Ferguson set out to redeem him and over a two year period he took on a new life of his own. And that life included a preoccupation with sex, particularly masturbation.

As Ferguson reveals on his website: “I wanted Charlie to come across as being real and authentic, which meant not shying away from the fact that, at seventeen, Charlie was going to be thinking about sex on an almost constant basis and that he’d be desperate to get off—by himself or with someone else. And since the novel is set up as if it were Charlie’s diary, there’s no reason why he’d censor himself about sex, especially when he wasn’t censoring the way he wrote about his friends and family. I wanted the sex in the book to be explicit—in the sense that the reader actually knew who was doing what to whom; not that, ‘and then we made love’ garbage—but it also had to be more than just a graphic how-to (‘insert slot A into hole B’). Ultimately, if the sex didn’t reveal something about a character or change a character, it ended up getting cut.”

Ferguson has successfully put the coming in coming-of-age.

The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second is out now through Kensington Publishing.

drewferguson.com

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