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Book Review: Torrey Peters, Stag Dance
42 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, I review Torrey Peters' book Stag Dance (2025). These book reviews will drop into the feed in between interviews. You can also find the review on the YouTube channel. Go subscribe if you haven't already!
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to Books Up Close Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
and welcome to Books Up Close, the podcast. This is a special little drop in your feed. If you know Books Up Close from YouTube, you'll know that I used to do book reviews and then this podcast was spin-off.
00:00:20
Speaker
The plan is from now on to drop little book reviews in between regular episodes on the podcast and and I will also be putting them on the YouTube channel too. So if you prefer to see me as I give these book reviews, you can go to YouTube to
Integrating Book Reviews and Author Discussions
00:00:37
Speaker
find them.
00:00:37
Speaker
If you want to listen, you can hear them here. I will drop them in this podcast feed. Hopefully this will help link together those reviews with the conversations with authors that I hope you are enjoying.
Review of Stag Dance
00:00:51
Speaker
What better way to start, really, than to review Stag Dance by Tori Peters, which is a book I have been waiting for, longing for, for such a long time since Tori Peters released Detransition Baby, which I think I reviewed on here. I've been obsessed with her writing and her thinking. Like, she's really incredible.
00:01:10
Speaker
I think she's wonderful. In every interview, she's really amazing. ah highly recommend a couple of interviews. She does one with... The Lab Radio Hour podcast, I would go listen to that. And I would also listen to the one she does with Tracy Thomas on the stacks, both of which are really good. And both of them kind of informed my reading after I'd finished the book.
00:01:29
Speaker
So Stag Dance is... Well, depends on where you live in the world, it's called different things, but they are four stories, maybe novellas, maybe long short stories, maybe it doesn't really matter what we call them.
00:01:42
Speaker
They're longer than most short stories, but, well, some of them are. It doesn't really matter. Whatever they are, there's four of them, and they are utterly joyous. All four in this book, and also can we please talk about how beautiful this ah version is and the cover is fantastic.
00:01:58
Speaker
All four, as Peter describes in an interview with Tracy Thomas in that show, they talk about genre and gender and how those two things relate.
00:02:08
Speaker
And all four of the stories are kind of in a particular genre mode. and explore questions of gender, questions of sexuality, questions of identity in very different
Exploring Gender and Identity in Stag Dance
00:02:20
Speaker
ways.
00:02:20
Speaker
So the first one is called Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, which Tori Peters wrote a long time ago, way before Detransition Baby. And it's a kind of post-apocalyptic story and it kind of jumps around in time. It's really, really good.
00:02:32
Speaker
It reminded me also of Carmen Maria Machado's short story Inventory, which is in... What's the book called? Your Body and Other Parties? Whatever that book is called.
00:02:43
Speaker
Or Her Body and Other the Parties. I forget. And it really reminds me of that story in that they're both using the apocalyptic form, that kind of genre convention, but doing really, really interesting things with it.
00:02:56
Speaker
And in this version... in this new world everyone has to inject hormones because of this virus that's kind of raging around and so it kind of takes this kind of commonplace for trans people and trans identity about kind of hormone injection and taking and it means that everyone in the planet has to do and it's a really interesting funny commentary on what gender is how it operates how it works in the world. I mean, it really opens up all those questions that, you know, the anti-trans lot hate about kind of gender confirmation surgery and gender confirmation processes, right? How many cisgender people have hair transplants or boob jobs or kind of injections of various kinds?
00:03:39
Speaker
any number of procedures that alter your sense of self and the sense of how you present your gender like this is what trans people are doing and this is what the story is kind of interested in but it's doing it in the form of this post-apocalyptic story which is like tense and engaging and really really really readable and and funny The second story is called The Chaser and it's set at like a boarding school. It's very much like a teen romance kind of story.
00:04:05
Speaker
Very, very different from the first one where you kind of jumped to that one. Again, it's really beautiful. The ending was really shocking actually. It gets quite violent in one particular moment that really had me surprised. I didn't know we were going there.
00:04:18
Speaker
And again, it's a really beautiful story about desire, about gender and femininity and... all kinds of secrets. The third part of the book, which is the longest story, which you probably would call a novella because it's quite long, is called Stag Dance. It's the title story and it is so good. it is set in like the 19th century and it's about a group of loggers in the Pacific Northwest and it's written in this old logging language that Tory Peters found with this dictionary.
00:04:47
Speaker
So they use all these different kinds of words. It takes you a while to get into part of it. And the story kind of leads up to this stag dance where all the men, they're kind of in the depths of winter logging these trees before the kind of forest service realise they're doing it.
00:05:01
Speaker
And they have this stag dance where all the men get together and a few of the men become women for the evening, right? And dress as women and kind of act as the person to be wooed. And our main character is someone who is huge and ugly, is how he's kind of described, and really kind of just grotesque.
00:05:19
Speaker
But he wants to be the woman in this scenario. And the story kind of follows them. There's also loads other stuff going on. It is really, really joyous in some ways. It's really shocking in other ways. It's beautifully done. The ending actually is so unbelievably moving.
00:05:36
Speaker
I was really taken aback, because at times it kind of feels like... just kind of historical fiction or kind of fun historical fiction. It's thinking through questions of gender, of course, and history and masculinity and all these things.
00:05:47
Speaker
And then Tori Peters isn't just that kind of writer. She will take you there emotionally. And it really blew me away. The ending really took me by surprise. And the emotional punch was massive.
00:06:00
Speaker
And then the fourth story is called The Masker, which is kind of like a horror kind of thriller story set in Las Vegas and is about a young cross-dresser who goes to this convention in Las Vegas and is torn between these two people. One, this older trans woman who's kind of trying to take ah the protagonist under her wing and is like, oh, you are just like a trans girl. Like, this is going to happen for you. this is what you need to do. do-dada Like, really trying to be there for her. And then this other character who's a guy who dresses up in this...
00:06:28
Speaker
kind of leather bodysuit, this kind of woman suit if you like. And he's kind of creepy but is also doing it for different reasons, for kind of sexual reasons but also other things and the main character is kind of drawn between these two poles and it's tense, it's weird.
00:06:44
Speaker
It's Vegas, so all those kind of Vegas stories weird. And it is just very, very readable. And the ending is also quite tense.
Tori Peters' Literary Exploration
00:06:52
Speaker
And really, i don't know, across these four different tales, Tori Peters is telling us a couple of things to me.
00:06:58
Speaker
One is that she's interested in form more than anything, really. She, from Dee's transition baby to this, she's interested in what form can do and what literary form is able to do in thinking about gender and thinking about performativity and thinking about the kind of life stories we tell about ourselves and about others and she's just more than anything interested in like good storytelling like call her a trans writer if you like call her a writer of kind of trans identity just call her a writer because she knows how to write a sentence she knows how to tell the story
00:07:36
Speaker
You will fly through this book, I promise you.
Engaging the Audience
00:07:39
Speaker
is really enjoyable, really fun, but also thought-provoking. Highly recommend. Highly, highly recommend.
00:07:47
Speaker
If you've read it, if you've read other Tory Peter stuff, let me know in the comments. Let me know what you think. If you're watching this on YouTube, add comments below. and like this video if you're listening on the podcast please get in touch there's a microsoft form that you can fill out that's linked in the show notes or you can get in contact via instagram or any of the other modes um i would love to hear what you think about this book and the other things that you're reading right now so until the next episode which might be a review it might be an interview with someone ah thank you for watching and listening and take care of yourselves keep reading and see you soon
00:08:26
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode. Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave a review and share with people you know. You can also follow the show and me on Instagram at Books Up Close and on YouTube.
00:08:38
Speaker
And if you can, please do fill out the feedback form linked in the show notes. It's really helpful to us. You can get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the Substack.
00:08:51
Speaker
This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.