Beautiful
Dreamersnovel by Chris Kent
First New Chris Kent Novel In Years!
Beautiful
Dreamers
novel by Chris
Kent
What the Reviewers are saying:
Beautiful Dreamers is not a tawdry tale of young
victims lured into destructive relationships, but the young students of Bruce
Academy are usually the sexual aggressors. As usual with Chris Kent's fiction,
the plot is engaging, the characters are believable, and the sex scenes are
torrid. He depicts in unapologetic terms a world with changing boundaries,
where some of the adolescent boys choose to dally with willing mature men;
the jail bait are in control and they play a dangerous game with each other
and their older lovers. This is uncertain territory that may create some
degree of controversy.
— David Chapman
----------------
Author Chris Kent is fascinated with the sexual awakening of boys. In the
past, his books have cut a fine line between child-sex and the reality of
the sexual experiences that shape a young man, especially a young gay man,
and give him a sense of his own sexual power and desire. In Beautiful
Dreamers this line is not just blurred, it's obliterated. The result
is a novel that is purposefully controversial and titillating and ultimately
a bit disturbing.
The story takes place in familiar territory for Kent:
an English boarding school. Young protagonist, Donny Cameron, roams the halls
of Bruce Academy with a wide-eyed but naive sexual desire for his classmates
and fortunately for this preteen, his peers are just as curious. Initially
they do a lot of groping, probing and eye-opening on their own and though
it would be illegal to film these encounters, the innocence and play of their
youthful discoveries reminds most gay men of some of their own early sexual
rites of passage.
But Kent doesn't leave it there. Inevitably these boys
will become men and in order for their sexual games to progress they must
gather information from men. This is where the sexual depictions become more
disturbing. Some of the boys have much older lovers, lovers they claim to
have pursued and seduced of their own accord and with full knowledge of the
consequences.
Kent knows this has the potential to cross the line with
readers; later in the novel a grown-up Donny questions the man/boy pairings
andwonders about the wisdom of telling these stories. Is it pornography,
he wonders, since porn is a picture and the picture is in readers' minds
and not in the act itself, nor in the intent behind it?
But Donny's questions seem thrown out to distract from
what Kent really wants to do, which is to depict these encounters as
realistically and as explicitly as possible. He doesn't shy away from the
graphic nature of it, makes the boys willing participants to it, and claims
it is the truth of the event. But let's face it, he gets off on it and he
knows others do to.
Kent is trapped in the innocence of these depictions
and in the singular notion that the truth of it makes it okay. Maybe it does.
Ultimately, each reader will have to decide for himself whether Kent succeeds
in opening a dialogue or crossing a line.
--- Will Louis, X-Factor
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