Additional Reviews

What the reviewers of Secret Buddies said the first time around:

Do these words give you the beginnings of a hard-on: bus trip, bunk beds, tanktop, bleachers, backpack, pickup truck, campfire, sleeping bag? Then I recommend Mike Newman's Secret Buddies. Newman's book is equal parts longing and sex, nostalgia and innocence – pure gay Americana. — Aaron Travis There are times when you read for escapism and there are times when you read for – ahem – personal pleasure. Secret Buddies is Mike Newman's first novel and details a young man's struggle to find his sexual identity through a career as a forest fire fighter. The rough and randy road he roams from virgin to bisexual to confirmed homosexual makes for some raucous reading. — Mark C. Canterbury, Southern Exposure Coming of age, coming out, and coming are the themes dominating this unabashedly randy novel. The all-male camp is ripe with horny men, surging hormones, cool, starry nights, and deep, shady woods perfect for secret encounters. Newman's writing is right on: juicy, raunchy, hungry and raw. It's downright cinematic, and the reader has the best seat in the house. — Ken Furtado, Echo Magazine, June 30, 1993 Q: Do you read contemporary fiction? A: Having to read a lot of manuscripts, reference books, heavy-duty poets and what not, I read what you might call drugstore fiction. I read dirty books. Q: Do you have a favorite? A: I just read a very good one, called Secret Buddies, by one Mike Newman. In California. It's about lumberjacks out in Idaho. A real pleasure. The most open and honest book I've read since John Valentine's Puppies. — "High Art & Low Life: an interview with Jonathan Williams" The James White Review, Fall 1993 Mike Newman knows that belles lettres erotica must both titillate and have style, tone, structure, characterization, fine descriptive passages, and intelligence. Humor abounds…"Erections are like yawns—they're contagious;" "no man with a hard-on is a stranger;" "there's no stopping a man halfway through a fuck;" if you pull too hard on a cock straining to come it might spurt "like a stepped-on tube of toothpaste." Later, when Billy regales us with the pleasures of being finger-fucked, the writing evokes Henry Miller. And the parallel is apt, for at one point the wimp Stanley reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while Billy reads Miller's Tropic of Cancer. "Anyway," Billy says, "don't you like a little smut when you read?" During a vicious lightning and thunder storm, an intense fuck session leads to this observation: "Obscenity is like looking at clouds. Do you know how clouds have shapes, and you can see animals and stuff in them. Well, do you know what you see if you look at clouds through binoculars? Nothing, just fog. Clouds are just fog, and when you look at them too close, they vaporize. All white nothing. "It's the same with sex and shit and piss and everything. If you look at it up close, it's not dirty or obscene. It's just there…sex is only dirty because people hide it. The whole world is backwards, you know." — "A review by Robert Peters," The James White Review, Fall 1995 Secret Buddies is the kind of book that Jack Kerouac would have written had he been openly gay and completely uninhibited. Aaron Travis calls it "pure gay Americana." I call it pure, unadulterated whack-off material, which is good enough for me — Jesse Monteagudo, TWN, October 28, 1992. Back to Secret Buddies 2