1991. For some, it was the beginning of a decade of nonstop fun, brand new pop, and the sounds of the approaching millennia. For others, its was the marker of a decade of struggle thought an epidemic that had swept the world, quietly erasing friends and family, charging public fear and outrage. Paranoia grew. The LGBTQ+ community mourned. And men disappeared like smoke…or steam.
Enter Jay B. Laws, a playwright and author who, like many in the community, was trying to make sense of what was happening around him. He wrote plays. He wrote articles. He protested. And in 1991, his first novel was published. A year later, he would also be gone, a casualty of the same plague that became the central horror of his stories.
Steam begins with a man slitting his own wrists. This isn’t a spoiler. It’s a catalyst, an act of desperation that will set in motion everything that comes after it.
His name is Flint, and he didn’t come to this decision lightly or quickly. It had been building in him for years. Since the first time he’d heard the word GRID in reference to a strange new disease that was sweeping through his clientele. He owned a bathhouse, you see? Right in the center of San Francisco.
Or, he had.
Right up until 1987 when the city shut him down along with all the other gay bathhouses and no few gay clubs. They were trying to be proactive, trying to get ahead of the disease that had come to be known as HIV and AIDS. They were trying to keep young men from dying, and somehow they thought that removing their community, their meeting grounds, their sanctuaries was the way to go about it.
They were wrong, of course. And by 1987, though the number of gay and bisexual and queer men dying of AIDS far outnumbered their straight counterparts, it was no longer just a gay disease.
But Flint…Flint had escaped it, or so he thought. Until that day when he got his diagnosis and then, the years fell on his shoulders, and he decided he wasn’t going to waste away like so many men he loved had. He was taking matters into his own hands. He went back to his bathhouse, aptly named the Cavern, and turned on the hot tub jets. He climbed inside and opened his dark flesh allowing the blood to flow and his life to slowly, gently slip away.
But Flint isn’t alone. As he fades, another presence rises, and in that moment, he uses Flint’s own blood, the very thing that had betrayed him, to ignite a dark and terrifying curse that would soon begin to sweep the streets of San Francisco at an alarming rate. Taking men indiscriminately. Promising them every pleasure, every freedom, everything that had been denied them for going on a decade.
All they had to do was die.
Jay B. Laws knew well the horror he was writing about. That visceral lived reality is splashed in blood and various other bodily fluids on every page of the expansive novel, written from multiple perspectives and encapsulating a moment in gay history that few have written about with such a personal flair.
The community was living a horror story, fighting a faceless thing, but in Steam, Laws gave that horror a face, a name, a purpose, and an appetite that feels all too real when looking back on the time frame. This was, after all, a period when many in the community had begun keeping track of the years by how many funerals they had attended, by how many times they heard a friend had “it,” and by how many times, they themselves had the big scare before finding out they were safe…this time.
As the book’s story sprawls over the pages, the author offers multiple viewpoints, each with their own stakes in this particular game. There’s David, a writer who after a terrible accident finds himself only able to write erotic stories for some of the skin mags. They pay the bills, but they don’t feed his soul the way he wants.
Mick is beautiful. The kind of beautiful that turns heads no matter where he goes. Bobby, Mick’s boyfriend, leans on the bearish side of things and love his man so much that he’s terrified of losing him. Eddie lies in a hospital room, staring at the ceiling, dreaming of the glory days when he was just as beautiful as Mickey was. He longs for the days before. Before the sickness, before the funerals, before everyone was afraid. Before he was afraid.
Officer Alex Webster is just a little too charming and a little too eager to help for anyone to believe he’s entirely straight.
Add to that an overbearing psychic mother and New Age bookstore owner with a homophobic son, and the Beast himself, that nebulous being searching for something ancient and taking as many souls as he can along the way, and you’ve got a powder keg.
Especially when those lives begin to intersect.
Laws’s prose never slows down and barely gives the reader a moment to breathe save for rare moments when the characters find it themselves. These moments, though often sacred, are not to be trusted however, as there is always a new horror around the bend.
What I love most is the author’s way of grabbing the reader and daring them to look, daring them to acknowledge what is happening. There’s only so long you can ignore a problem before it becomes your problem. There’s only so many ways you can try not to see what is happening in front of you until your eyelids are ripped away and you have no choice.
Reader be warned, this is a transgressive book. It will make your skin crawl and your stomach turn. You may find yourself wondering at times if you even want to know how this will end, or if it will at all. But that’s why you’re reading. You came for horror and Laws was a master at laying it out.
As I mentioned in the beginning, Laws died only a year after this book was published. His second and final novel, The Unfinished was published a year after his death. Both are excellent reads and I cannot recommend them enough. It’s heartbreaking to know he was gone so soon and to dream of the books that would have followed if he’d been with us longer.
For more on Laws and his books click here and find his books on Amazon.
