Review of Vintage by Author Steve Berman

A Chilling Award Nominee Gay Ghost Story Re-Released By Lethe Press

Oct 13, 2008

Vintage, an emotionally charged, haunting gay ghost story from award winning writer Steve Berman, re-released by Lethe Press, proves to be anything but stuck in the past.

Steve Berman’s new title, Vintage, re-released by Lethe Press, tells the story of a disaffected teen who's interest in the macabre leads him to strangers' funerals and nights of experimenting with the occult, all the while searching for the one universality each person shares: he wants someone to love.

Then, whilst strolling down an empty stretch of highway late at night, he finds himself confronted by a handsome stranger in vintage attire who looks like he just climbed out of the 1950's. Which, in a manner of speaking, he did.

The man is an urban legend, a ghost talked about in that small country town, and now he haunts our hero with a grip that is lethal, and so it is a race against time for our hero to unshackle himself from this mesmerizing apparition or perish in Vintage, a gay urban ghost story.

Vintage by Steve Berman is first and foremost a character piece, where by the protagonist, a lovelorn goth hanging around cemeteries and courting death like a first and final lover, comes to terms with the horror of parents that do not want him because of his sexuality, and who’s fascination with death is overtaken by a need to live and enjoy the love he eventually finds.

As such, Vintage is highly successful in creating a full array of characters that are distinct, lively and realistic, and what is more, the emotions that they respond with and the conflicts that arise feel organic and will resonate with any reader, especially a gay audience.

The prose in Steve Berman’s gay urban ghost story, especially in the scenes of the haunting and the sudo-sexual possessions, which read, in some respects, like rape scenes, are like a chill to the spine who’s finesse can’t be shaken, and the urgency in the authorial voice provides a trip-hammer pace for which to turn the page.

It is easy to see why Steve Berman has won awards for his fiction, and non so more than here where the literary landscape of queer speculative fiction has honoured Berman time and time again with various nominations from the Galactic Space Award to being a finalist for the 2008 Andre Norton Award.

In terms of its subject matter, Vintage is an important book in the literary field as it gives voice to gay teenagers whom may be struggling to find their own in an equally scary world. For this Steve Berman should be commended.

And whilst there were some minor technical inaccuracies in the reprint of Vintage, this gay urban ghost story from Steve Berman shines like a pair of sinister eyes in the moonlight and entertains from start to finish.

(Vintage by Steve Berman, Re-released by Lethe Press Trade Paperback, 208 pages, ISBN 1-59021-053-0)

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