Readers have waited nine years since his angry, funny Ferro-Grumley winning debut Through It Came Bright Colors
[Kindle] twenty-one year old Seamus Blake bicycles from San Francisco to Buffalo, New York carrying the ashes of his boyfriend Jimmy who died of aids. En route he meets truckers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and a young Indian mourning his mother. Kevin Killian calls it "a great love story, one with political vibrations, the tragic tenderness of Leonard Cohen's early LPs andnovels, and the manic queer energy of William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys."Maureen Seaton says the novel is "simply, inexorably beautiful. It is sexy, cinematic, the prose itself an absolute joy to read, and often funny as holy hell. It is, at the same time, one of the saddest works I have ever read: piercing, poignant, and memorable."
Of Healey's other new book Faun [Kindle], Mark Thompson said, "This magical tale about a boy unexpectedly turning into a faun is funny, poignant and erotic. Faun offers a wise meditation on our relationship to the earth as well as each other—and to our sexuality, which is the 'greenest' part of us all." PW wrote, "Both strikingly beautiful and coarsely humorous, this engaging novel by urban fantasist Healey, anchored in the sensibilities of the West Coast Mexican-American community, gives the modern bildungsroman a magical twist... the themes of self-discovery in a world that doesn't understand you will appeal strongly to grown fans of supernatural...'' Lethe explains:
"One morning Gilberto Rubio wakes up with a five o'clock shadow. Puberty. But why are his legs getting so furry? And what are these little horn nubs pushing out of his scalp? What's that nub of a tail that's making it so hard to sit on anything but couches? His peers begin to treat him like a freak, while his anxious mother Lupita crosses herself and worries about his eternal soul and what might be happening to it. When his mere presence begins to stir the hormones of anyone nearby and the pregnancy rate suddenly skyrockets at Buenaventura High, Gilberto panics, and hopping aboard his skateboard vanishes into Hollywood before hitchhiking out of Los Angeles to find a mysterious stranger he met online who just might have some answers."
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