King Trevor

Recently I did something I have never done before, and will rarely ever do again—I read an advance copy of a novel, King Trevor by Susan Helene Gottfried, on my computer screen. Why did I do this? Because it’s the sequel to Trevor’s Song, and I very much wanted to know what happens next.

While Trevor’s Song was well-plotted, King Trevor is more of a character study that peters out. It answers some of the questions it raises, but leaves others open, and the effect is anticlimactic.

Trevor is now coping in his own inimitable fashion with his physical constraints. That part will ring true to almost anyone who has ever been through physical therapy:
“This defeated pose was so unlike Trevor, it was almost scary. Except… she’d seen it an awful lot lately. The longer it had been since Trevor’s onstage collapse, the more he’d done this. As if the slow healing was more devastating than the actual injury.”

We also see Trevor stepping in to help his best friend Mitchell’s wife Kerri with her family troubles. We learn more about Kerri, but the final revelation about her family doesn’t seem to me to justify all the secrecy and build-up. It seems like Kerri’s mother is a merely an overbearing conformist:
“I’ve been living my very public life while my dear, darling mother tells everyone I’m dead!” … Stevie kept watching her, trying to understand this new Kerri. In so many ways, she was the same sister he’d grown up with, but how could she be? From the night she’d left on the spur of the moment, making him drive her to the bus station at midnight, until now, her life was a mystery to him. All he really knew was the bare bones: She’d gotten to town in the middle of the night and wound up living with two drag queens, rent-free if she kept the place clean. She’d posed nude for art classes to help meet her tuition and turned into one of the rare straight women who was accepted by the drag queen community. Being a whiz with their makeup and then, after art school, painting their portraits as a way to bring in money hadn’t hurt, either. That’s when she’d met Mitchell—and had been oblivious enough to believe he was a struggling musician. But more than that, Stevie had no clue. Was her favorite color still purple? What were her favorite TV shows?”

Still, the pleasure of a novel about Trevor is seeing Trevor in action, and there’s plenty of that. The scene he makes when Kerri finally agrees to meet her mother in a restaurant is lovely:
Trevor made a show of yawning—loudly—and stretching his arms over his head. “Yeah, it’s all about you, lady.” He sat forward, his brown eyes snapping. “Don’t you know dick around here? I’m Trevor Fucking Wolff, and it’s all about me, not you. Now shut your whining and tell me how having you around is going to do more than piss me off.”

From the way King Trevor ends, I’m hoping there will be a third novel, and it could even be the second book I’m willing to read on a screen. So my disappointment in this sequel may be only a momentary chafing because it wasn’t long enough and didn’t yet deliver on all the promises it makes.