GLR January-February 2026

ways the martyr yet always the monster. We are always symbols and never people.” Di vided into three sections, “Selfhood,” “De sire,” and “Coming to Light,” the book uses speeches, family history stories, and re portage from seventeen contributors to ex plore issues ranging from language and word choice to embracing anger and its inner power. There are many high points, including Vanessa Angelica Villareal on the created worlds of video games, “the only place to imagine wholeness ... a site of (im)possible futures,” and “Trick,” Meredith Talusan’s first-person mix of the comic, the erotic, and the terrifying. The feelings the essayists describe of not fitting in and chafing against constricting notions of gender will be famil iar to many readers. Novelist Caro De Robertis comments: “For some of us, the training to keep ourselves small or distort our own truth for the comfort of others runs deep, below consciousness. ... None of that worked as well once I let my whole gender exist in my skin. The change expanded me. … I had to access more of myself than ever before.” For those wanting to understand the inner lives and hopes of trans and gen der-nonconforming people, Both/And is an excellent place to begin. R EGINALD H ARRIS TWIST by Bruce Parkinson Spang Warren Publishing. 124 pages, $17.95 Many of the poems in Bruce Parkinson Spang’s Twist flesh out the portrait of a boy growing up beneath a “pure suburban sky” in the 1950s. Innocence abounds—most memorably in the wide eyes of a five-year old gazing down a row of men standing at a long urinal at a drive-in theater’s men’s room, and in a young boy’s enjoyment of physical closeness while his father lifts his sleepy little body from their car, gets him into his pajamas, and puts him to bed. Unsettling questions, however, keep nip ping at this youth’s serenity, as in the poem “August, 1956,” when Allen Ginsberg’s dis turbing lines of poetry puncture the peace of sleepaway camp, where the speaker misses his time with Ricky Nelson’s “heavy-lidded, bedroom eyes/ and pouty lower lip” back home on The Adventures of Ozzie and Har riet . Poems that convey just how unmoored a closeted man finds himself when his mar riage breaks up and when his father dies deepen and expand this collection’s primary focus on boyhood. Readers will admire Spang’s skills with syntax, rhythm, and lin eation in poems like “Useless” and “Our First Orbit,” where the pacing that he or chestrates accentuates the movement toward resolutions that satisfy in terms of sonics and sense. S TEVEN R IEL

“A MOST INFAMOUS YOUNG SWINDLER” The Short Tragic Life of Thomas Langrel Harris by Patricia J. Fanning Rock Street Press. 200 pages, $24.99 A model and aspiring artist, Thomas Lan grel Harris drowned himself in Paris at age 24. Like many fin-de-siècle contemporaries, he was beautiful, erratic, and gone too soon. Harris undoubtedly had talent—Edward Steichen greatly admired his paintings, most posthumously destroyed by fire in 1904— but he left only the barest trace in the histor ical record. In A Most Infamous Young Swindler, Patricia J. Fanning, biographer of photographer F. Holland Day, attempts to overcome this obstacle. Growing up in Kansas City, the scion of an upper-middle-class family, Harris’ artis tic nature, along with what Fanning diag noses as bipolar disorder, alienated him from his stolidly Midwestern parents. Alien ation remained a theme throughout his short life, as Harris bounced across North Amer ica and Europe, leaving in his wake a series of debts for which his irritated friends be came responsible. These friends included Day, for whom Harris modeled in Boston and who was in love with him, and Oscar Wilde, briefly charmed by Harris during his exile in France. Fanning’s best passage dis cusses several Day photographs for which Harris modeled, including correcting the record about a frontal nude previously as sumed to be a study for Day’s famed Cruci fixion series. The problem is that, despite valiant efforts, there isn’t enough material about Harris to justify a full biography. Two chapters about his much younger sisters, who also wanted to be artists but never knew their brother, are ir relevant to the subject at hand. Fanning’s bi ography reads like a scholarly article padded to book length, and indeed she previously published two articles examining Harris’ re lationships with Day and Wilde. P HILIP C LARK BOTH/AND: Essays by Trans and Gender Nonconforming Writers of Color In Both/And , Electric Literature editor-in chief Denne Michele Norris brings into print previously online essays chronicling trans and gender-nonconforming life. In a project initiated at Norris’ nonprofit digital publisher because of her “fury” over Dave Chappelle’s transphobic “jokes” in his 2021 Netflix special TheCloser , the writers of color gathered here mostly use personal narrative to explode competing, and often contradictory, stereotypes about their com munities. As Kai Cheng Thom writes: “We are always the saint yet also the shadow, al Edited by Denne Michele Norris HarperOne. 240 pages, $27.99

MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story Created by Ian Brennan Ne tf lix Does cannibalism need nuance? Does incest? Antisemitic sadism at the hands of the Nazis? How about transgender people who delight in human torture and wearing their dead mother’s panties? Monster: The Ed Gein Story argues that you’re not think ing deeply enough about such matters, and it follows two previous installments on Jef frey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. The third entry in Ryan Murphy’s franchise tells the lurid tale of Wisconsin-based psy chopath Ed Gein (1906–1984), whose body count was relatively low—he only con fessed to two murders—though, if Monster is to be believed, he spawned the entire hor ror genre as we know it. Murphy, the Herculean Hollywood pro ducer of Glee , American Horror Story , and American Crime Story , has said that the the sis of the series is the question of whether monsters are made or simply born that way.

Gein’s killings inspired some of the mighti est tentpoles in horror cinema. Beyond Psy cho , there’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , The Silence of the Lambs , and even the trope of the babysitter in distress. The most con troversial episode in Monster , “Sick as Your Secrets,” links Gein’s grave-robbing and dancing around in female flesh with the hid den homosexuality of actor Anthony Perkins (aka Norman Bates), who died of AIDS-re lated illness in 1992. Perkins (played by Joey Pollari) turns to a shrink for an electro convulsive bout of conversion therapy. The online outrage was as swift as it was justifiable. Why, in this especially dark time for trans people and trans rights, are Murphy and Ian Brennan serving up the visual equiv alent of food poisoning? After being shown the set of Psycho , with Alfred Hitchcock as his personal tour guide, Perkins rushes off stage to vomit. My sentiment, exactly: The third season of Monster —unfortunately, more incarnations are in production—leaves the bitterest of aftertastes. C OLIN C ARMAN Charlie Hunnam in Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

January–February 2026

37