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In life, hating as I do crowded bars, smoke, drugs, and late hours, I would be perfectly miserable in the dance club in which much of the action takes place in Serah’s first novel. In fiction, I was sucked into the scene from the opening sentences: "It was 3:14 a.m. by Joey’s Pop Halo watch and a bank of sweat and stale disco smoke was rolling across Klub Galaxy like a skanky fog. Joey tried blinking but he could barely see past the end of his arm. One glance up, though, and he knew exactly where he was – beneath the spinning lantern, dead center on the dance floor of San Francisco’s biggest queer night klub. This was his spot, where he danced every weekend, surrounded by hundreds of glistening male bodies sliding against one another like sausages in a meat factory, while the deep house mixes of DJ Marcus Barker made the air vibrate in front of his eyes." Captured by this kaleidoscopic appeal to the senses, I raced through the book, pausing halfway to relish the 16 color illustrations provided by Gina Wick, until I reached the last of the 48 short episodes, reading more for sheer pleasure than to identify the murderer. I realize that this novel will not be to everyone’s liking. But for those of you who are still with me, here’s your chance to read an ingenious whodunit told from the perspective of a Filipino-American gay boy in an unconventional but entirely fitting mix of English and some Tagalog, a mix of slang, camp, and political incorrectness, written with some distinctly nontraditional spellings. The first body arrives at the end of episode one, falling almost literally on top of Joey. That’s what he gets for always wanting to dance "dead center." If a DJ tumbles from his booth, Joey’s circle is where he is going to land. Joey reacts with surprising nonchalance, even after a second body takes the same trajectory the following weekend. He is more relieved that he need not endure their musical mixes any longer than he is concerned about their deaths. But when his own photo shows up in the newspapers as a witness wanted for questioning: ". . . it hit him. The suspect is someone I know. Which means someone I know is a murderer." Which means, it’s time to start his own investigation – especially when the police stop pursuing the murders, letting out that both DJs died from drug overdoses. Joey lists the possible suspects and starts plying the internet on his own, hacking his way into some dangerous corners. In short order he plunges into an underworld of child pornography, drug dealing, FBI informers, unscrupulous rice queens, and corrupt police officers. Especially ominous is the transgender officer L Holleman. (". . . was she a he who had been a she or a she who once was a he? Gender gave Joey a headache.") Along the way friends and event force Joey to contemplate the role of organized religion and government in fostering crime and unsafe conditions: "The higher powers didn’t want partying to be safe any more than the church wanted sex to be fun." He has to think about the dangers of money when he discovers his dead father’s hidden legacy. He discovers the value of friends and recognizes simultaneously the strength of family ties and the need to stand finally on his own. Not that the reader necessarily has to think about any of these matters. It’s possible to read the book just for the sheer fun of it. But some of the simplest throwaway lines take on greater significance if one reflects a bit on them. Take this instance: "This was giving Joey a serious existential crisis. How could third-world Manila have a better dance klub than San Francisco, the bading kapital of the world?" The author is just being kute, right? Yet Joey, for the first time, is trying to bring order to his messy life, to identify himself on his own terms, to get "in touch with his Inner Filipino." He is, in truth, undergoing an existential crisis. The novel’s subtitle could just as easily have been "The Transformation of Joey De Vera." The trip on family business to Manila shakes him profoundly. He starts thinking about the effects of colonialism, stereotyping, and ghettoization and the ways they generate unacknowledged self-hatred, vacuous conformity to stereotypes. As a result he begins to move outside the perimeters which he has hitherto allowed to define him. He begins to feel a sense of solidarity with his Filipino brothers. ("If we don’t look out for each other, who will?") When he falls in love with Matthew, he falls in love with Matthew, not, for the first time, with a white boy. Of Joey at the end: "Somehow he sensed that he was no longer the shallow, self-centered circuit boy we met 47 short episodes ago." DROP ... DEAD is one drop-dead dazzling mystery, rich, complex, and witty in a way I have not encountered since I read Ashok Mathur’s equally daring ONCE UPON AN ELEPHANT. I await Serah’s second novel with avidity.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, May 2007
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