- Swarm
- by Camille Roy
- 1998, published by Black Star Series
- designed by Jay Schwarz
- s120 pp, 5.5" x 8.5", offset, three color cover, 3 pages of color xerox
- only $8.50
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These startling, witty stories take an astringent view of America's sexual paradise. Combining a playwright's keen ear for speech with a poet's vivid eye, the tone throughout is darkly comic as the young narrator stumbles from her tense inner city home through Lesbian Nation, dyke-run massage parlors, the homes of the wealthy, and eccentric sexual lives of all kinds.
Critics on SWARM--
Erin Blackwell in The Bay Area Reporter:
Some books you read word for word, because the way the words follow one another is so delicious, such a shock. Like listening to a brilliant baby babble. Like learning a new language. Camille Roy's SWARM, a book containing two novellas, is such a book.... The stories Roy tells have a quirky, shifting urgency about them, akin to dreams. Why is she telling us these stories? Why are we reading them? Here's my guess: Roy has an unbeatable gift for rendering the most intangible experience in lyrically zany terms.... Physically, SWARM looks like no other paperback you've ever held in your hand. The cover is mauve cardstock imprinted with silver rococo curlicues, plus title and byline in grape... Its a satisfying and strangely luxurious object Richard LaBonte in SF Frontlines:
There's certainly much more to a good book than just its look, but first let's praise the texture and feel of local poet and (with this book) fiction writer Camille Roy's two-novella collection: it's a beauty to hold. And to have: Roy writes with passionate directness and subversive humor about the usual good stuff---sex and love, lust and need---in a fresh engaging way. Rebecca Brown in The Stranger:
What's swarmy in these stories is the stickiness of growing up, of having skin, like a snake's you ought to shed but you're not ready to yet, but you are waiting, itching to. It's about clouds of things that come from nowhere or are always ready to, like locusts or frogs or blood, the summer-sticky skin of adolescence, of first sex, that sourness... The writing in this book is thick and viscous in some places, thin and cool and dries off your skin immediately in others. It's like when you grow up and discover and almost drown from sex, from story-telling, the way you long and are afraid to. It also, in some ways, helps: "Being a dyke...helps you get over being a girl, but so does whoring or professional sports. Back then I thought I was smelling my own death, and what do you do with that?" back