I never read anything of the author before, so this collection of stories was such a. Brilliant introduction. Each narrative stands independently, with no direct relation to one another beyond the shared exploration of gender. Despite this separation, the cohesion of the collection works beautifully together, creating a powerful reading experience that I loved. The exploration of the different styles and different storytelling was so refreshing for me, it had some topics that made me feel uncomfortable completely and some point of views that seemed not okay in my own point of view but as a reader I kinda think the author is allowed to express himself ik the way she wants. In the end are just stories. I really need check her work and read a bit more of her work after this brilliant book

I was a huge fan of Detransition Baby and wanted to like this book so much. However, I knly.managed 60% and had to abandon it. The story just didn't engage and I couldn't connect with this. Peter's writes beautiful but this book just want for me. I'll definitely read more of Peters' work, though.

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is an intriguing, genre defying collection of short stories and one novella that proved to be a bit of a mixed bag.

My favourites were definitely Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (dystopian sci-fi) and The Chaser (coming of age romcom with bite) - both of these were tender and clever.

Unfortunately the central novella, Stag Dance, just didn’t work for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t get along with the language and writing style, and that I also had no idea what was going on half the time (the dialogue between the characters was very confusing to me). I really liked the concept (described as Brokeback Mountain but more trans) but not the delivery sadly.

The Masker I just didn’t enjoy. Too much violence and abuse on the page.

However the first two short stories I read were excellent, and the fact that each story is borrowing from a different genre and has different language and writing styles coming from the same author is impressive and unique! Overall a fresh and experimental collection.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

STAG DANCE is a collection of four short stories, the longest of which gives the book its title. As inevitably happens with collections of short stories, I enjoyed some more than others, resulting in an average of four stars (which means I really liked it) across the book as a whole. Each story feels completely different from the next, the characters individualised and the control of genre masterful, and each has a unique take on gender identity and sexuality.

"Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" is a page-turning read, which moves between the time before and after a contagion that prevents people from naturally producing hormones, and thus requires everyone to choose their own gender. I really enjoyed both the premise and the way it is executed, but there is also much more to this story, and I loved the way we get to see two perspectives on the same event (as we also do in "The Masker"). As someone who doesn't always love dystopia, the way this story balanced those elements with a sort of Trans utopia really worked for me.

"The Chaser" is my favourite story in the collection. Described by Peters as a teen romance, it tells the story of a relationship between two roommates at a Quaker boarding school. I just loved how visceral the emotions of this story felt: both the tenderness of the romance, and the adolescent rage of the main character. I also really liked the way Peters explores how homosexual expression is permitted within heterosexual all-male spaces (as she also does in "Stag Dance").

"Stag Dance" recounts how an illegal winter logging outfit entertain themselves with a dance at which some of the loggers must volunteer to attend as women. I really liked the way Peters plays with the idea of gender as performance, but I have to admit that this was my least favourite story in the collection. I found its length a bit of a slog, but fans of the western genre will probably feel differently.

"The Masker" is another favourite for me, set during a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip where a young crossdresser must choose between exciting power games with a mystery man, and the unglamorous reality being offered by a cynical trans woman. I loved the sexiness of this story, with its dark undercurrent, as it explores the world of cross-dressing and fetish. I also found it a genuinely affecting read, and its mix of fun and heartfelt emotion is sure to appeal to fans of DETRANSITION, BABY.

Stag Dance is the follow-up to Detransition, Baby, a collection of three novellas and one short novel that use genre to explore different narratives of transition and gender. There are two previously self-published novellas, 'Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones' and 'The Masker', which explore trans community and desire from a speculative fiction and horror perspective respectively, and then a new novella, 'The Chaser', which tells a teen drama story in a boarding school. And then there's the titular 'Stag Dance', a short novel about an illegal logging camp in which a winter dance brings to the forefront a rivalry between two 'jacks'.

It's hard to summarise my anticipation for this book, even with the fact that I'd already read the two self-published novellas before. I didn't know how it would work with the four different stories, but as Peters herself explains in the closing acknowledgements, they come together as using genre to explore transition, each written at a different time for Peters but also taking a very different framing. The world of trans community and hormone farming in 'Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones' feels just as relevant now, and was just as punchy as when I first read it, and I think I enjoyed 'The Masker's depiction of a horrifying choice amidst the wannabe glamour of Las Vegas more this time, with its echoes of trans media to come post-2016 (for example, a very different version of I Saw the TV Glow). 'The Chaser' felt very different again for Peters, with boarding school teen drama not a genre I'd expected, and it sits nicely with Idlewild and ideas of pre-transition relationships and desire.

And then, there's the titular story 'Stag Dance', which if you'd told me the summary without the author, I would've assumed there was no way I'd enjoy it, but instead, it turned out to be an incredibly written and gripping look into what a transition can be in a completely different context. The honesty of costumes and crossdressing for trans people becomes something fresh in this world of lumberjacks in which some are pretending to attend a dance as a woman, but for others, that is entirely revealing. It is written in such a specific way and I found that fascinating: as I've heard Peters talk about, her writing often is interpreted as having a trans audience through the vocabulary and what she does or doesn't explain, but in 'Stag Dance', that is not explaining any of the 'jack' vocabulary and just letting you pick it all up through context. It shows how much language shapes our understanding and our ideas of gender and transition, with the narrator having a very different way of describing transition, but still having one nonetheless.

Stag Dance is funny, insightful, horrifying, deeply sad, and won't be for everyone. I've heard a talk in which Torrey Peters spoke about the fact (in a far more nuanced way than I'm putting it) that there should be "trans" every genre rather than the idea of "trans literature" and Stag Dance is doing that work, four stories at once. Entirely predictably, I loved it.

The range!! Raw, uncomfortable, beautiful, reflective and completely varied. 4 stories with no relation to each other outside of experiencing gender, and it works BEAUTIFULLY. loved it.

An interesting and very varied set of stories! I realised once I started reading this that I’d already read Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker, so it was interesting to revisit those a couple years on. The former I really enjoyed (a dystopian short story about an very trans-coded apocalypse scenario) and would have loved to read more of, the latter (a short story about different forms of transness and their conflicts within them, with a creepy almost horror-y feel) I found unsettling enough that I didn’t really enjoy it but was an interesting reread.

Of the two I hadn’t read before (The Chaser and Stag Dance) - I really enjoyed The Chaser, the themes of coming of age and teenage repression with queer and trans themes really drew me in, and I thought it was beautifully crafted as a short story (despite the very gory part that I would not recommend reading in public - I’m sure my face was a picture). Stag Dance - the titular novella and longer than the others - I wasn’t really drawn to, I thought it was masterfully written, especially the language, which really world built very well, but the slow build didn’t really keep me engaged and I think overall logging party novella is probably not a story I’d be super interested in regardless of all the trans themes!

So overall a 3.5 from me.

This was exactly what I've been looking for in speculative/dystopian and Peters once again discusses gender in such a poignant nuanced way that I have never come across before. A sensational follow up, will be recommending to all!

I loved all of the stories in this collection. They were so different from one another but the writing and emotions were consistently powerful across each of the different genres.