Running in Bed

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:

Sharlach's winning debut is a moving portrait of the gay community before and during the age of AIDS. In the 1970s, Josh Silver moves to Manhattan and becomes an advertising executive, all the while repressing his sexual feelings for other men and even engaging in aversion therapy. After a dinner--and an epiphany of sorts--on a business trip, he finally accepts his sexuality. Returning to New York, Josh ventures out to his first gay bar and runs into co-worker Randy Starke, who becomes a close friend. Randy and his partner, Gerard, take Josh under their wing, and his social life blossoms--including a serious relationship with Tommy Perez. But soon AIDS hits the gay community--and close to home for Josh, who loses more than two dozen friends to the disease. The author does a masterful job of portraying love and loss in a fast-moving and engaging story that will linger with the reader long after the final page is turned.

KIRKUS:

A resonant debut featuring a closeted young advertising apprentice wrestling with the undertow of burgeoning homosexual feelings. Sharlach's vibrant, accomplished debut introduces Josh Silver, a young, handsome Cornell University graduate at odds with his sexuality and desperate to dip his feet into the boy pool. Evocatively set in late '70s Manhattan ("the Emerald City at the end of the yellow brick road"), it's not long until Silver's 22-year-old jitters dissipate, he grows a mustache, moves in with some dicey housemates and dives right in by visiting a gay bookshop, then a gay bar. From there, it's onward and upward through a lengthy procession of randy men from Christopher Street to sex-frenzied Fire Island to do what comes naturally. Searching for that elusive one true love, however, proves more of a challenge until he sets his sights on Tommy Perez, a troubled, muscle-bound hustler who steals Silver's heart away on Christmas Eve. Sharlach provides some textured, nuanced scenes with the narrator's cautionary family and his loving rehabilitation of former rent boy Tommy, and offers many nostalgic, gimlet-eyed observations about gay culture in the halcyon days of the '70s throughout. All the fun and games, however, eventually succumb to the dour, encroaching specter of AIDS as the novel moves into a melancholy denouement that wraps things up grimly yet gracefully. Those with a particular affinity for gay fiction will be refreshingly satisfied with Sharlach's storytelling acumen, his descriptive talents and the authentic dramatization of a gay man in search of love and laughter amid the ashes of a decimating plague. An undeniably charming, well-written first effort-and hopefully not Sharlach's last.