Review - Whitefish by BT. Hearst

CW: discussion of incest.

This is a short review for a relatively short work that I picked up as part of the Don's Dead Market that ran earlier this year. This is one of the ones that really intrigued me, but I initially picked it up, read a tiny bit of it, and then put it down, for one key reason: outside of the porn, the prose of this book is a little lacking for my tastes.

To be completely clear, this is a book which (to my understanding) exists to be erotic. The heart of the book is that this is about a trans boy who's becoming a man (Milo) and his father (Vincent) decides to fuck him about it. And I really liked a lot of the porn scenes - Hearst is very comfortable with the physical elements of the scenes, and there was a lot of creativity and variety for a pretty short work. I found that the internal logic that strung the sex scenes together made sense, and I got a really strong impression of who Milo was on a sexual and emotional level throughout the work.

The plot that went alongside the porn, however, felt less well-thought-through. I occasionally got the impression that I'd missed some key context as to what was going on, and outside of sex, Vincent was one-note enough that Milo had pretty much the same thoughts about him multiple times throughout the piece (which is about 21k). There was some work going on with side characters and digging into the ugliness of the American family, but the way this was slotted in between scenes made me feel like there was meant to be more and the author was impatient to get to the porn (fair. Hearst is good at it).

I liked some of what was going on with the general plot! Milo was going through it and didn't know how to talk about it with anyone; he knew he needed to get away but also knew it would have to be at a specific time. All this stuff was good, but it felt flimsy in comparison to the attention that was paid to writing the sex scenes. If that's for you then it's for you and I highly recommend this, but the plot in between didn't do it for me.