Review: Into the Real

Into the Real by Z Brewer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's been three years since Pibling Z, leader of the glorious Minion Horde, gifted us with a new book, and now they're back this year with two great new stories. Well, I still haven't read Soulbroken yet, sadly, because my only e-reader is my phone browser when I'm borrowing library ebooks and my library still doesn't have that one yet. I know, I know, I'm a bad Minion...but I digress. Today, I'm here to talk about Brewer's most expansive and ambitious standalone novel yet - a trio of intermeshed horror storylines, each rooted in different universal fears and fears unique to LGBTQIA+ community members. Major trigger warnings abound for blood, gore, deaths of family members and loved ones, open homophobia and transphobia, conversion therapy, and demonic terror all over the place.

Quinn, our protagonist, is experiencing a fractured reality not unlike those depicted in Inception, or the TV series Awake - three different versions of their hometown of Brume, in which their genderqueer identity manifests in different ways, and in which they must confront different horrors that feature the same casts of characters in wildly different roles. Friends in one Brume can be enemies in another, making the reader have to work a little harder to keep track of which reality Quinn is currently detailing on the present page - notably, there's no headers at the beginning of each chapter to indicate which reality is which, and the chapters also count down backwards, adding a Memento vibe to the book's mind-bending nature. 

The three realities are all also pretty strongly inspired by different genre stories, each with their own levels of horror genre in their DNA. The first Brume is the most obviously horror, a monstrous mashup of the Upside Down from Stranger Things and the town of Wayward Pines...but also, it's the only one in which Quinn is openly genderqueer. The second Brume has a female-presenting, gender-questioning Quinn sent to a pray-the-gay-away camp, where many of those they knew in the first Brume have also been sent by their parents to endure the nastiness of conservative Christians forcing their sick, twisted worldviews on these poor teenagers by any means they deem necessary. The third Brume is a Hunger Games-style dystopian war story where a male-presenting Quinn is the face of the Resistance against the Christofascist Allegiance that has taken over most of the southern, eastern, and central US, and Brume is one of the few pockets fighting back...but the Resistance has its own major issues, such as its ridiculous insistence on prioritizing men as fighters and relegating women to the backseat. You'd think they'd do better considering they're fighting against racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic Nazis... 

One thing that surprised me about this book was actually the way Brewer structured it narratively. Not gonna lie, I went into it thinking Quinn would show us glimpses into the three realities with pretty regular shifting between them, but the narrative actually lingers on each reality for quite some time, often as much as three chapters - which, especially early on, translates to as many as 50-75 pages in one Brume before moving to the next one. That said, though, Brewer's prose is as compulsively readable as ever, to the point where I was able to read the whole book - all 430 pages - in a single sitting. With all the detail they put into this one, I'm so glad I preordered this one - the first time I did for any of Brewer's books! (Of course it's coming with me when, hopefully, I make my long-awaited move to the Pacific Northwest...)

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