Author Spotlight–A Shot of Ginn Hale

Key Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Brightest Stars: Worldbuilding Star, Tearjerker Star, Insight Star

Today I spotlight Ginn Hale, award-winning author of gay fantasy romance and standout member of the Blind Eye Books crew, as well the author of last week’s review.
Ginn Hale was among my firsts. Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn’t read gay fiction, and had no idea where to find it, which contributed to my malaise about reading for years. When I began plumbing the world of writers about gay-themed stories, Ginn Hale was one of the first I found. I saw her reviewed as possessing awe-inspiring talents and a fulminating, staggering imagination.
So who says reviews are never accurate?

This first and fateful encounter was a book which needs no introduction (especially since I just reviewed it), Wicked Gentleman. I can confidently name this book a masterpiece. But it carries an element that is almost more personal. I heard that Hale spent ten years, in the process of creating this book, finding a publisher before Blind Eye became available and took on the story. So, forgive me for filling in gaps as I imagine her tirelessly seekng out a space for her delicately crafted story centered on gay love that had to fight an uphill battle at every step. I feel no qualm in naming her one of the pioneers of gay fiction, and gay characters in fiction, increasing in visibility as we see today.

As gay romance authors go, I find her stories to be more to the romantic side of the romance-erotica spectrum, but this does not mean her couplings lack spark. Perhaps more traditional to formal romances, she nonetheless delivers in the buildup of sexual tension. Ironically, this is true despite the presence of rather early, and unambiguous, sexual encounters in the beginnings of her stories. Kiram and Javier are seeing each other naked rather early; and Harper and Belimai have their first drunken tryst before Act II. I find this is a twistedly enjoyable and distinct take on more familiar plot structures in these genres.

What’s To Love

I don’t even know where to start with Ginn Hale. Then again I feel pretty good about having that particular problem with my authors, which I typically do.

One thing you must absorb–you simply must, I insist, and chase it with a bit of gin–is that Ginn Hale worldbuilds. She worldbuilds like a boss. She sparkles and floats in a rarified aether of worldbuilding grace and creativity, and shimmering raindrops of crystallized fantasy realms patter across the pages of her stories.

Her creations always scintillate with insights, motes of vision and theory and possibility, about society, about freedom, about peace. I don’t mean only that her stories are thematic–they are–but that in exercising fantasy invention, she fleshes out worlds which are simply fascinating to consider.

One series, the Lord of the White Hell, exhibits a culture class between a society that is highly patriarchal, and one of arguable few fictional matriarchies. She spins this conflict largely in terms of religion; one religious tradition that is doctrinally centered on obedience and purity, and supports patriarchal dominance sentiments like lordship and the sovereignity of virtue and abstinence. The other is an existential tradition of spirit in life, of guardianship and ritual magic, replete with talking to trees. One is sharply heterosexist, the other more philosophical and fluid about human roles.

One could argue that this is stereotypy of East vs West, another battle of fictional Catholocism with fictional Buddhism with casualties of accuracy, but I don’t think so. Ginn Hale does not simply lift familiar concepts wholesale out of our minds and paint her own names on them. We’re not encouraged to idolize anything, any symbol we would make of liberation or compassion. This is my next great point about her; her glimpses of possibility do not come with a layer of instruction. She’s not insisting on her commentary, sitting over top of the story as if we were reading half novel and half treatise, a fear I’ve often known people to have about reading a “commentary” work. The characters live in these issues.

Part of this is how her stories never flinch in reporting the strident horror of oppressive or violent realities. In one series, the gay main character hides his relationship because the moment it is revealed, he will almost certainly be killed. I don’t mean to suggest that stories about gay love should always face that! We could certainly do without chewing on how real violence is. But this blistering gaze on oppression is valuable because it’s application. Today, including in places like the United States and Europe.

In fact, I’ve noticed that as her worldbuilding escalates, the grittier an eye she seems to take. I applaud that. Not because I fault LGBT fiction for being too mild, but because I want chances for straight readers to see the wicked underbelly.

Perhaps this bravura and insight is what gives her stories their sense of timelessness. Have you ever found an old book in, say, your grandparents’ basement, and the tone of the prose combined with the browned pages gives you a sense of a story that may have existed forever? I feel something like this with Hale’s books. Wicked Gentlemen strikes a chord somewhere between literary classic and past-life diary. Always these narratives slip under my memories and feel personal, transcendent, and difficult to place.

Brightest Stars

Worldbuilding Star: I’ve talked about her worldbuilding. If you’ve read my review of her debut novel, I think you can understand why. She has written a world where demons became Christian and spawned their own race of humanity, similar to the story of Lillith. She has a series in which a destiny of possession is filtered through religion, with white hells, red hells, Bahiim shajdi, and ghost lockets. In the Rifter series, she has invented a language which the characters actually speak, as well as a dearth of history chronicling war and religion, and one of the most compelling time-travel stories I have ever witness. Simply cataloguing the various trinkets, words, images, concepts, and other details of her settings is entertaining.

Tearjerker Star: I will say it again–the stuff fine-ass tears are made of. Her stories inevitably vary in their level of heartbreak, but they are always so visceral. The unflinching quality I spoke of above makes them feel emotionally constant, gripping, and effectual. Our world is full of harsh, soul-bleeding realities, ones we often dislike pondering–but she ponders them. This isn’t merely a contemplation on suffering, but a truth in which her characters must act on a level of need, compassion, and combat.

Insight Star: As I said above, Hale manages brilliant commentary with a subtle touch. She focuses a lens not theorizing society through a dogma, but on deconstructing and reconstructing identities, familiar concepts, and social norms over and over again. She engages in a literal pioneership of the imagination that any fantasy lover, and any seeker of symbolically filling work, will devour with hunger and gratitude.

Bibliography at a Glance
Wicked Gentlemen (Hell’s Below): As I said above, a book that needs no introduction, because I already gave one. Read my review! I awarded it the same stars I know her for.

The Lord of the White Hell: Kiram Kir-Zaki is probably the only mechanist at Sagrada Academy in Cadeleon, but one thing is certain. He’s the only Haldiim boy. A non-white people segregated not only for their ethnic distinction from the Cadeleonians, but their matriarchal and matrifocal society in which homosexuality is seen as relatively normal. This in no way prepares Kiram for a rough-spirited boys’ school where he hears tales of demonic possession, realizes the real danger of physical and sexual violence from the older boys, and being hit on by his surprisingly naked roommate, Javier. Kiram’s lack of superstition makes him the only boy brave enough to share a room with the Javier Tornesol, possessed of the white hell, a malevolent force which manifests in mystical powers that have arisen in the past to harm body and soul of those around him.
What Kiram comes to find is instead a young man protecting an endangered loved on, believing his own soul lost even as he submits it to the pleasures of despair. And a searing closeness and need that could prove deadly in the Cadeleonian world in which the bond between the two boys, and their cultural enstrangement, will be feared more than a hell of any color.

The Rifter Series: A staggering, intricate masterwork in which Hale imagines the world of Basawar, complete with a linguistic texture and classic elements of one our own transported to a strange other land. Reminiscent of works such as Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, John Toffler and his friends Laurie and Bill are lost in a strange alternate earth in which the transition is anything but easy. While many works using this trope understandably work around issues like language barriers and cultural disparities, Hale embraces them. John and his friends have only one choice, which is to figure out how to assimilate, and fast, into this land where religious warfare and threatening magic make everyday life rife with danger, separation, and unavoidable change in identity. They must carve a path across time in the spanning battle of the Rifter, the god who would bear down destruction on both their worlds.

Ginn Hale can be found at her site, her Livejournal, and as an author at Blind Eye Books.