Friday from the Archives: “Dream Boy: Jim Grimsley’s Gothic Gospel” by Ed Madden with photography by W. Cameron Dennis and Mary Thiessen in NCLR 2000
New audiences can find Jim Grimsley’s novel Dream Boy, thanks to the republication by Levine Querido. As with so many pieces in our literature and in our NCLR collection, it will be interesting to see how older works speak to newer times (and vice versa).
Ed Madden wrote a scholarly piece about the novel for our 2000 issue. He wrote, “Although Dream Boy combines a number of literary subgenres and styles – gay coming-of-age novel, Southern gothic tale, magic realism narrative, reconfigured gospel – as a gospel, it is a story in which a character rises from the dead after being sacrificed for the good of the social order. But that resurrection suggests the promise of an alternative vision of the world.” His scholarship derives from both Southern and Queer authors and criticism of the time.
Much has transpired in the ensuing years, both in queer representation within literature and in American (and global) culture. Madden wrote, “Despite the redemptive potential marked in both gospel tropes and homoeroticized spirituality, the gay romance that opens the novel can only conclude it through a radical and violent transformation into the otherworldly, as if to suggest that this love can only survive in a world, a culture, and a church transformed.” And the struggle for transformation continues.
Subscribe to the 2025 issue for a new in-depth interview with Jim Grimsley, who once again resides in North Carolina after a lengthy stay in Georgia.
[TW: all violence] Read the entire essay at Gale Cengage.
