PositiveReview 31As a literary endeavour, Darryl is simultaneously polished and uneasy, making strategic use of glibness as a sign that something dangerous is being glided past. It’s often hilariously cutting at the expense of the sexual subcultures it ranges across, in the sorts of ways that this cishet reader would have felt guilty about enjoying if he were into feeling guilty about enjoying things. (The chapter on the ‘trans flat’ was brutally funny, but only a trans author could possibly have gotten away with writing it.) But I found it most interesting in its eschewal of melancholy, its use of Darryl’s primary ontological instability as a way of shucking off the twin narrative temptations of nostalgia and closure. Most iterations of the ‘trickster’ archetype have a self-congratulatory aspect: they picture a figure who successfully puts one over on the world, dancing around its snares and evading its tedium. Darryl introduces a genuinely novel figure: a chaos-agent who is at every turn a loser, on whom the world continually puts one over, but whose very passivity is explosively charged.