Discomforting ... Peters excels at plumbing the murky hearts of queer people ... A great Torrey Peters story feels like punching yourself in the face, laughing at the bleeding bitch in the mirror and then shamefacedly realizing you’re aroused by the blood on your lips. The four pieces in Stag Dance will leave you bruised, broken and wanting more.
My favorite of the pieces is the title novel, which is also undoubtedly the most stylish of the bunch. Its narration, littered with lumberjack slang, is beautifully poetic ... Peters’s book is important, but putting aside for a moment the weight of that unasked-for responsibility, Stag Dance is a marvelous follow-up to a tremendous debut.
Peters’s new book chronicles a grittier aesthetic milieu ... The stories, jagged tales of sissies, losers, and assholes, showcase a more expansive palette and are written with sharp prose that crackles with transgressive glee ... The prose in this story is smooth like slate, devoid of any modern references to movies, technology, or gender as we now envision it ... Gender, like art, Peters argues, is not always explicable
The other three stories in Stag Dance range from pretty good to very good, but mostly they don’t feel very much like Detransition at all, and 'Stag Dance' might as well be from another planet. It’s also just about the most exciting piece of writing I’ve encountered in year ... A dynamite yarn ... Whatever you do, don’t miss the book’s title story. It’s green gold—absolute candy.
[A] fantastic titular novel ... A truly stellar novel (novella?) that confidently embodies a creative vision which feels purposeful and confidently executed even as it careens into stranger and more daring narrative swerves ... It somehow manages to meet, and arguably exceed, the heights of Peters’ lauded debut novel, Detransition Baby, and further establishes her as one of the most essential contemporary writers of trans fiction.
Genre-defying ... Taken altogether, Peters’ writing truly defies pigeonholing, pushing through genre and styles as she interrogates gender and various performances of it in multiple directions ... Moving.
Genre-bending and gender-bending ... Peters asks many questions throughout these stories, and answers very few. What does shine throughout is a bone-deep love for trans women, especially trans women who refuse to play by the rules.
The lewdness and brutality underscore the near-fantasy world conjured in Stag Dance. The language is thick with early-twentieth century slang ... Seductive, dazzling, and history-making once again.
There is nothing ragtag about this collection, despite its long span of writing and diversity of genre, because Peters is such a capable and considerate writer ... Moreover, it is clear she is having a great deal of fun: even when exploring serious issues around gender and sexuality, the writing is mischievous rather than sanctimonious. Peters seems to delight in complicating liberal identity politics, refusing ever to sanitise her work or narrow her focus, and glorying in some truly rollicking prose.
Electrifying ... Peters explores her characters’ conundrums with striking honesty, revealing how they’re bound by indecision and insecurities from finding happiness, and she exhibits spectacular flexibility with language and form. It’s a marvel.
