Have you ever danced with the devil? If there's any doubt about it, you'll certainly know after you've read Taylor Siluwe's first book of short stories, Dancing With The Devil! I'm not necessarily saying that you'll read your own life, but you'll certainly recognize yourself in the pages! This book is about what happens when the song has ended but the melody lingers on - especially when it's a dirge. There's always a price to pay for bumpin' and grindin' with Satan and sometimes the payback starts well before we even realize it! That's if you believe in such things!
As soon as I read the introduction of the book, I knew I was in for a treat! After reading a few paragraphs of the first story, I knew the author as a talent to be reckoned with. Taylor Siluwe is an erotic storyteller extraordinaire! And Dancing With The Devil is a delicious, delirious collection of stories. It's different! Real different! And different is good!
It's a book full of forbidden funk and fire. There are plenty of trials and tribulations, but they aren't about cute young yippie-yuppie black puppies and their tales of woe in the big city. No, THESE brothas live on the EDGE of the city, on the back streets and on their knees in dark stairwells way beneath Paradise.
Real writing makes for real reading. It also helps if you're in tune with your inner freak and perhaps a little demented to begin with! I had cause to wonder just how feaky and demented Taylor Siluwe is ... so I asked!
“Yes! I can be extremely freaky or even demented - in its most comical sense, of course. But I think that comes with being human. Most people don't, or just won't 'fess up to the presence of the inner freak. These are usually the same self-righteous people later caught in embarrassing sex scandals. Like repressed “anythings” those repressed inner-freaks will assert themselves and more power to them” says Siluwe.
Repression is something our protagonist Dante knows all too well about! Dante spent a good part of his youth oppressed by a fanatically religious mother and trying to adhere to the impossibly high religious code of his strict Jehovah's Witness upbringing. Now over 40 with a vestige of youth - still enough to pull the pretty young gangstas in the neighborhood, Dante's inner freak has long been asserted, and these are the types that he has eroticized. These dangerous types! And that is what sometimes when one's sexual thoughts, feelings and desires are left to develop in secret. A sort of compulsion or sexual schizophrenia develops, splinters and often morphs into something sinister like a monster that gets bigger and uglier and ends up overpowering. Sorta like an addiction!
“Standing just feet from the bed, my nostrils full of youthful summer funk, I felt a trickle and wondered why I always fell for the same types – the same pretty young gangster types – knowing that grief always followed the pleasure” Dante practically says as much in his own head. But Taylor says it's an addiction to danger maybe.
“Pretty young gangsters, sexy drug addicts and thugs, all have an element which titillates our dark side, our danger junkie, and sometimes our inner freak. It's the bad boy syndrome! The reason predictable, ordinary nice guys rarely get laid because everyone secretly, or not so secretly wants that bad boy. It's why people love roller-coasters too; why if they invented one that traveled 500 mph with a mile high drop, people would come in droves to ride it. We're never as alive as when we're whizzing toward possible death at 500 mph” Siluwe offered.
When I asked how much Dante is based on his own life, Taylor jokingly described himself as a boring couch potato who watches too many crime dramas. He went on to quote Alfred Hitchcock with “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out” and added “throughout Dancing, the reader knows Dante likes sex and drugs, but never what Dante does for a living. Dante is my drama. He's my broken, drama-filled doppelganger who doesn't walk or even exist on the dull side of the street. Dante is all the horrible things I've ever dreamed, done or desperately wanted to do” adds Siluwe.
On the other hand “the book takes Dante from high-school to middle-age, and his experiences overlap my experiences – as a religiously abused child, as a black gay boy, as a self-described 'perv from my earliest memory; a destructive soul who couldn't fuck enough or get high enough. So, yes it's inspired by my life – though it's hardly autobiographical."
It seems like every character in this book is dancing with some demon or other in a sort of living hell! Lessons aren't always learned and the solutions aren't always easy. “Sounds like life to me” says Siluwe. “How many times do we make mistakes, learn from them, only to repeat the same damn mistake down the road? questions Siluwe.
"In the opening story, When Romeo Wakes, Dante asserts that he's going to hell for what he's doing, then decides “but then again, this IS Hell.” So I would have to say Hell is all around us. We have to somehow navigate our lives through it without getting burned too much in the process. Religion was certainly a key point in his decline into self destructive behavior....'cause when you damn a boy to Hell for being himself, can you blame him for ultimately wanting to die high and on the verge of a nut?” the author deftly points out.
Well said! Alas, we have the system of Dante's Hell!
(I think) Dancing With The Devil is so far ahead of the current crop of available black gay literature, yet Taylor (not surprisingly) cites E. Lynn Harris and James Earl Hardy - two pioneering black gay authors, as his most pointed influences. “Seeing those openly gay black men successfully publishing black gay stories inspired me to the core. Inspired me to write what I know, the dark shit I've seen people do to each other. To this day, I write about what I find endlessly fascinating as seen through my black gay eyes, which among other things – would be the dark human tendency toward total self destruction” he shared.
Taylor also shared that writing is both sanctuary and therapy for him and added “writing is a way to focus and turn inward, I guess, to solve our nagging little problems. I sometimes can work out an issue by giving it to a character and helping him work his way through it. And the benefits, I believe, are not unlike those experienced from prayer. Some believe there's an old man in the sky who grants wishes arbitrarily. I believe all we need is our brain. We just have to learn to focus its awesome power.”
Okay, so whatever you believe about an old white-haired man in the sky or a red man with horns who lives in the bowels of the earth, please believe that Taylor Siluwe presents something mighty special with this collection of stories. My only complaint is that the collection is a little too compact but this only leaves you wanting more. And that's no problem! Siluwe is working overtime adapting stories and doing all the things that require getting them on the screen!
Until then, you can buy the book! Dancing With The Devil (published by Atlanta based Chuma Spirit Books) is available on Amazon.com. Taylor Siluwe resides in New Jersey and is an amateur photographer for the most widely distributed regional magazine in the LGBT community, Out IN Jersey.
He can always be found at his popular website http://taylorsiluwe.typepad.com/taylor_siluwe/
I think I know what I want for christmas...
Posted by: thegaytekeeper | November 13, 2009 at 10:48 AM
Wow, what a superb review! If I ever write a book I'll be sure to ask you to review it, Corey :)
Posted by: Thomas | November 13, 2009 at 12:19 PM
Great article, I'm a huge fan of Taylor and his work. It doesn't hurt that he's sexy as hell.
Citing James Earl Hardy as an influence is ironic, given Taylor's talent is approximately twelve billion times that of James Earl Hack...
My review is here, and there's a YouTube clip of Taylor reading from Dacing With The Devil on it.
http://ka-os.blogspot.com/2009/05/review.html
Yeah, he sounds as sexy as he looks too...
Posted by: Garçon Stupide | November 18, 2009 at 07:24 PM
@ Gaytekeeper! Yes...definitely...GET IT!
@ Thomas! It's not "IF" but "WHEN" you write that book!
@ Garcon Stupide! WOW!
Posted by: Corey | November 18, 2009 at 10:02 PM