Showing King of Angels, A Novel About the Genesis of Identity and Belief by Perry Brass

A new, mesmerizing novel by the acclaimed author of The Lover of My Soul, How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, Carnal Sacraments, The Substance of God, Warlock, and bestselling Ippy-Award Gold Medalist The Manly Art of Seduction.
“Perry Brass is a literary polymath who enthralls readers no matter the genre.” Richard Labonte, syndicated book columnist, Book Marks.


The early ‘60s “Mad Men” era were turbulent: new ideas and the daring people behind them were shooting out of the closet at lightning speed. Men were sexual animals, but women were supposed to stay moms and wives. Playboy hit the newsstands; sexually-rumored John F. Kennedy was president; the Beatles had arrived in America. There was a dark side: the Ku Klux Klan, racial violence, and razor-edged homophobia lurking behind the new splashy Playboy "lifestyle." You were either a player or a Los Vegas comedian’s fag joke—and 12-year-old Benjamin Rothberg, growing up in beautiful Isle of Hope, Georgia, in the marshes outside Savannah, realizes this fast. Child of a mixed marriage between a stunning blonde Southern-WASP mother and a passionate dark-skinned New York-Jewish father, Benjy will soon be plunged into the heat-soaked sexual underground of boys at Holy Nativity Military Academy, a Catholic school in Savannah run by an order of monks with secrets of their own: alcoholism, pedophilia, and whispered doubts about their calling and faith. The monks are compassionate, proudly progressive, and dedicated to educating boys; they are also ruthless when they need to be—and dedicated to keeping the school going, even after the death of a young handsome Puerto Rican student has been linked to a “closer than normal” relationship with an upperclassman football player.
Benjamin Rothberg finds himself in the middle of all this as he tries to sort out his own identity, overcome his family’s problems after his father Robby is put on trial in a one-horse Georgia town for shady business deals, and discovers a genuine connection with an older “out” Jewish teen who is trying to survive in Savannah’s queer sexual underground.

Bringing to life the coastal South during the glamorous, secretive, and often violent John F. Kennedy years, King of Angels explores the role of Southern Jews in the still-segregated South, the explosive race relations and racial consciousness of this era, and the emergence of a genuine gay community with its own honest, outsider viewpoint. It is also a realistic story of teenage boys who must fool their parents and each other in order to achieve any form of unguarded closeness. As a “half-Jew” attending Holy Nativity, Benjy will make some of the closest friendships of his life, encounter the most violent bullying, and form an attachment to a handsome teaching monk who will find his own salvation in Benjy’s presence. At Holy Nativity, Benjy will become aware of many forms of seduction and attraction: the seductions of a secret sexual life in the school, the seductions of his own heart taken with a handsome, secretive male student, and the attractions of the Spirit in all of its revealed forms. This is a novel about the genesis of identity and belief itself, in a questioning heart and time, while growing up in the changing South in the early 1960s.

Aaron Lassen in Aaron Lassen Reviews writes:
“We all have our literary heroes and I have several—Edmund White, Christopher Bram, Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran and Perry Brass are authors for whom I will stop whatever I am doing when I hear they have new books out . . . This is not a short book but I sat down to read and did not stop until I all devoured all 360 glorious pages. I laughed and I cried but most of all I thought and I remembered how it was growing up in one of the most turbulent periods of American history . . . Accepting ourselves is part of it all and Perry Brass helps us with that in his brilliant new book. Now back to read it all over again.”