I didn't want to read anything else by Spanbauer for fear it would taint the standing of my favorite fiction, "The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon". "In the City of Shy Hunters" didn't take over that position, but it was a compelling, poignant, heartbreakingly beautiful story, told with realism and fancy. A necessary addition to any library.

People say that Spanbauer, one of my favorite novelists, took so long writing this book because he planned it as his last testament, and that the manuscript mounted up to a magic mountain of pages, enough to dwarf a Thomas Pynchon or a David Foster Wallace. Cold heads at Grove Press prevailed and insisted on cutting the MS down to its present state, where it sort of just sits there, neither fish nor fowl, a sketch for a grander Balzacian social tragedy, like James McCourt's subsequent QUEER STREET but with an actual plot. What we have now is still pretty amazing, but don't you wish that novels were treated like movies and that we might someday hope for the "director's cut" of ITCOSH, with its lofty architectronics restored to us the way the writer wanted us to have it?

Perhaps in years to come a scholarly edition will be prepared, for Spanbausr probably has the missing sections somewhere? Can I do it? If there's a committee, count me in! I cried and cried all the way through the Will Parker story, and his hunt for Charlie the missing lost boy keeps the novel going through some dangerous backwaters. I didn't exactly fall in love with Rose, the glamorous transvestite character, I kept thinking of "Angel" the one from the musical RENT; however "Rose" is supposed to be more of an intellectual, a Dorothy Dean type with yet oodles of sex appeal and every trick in the book.

Many great novels have been written on the restaurant theme, and perhsps it's Spanbauer's concentration on this setting that, for me, evokes the glory days of Balzac and the 19th century passion for knowing everything and educating one's readers in the process. This book takes place during the days when AIDS and HIV were still unfamiliar to most people, even to proto sophisticated New Yorkers, when a man in the AIDS ward might not be able to count on his own parents visiting him (here, one of them is told that "my son died long ago"), and even one's own friends might draw back for fear of breath-drawn transmission. The heartbreak and the courage it took to go on in those days make for a stirring story, and even if the rumor isn't true, even if Spanbauer wanted his book to be exactly this size, he took a giant subject and smashed holes in it everywhere, like someone inside a pumpkin compelled to make a jack o'lantern--punching outwards, and shining with a weird, eternal fire.

I read The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon and I fell in love with Spanbauer's writing. In The City Of Shy Hunters is quite possibly a more brilliant novel, though both will certainly hold up as classics.

There are certain writers who are acclaimed in their lifetimes - and after moreso- and those who are completely ignored. In my opinion, Spanbauer is an unrecognized genius, deserving of more respect from the literary world. In a world where lesser original writers are held up as examples, Spanbauer's voice is utterly unique, his stories completely compelling, his characters unapologetic and unforgettable - and his words, pure street poetry.

I recommend this book to everyone wanting to connect to the writings of a true artist telling the story of wartorn New York City in the '80s, ravaged by AIDS. This book isn't about AIDS though. It's about the people you meet who teach you how to love. Utterly compelling.

This novel hovered at the outer edges of my view for a long time, but I finally got a copy and read it. I am amazed at the lack of publicity In the City has received. Unique characters that you come to care for as flesh and blood beings and wonderous language make for one of the deepest and most tender novels I've ever read. The author claims in an interview that writing this book almost killed him but also saved his life, and I can see why. A work in which to immerse yourself, completely.

It was, in some ways, what I expected. Manhattan, the 1980's, the cocaine, the AIDS apocalypse. Brutal, indeed. Spanbauer's characters--some naive, some dark, most ambivalent--ricochet through the city and its demon-lined streets, colliding with sub-human debasements and self-destructive dalliances. Within the sufferers and what Spanbauer creates as "fools" or "harlequins", there is complexity: people do good things, people do bad things. However, the enemy ("pharisees"), is given less depth; the enemy is blanketly: Reagan, the Catholic church, cops, the elite--in other words, the obvious enemies, summed up and embodied by one mounted police sergeant who has no revealed motive other than doing bad things to people. That's too bad, because the moral grayness of the good faction is rather appealing, and more like something feasible.

The novel is rhythmically framed with myriad, repeated catch phrases: "Green Date."; "The lucid compulsion to act polemically.";"Stranded beings searching for God." These from the cliquish central cast of the story, at whose lives you peek from time to time, catching glimpses of pathos and perversion, family strife and gloom--though not quite often enough to gain appreciation for the intense bonds the protagonist, William "of Heaven", avows. The characters, indeed, seem to be a collection of extreme postures and deeds: less an endearing, downtrodden bunch than an exclusive, curious lot. Thus the repeated catch phrases often ring with the empty profundity of inside jokes.

What's nice is the depth of history some of the main characters are given. The most compelling part of the
whole affair to me was when we left Manhattan and visited the past, as narrated by various characters, especially the protagonist. William's damaged upbringing on an Indian Reservation in Idaho kept me riveted (and was the book's closest bond to its predecessor "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon").

All in all, it succeeds in bringing an Apocalyptic edge to the story of the New York AIDS crisis in the 1980's. It's a romp with often-outrageous turns that may stretch credibility, but as such is an absorbing page-turner. Its graphic depictions of acts, both sexual and violent, are not for the dainty, but the overall impression isn't one of despair and gore, but of redemption and survival.