chai ♡'s Reviews > Razorblade Tears

"What does it take for two cishet men to grasp the basic fact that queer people are also human beings deserving of dignity and basic human decency?" is the center inquiry of this novel. The answers we are left with by the end are: (view spoiler)[the savage murder of their two gay sons, the subsequent defacement of their graves (by none other than one of the fathers), the traumatizing of a trans woman, the unnecessary deaths of several innocent bystanders, the kidnapping of a child, and, of course, a massacre. (hide spoiler)]

But hey, at least they grow as people, learn from their mistakes, and realize that "love is love" and all that jazz. Right?

***
I wasn't going to write a review, but this book still strikes such a chord of anger and my train is delayed so let me elaborate very briefly:

I began this book with a half-formed sense of unease. Two lines from the synopsis raised immediate red flags in my mind: In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, [the two fathers] rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys. I thought, "that sounds a lot like the novel is using violence against queer people to redeem two homophobic men." I was not interested in that story, but I resolved not to judge a book by its synopsis, and upon seeing the waves of adulation in the reviews, my skepticism was somewhat placated. I decided to give the story a shot. Why not.

I really should've just listened to my gut.

In Razorblade Tears, violence—graphic, stomach-turning, abject violence—wreaked upon queer bodies quite literally provides the impetus for the character motivations: two homophobic dads learn of the murder of their two gay sons and decide to indulge their grief and alleviate the burden of their guilt by setting out on a redemptive quest for revenge. This is, in every sense, their story and if a few queer bodies had to be horrifically sacrificed to the gristmill for the realization of that story, well—this novel seems to say—then so be it.

But there is another story gasping for oxygen on the page, and it is more relevant to me, more heartbreaking and more confronting than the story this book was trying so hard to get me to care about. It's the story of two young and successful gay men who, despite being impoverished from a lifelong diet of miserly love, found the absolutely incandescent strength to build a home for each other and to raise a daughter whose fingers will never bleed trying to unwind the love of a father from its violences. That story—glimpsed briefly in shards of someone else's memory, flickering in and out of darkness from someone else's nightmares, or otherwise sharpened into cruel careless jabs and flung at someone else's expense—ends in tragedy. That tragedy is, in turn, pushed to the ill-lit margins of the page in order to center the insufficient belated guilt of two violently homophobic men who learned to mourn the children they abused before they learned to love them properly.

In that story, queer people are afforded agency, dimensionality, and ownership of their own pain. In that story, they do not exist solely as some combination of dead body, traumatized victim, and story-driving device. They are not mere collateral damage on the way to something else, something better. In that story, queer trauma isn’t disfigured into a site of heterosexual absolution and dead queer sons aren't cannibalized into some shitty father's personalized catharsis. But it had been a vain hope from the outset, because Razorblade Tears is decidedly not that story, and to quote something a favorite author once said, “I am so, so tired of being eaten.”

So, hey, I guess this one's on me.