Why Lone Star by Josh Lanyon is like good chicken soup

I feel like I've not blogged for ages. I should have been linking to the guest blogs I've placed about The Lady's Secret and to the reviews I've had but I've been very remiss. (I did post excerpts from some reviews on my author website but since then there's been Liz Mc2 and Hilcia and Dear Author and more stuff on goodreads). Even one from Japan and one from France!) Of course this is endlessly fascinating to me. I can imagine, however, for anyone reading this, that it's getting old.

So let me talk about someone else's book for a change.

I've been really looking forward to this anthology, Men Under the Mistletoe, each story featuring old lovers reunited at Christmas. It's rare to get an anthology where you want to read every single story. But I enjoy all four authors featured in this antho. Today, however, I want to talk about Lone Star by Josh Lanyon.

This has been the year of Lanyon for me. I have glommed Lanyon pretty well obsessively in 2011. Well, that's what I do when I like something! If it's a writer, I devour all their books. If it's a musical artist, I play their albums over and over and over. (In fact, as I'm typing I'm listening to John Grant again, having played his Queen of Denmark album hundreds of times since I bought it a few months ago).

Telling you why I enjoyed Lone Star might help explain why I love this writer since the things I enjoyed about it are typical of his books.

Lone Star is like a really good chicken soup, made properly.

There's lots of ways you can have chicken soup. You can go and buy a can of chicken soup and heat it up and sometimes that's nice. Or you might buy one of those 'posh' soups in a carton - fresher tasting and better but not home made. Or, if you want to make your own chicken soup, you might use a stock cube to give it flavour. Or you could do this: strip the carcass of a roast chicken, use the bones to make stock, chop fresh vegetables, sweat them down, add a little barley and that lovely home made stock and cook slowly till perfect.

And that, my friend, is good soup.

This is what Lanyon's books are like. They have that strong core, like good stock. And you see this clearly with his novellas and shorts which lend themselves particularly well to the exploration of a single idea.

In Lone Star, Mitch Evans is a successful ballet dancer. His father - who Mitch has been estranged from for many years - has died a few months prior to the story's beginning. Mitch has known he needs to return home to clear his father's ranch and put it up for sale but has been putting it off. However, after discovering his partner cheating on him, he finds himself returning to his Texas home where he meets old lover Web Eisley again. Web and Mitch split up 12 years previously when Web wasn't willing to come out for Mitch. Now that Web, a Texas Ranger, is out might things be different?

On one level, this is a lovely short romance about two men getting a second chance at love, reconciling themselves with the past and finding a new happy future together. But Lanyon makes more of it with pleasing touches and thoughtful use of language and images.

The title of the story, Lone Star, is meaningful and he puts it straight into the reader's mind with the opening line of the book: A lone star blazed in the midnight blue sky.

I loved the whole 'lone star' thing. Obviously the book is set in Texas, the lone star state - and Lanyon makes quite a bit of the setting in a low key way. But the real - and literal - lone star of this story is Mitch. A brilliant and successful dancer, Mitch achieved his ambition by cutting himself off from everyone he cared about. He's never really let anyone get close since Web. He's often described as a control freak who never lets his discipline slip, and as someone who is not sociable or good at communicating. He may be successful but he has paid for that success.

As a boy, Mitch only had his father, a cold, disapproving parent. Thankfully he also had Web Eisley - first as a friend and later as a lover - and Web's warm, happy family. When Mitch returns, he discovers the Eisleys haven't changed. When he goes there for dinner, he is swept along on the golden tide of the Eisleys to the big front room, persuaded to relax his iron-clad no-alcohol rule and tempted to eat rich foods. If Mitch is a cold star, alone in the dark, the golden Eisleys are all bright warmth and sunshine.

Over the course of this short book, Mitch uncovers a few things about the past that help reconcile him to his memories of his father and to what happened between him and Mitch. But what is so pleasing is that there are no great revelations here. No big misunderstanding that explains that he was wrong all along. Just nuances really. The discovery that his father was not as cold and uncompromising as he believed. A better of understanding of how Web felt when he was 22. And the discovery of how close Web was to giving Mitch what he wanted just when Mitch left.

There's another star at the end. Not a lone one this time. I don't want to spoil the ending by saying more than that. Suffice to say I really appreciated that little touch. It wrapped up the 'lone star' idea rather beautifully, and left me with the thought that, in a way, Mitch had never really been alone at all because Web had never forgotten him.