Reed’s Subcutanean, two college friends become lost in their basement of ordinary but discomfitingly endless rooms. In Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a man lives in a maze of galleries filled floor to towering ceiling with allegorical statues and tries to satisfy the only other person in the universe. I found myself drawn with new obsessiveness to literary depictions of queer mazes, and in particular to three novels released during the pandemic that are each set in and around labyrinths. But those dreams also instilled in me the quirk of feeling as though all stories of people lost in mazes are stories about me-and that, to some degree, the reverse is also true: that all people lost in labyrinths are queer.īut then COVID happened, and the world felt like a literal labyrinth: we all went into our houses and could not find the doors out again. In some primitive way, the dream was preparing me for queerness-a life of navigating spaces that, while banal for most, are mazes for queer people, spaces where our desires are forever too grand and our fathers turn out, more often than not, to be minotaurs. Invariably, though, I would reach the other end of the room, mount the dais, and sit in the chair. With trepidation, I would thread between them: it seemed a defining characteristic of the dream both that none ever moved toward me and that on any given night they were infinitely capable of doing so, with it being unclear what would happen if they did.
Between me and the seat, however, were dozens of ghostly flickers and, unlike during the rest of the journey, here they clearly could see me-indeed, watched me intently. Mostly I wandered, and though the layout varied night to night, the end point was always the same, a tall Vitruvian hall with a dais, on top of which was a wooden chair. It was long abandoned, everything dusted over from years of disuse, and though there were no people in the house, occasionally a kind of ghostly flicker, like a hologram, would stutter about for a few seconds in a way that was not so much frightening as uncanny. In the dream, though, it opened into a much grander house, a palace really, though also a maze, its rooms possessing no discernible order.
It began with standing in front of a door in our dining room that in real life led outside but had long been painted shut. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.įor much of my childhood, I had the same dream several times a week.
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