The World of Normal Boys
(The World of Normal Boys #1)
by
K.M. Soehnlein
The time is the late 1970s -- an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when
the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying
their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate
ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of
sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one, horrifying instant when a tragic accident wakes his family from
their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.
As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid
out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two
other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the
spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future,
beyond the world of normal boys. (less)
K.M. Soehnlein
K.M. Soehnlein's next novel, ARMY OF LOVERS, will be published Fall 2022 by Amble Press. He is the author of THE WORLD OF NORMAL
BOYS, winner of the Lambda Award for Gay Men's Fiction; its sequel, ROBIN AND RUBY, an Indie Next Bookstore Selection; and YOU CAN
SAY YOU KNEW ME WHEN, praised by The L.A. Times as "a dense, enjoyable read, like one of those famed Beat road trips: pedal to the metal
until the next inspired digression."
He is the recipient of the Henfield Prize for short fiction and an SFFILM/Rainin Foundation Grant for screenwriting. His play, OUT OF SITE:
SOMA, co-written with Seth Eisen, was performed on the streets of San Francisco and over Zoom in 2019 and 2020.
His stories and essays have appeared in the anthologies WHO'S YER DADDY?: GAY WRITERS CELEBRATE THEIR MENTORS AND
FORERUNNERS, which received a Lambda Award; GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS; BOYS TO MEN: GAY MEN WRITE ABOUT
GROWING UP; LOVE, CASTRO STREET; and BOOKMARK NOW. His journalism has appeared in Queerty, San Francisco Chronicle, Out, The
Village Voice, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, and more.
Raised in New Jersey, K.M. Soehnlein now lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at the University of San Francisco and enjoys life with his
husband, Kevin Clarke.