Midnight in Savannah

When I visited Savannah, I found it hypocritical, gossippy, deceitful, complacent, and smug. I also found it beautiful, historic, and compelling. Porter's book, which I read after my return, was adept, accurate, and witty. "BRAVO, I say, to the Georgia Literary Assn for portraying one of that state's key cities in such a satirical light. Tourism there will only increase, thanks to this IMPROVEMENT upon the rather dull and disorganized fare originally dished up by John Berendt. Only Darwin Porter had the feistiness to laugh out loud (in print) at the foibles of Savannah and its spectacularly crazed eccentrics, both gay and straight. At least one thing is perfectly clear: If Porter had ever satirized Kabul or Jalalabad with the accuracy he did Savannah, those cities would have fallen even faster than they did under the U.S. Marines!

This novel manages--all at the same time--to be both satirical, campy, and melancholy, with psychologically accurate portrayals of eccentrics living in The South's most decadent city. It's a tour de force by Darwin Porter, one of the most entertaining writers in America today. It's sometimes interpreted as a spoof on the bestselling "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" that put Savannah on the tourist charts of the world. But believe me, it goes way, way beyond anything ever conceived by John Berendt.In Porter's book, you'll find all the elements of big BIG drama: Greed, corruption, sexual tension (The South and Porter's books always have plenty of that), BETRAYAL, and murder, all of it set against a backdrop of Spanish moss, Southern decadence, and barely suppressed psychoses. Sometimes, it's devastating, to the point where it seems to blister the paint off the walls--but as Carson McCullers once said, "I always return to The South to renew my sense of horror." Overall, it has provided me with three or four nights of highly pleasurable entertainment, and I am grateful to the author who created it. It's a fabulous read.

Cinematic. That's what Darwin Porter's novels are. BLOOD MOON was an IMAX spectacle about the preternatural power of male beauty. Red-hot icons, a breathless climax, and erotica akin to Anaïs Nin on Viagra with a bump of meth. Now, in his most recent book, MIDNIGHT IN SAVANNAH, we're lured into a deco picture palace where menacing images flicker on a silver screen. A flattering nod to John Berendt's "non-fiction novel" about Savannah, Porter's new thriller still has its own deliciously wicked story to tell, picking up where MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL left off. And it has everything going for it: Mendacity, greed, betrayal, whoring, debauchery, and murder--the world as a film noir cul-de-sac.MIDNIGHT IN SAVANNAH jumps into high gear when movie producer Jerry Wheeler (looking like "an aged Tab Hunter") dispatches screenwriter Phil Heather ("a dead-ringer for Montgomery Clift") to the historic port city for pre-production and casting because his investors want "to capitalize off some of the fame of the place and [Berendt's] book." Ironically, it's a remake of BUTTERFLIES IN HEAT--Porter's cutting-edge novel made into a film over twenty years ago. But lust quickly entangles them with sexual predators more carnal, glamorous, and relentless than they'd ever imagined and a vortex of intrigue with a maw full of mayhem. Whatever you do, don't let anyone tell you how it ends.Porter's utterly irresistible new novel targets the strange, male fascination with hustlers, or at least the mythology of male hookers. And manages in MIDNIGHT to bring together, like some outrageous karmic homecoming, three of fiction's most unforgettable: Numie Chase, Danny Hansford, and Jeff Broyhill.BUTTERFLIES IN HEAT is the story of Numie Chase--a young drifter depending on his genitals to grab a life, a noir "anti-hero" taking up where MIDNIGHT COWBOY left off. Porter's adoring prose was a major factor in the novel's international success, prompting Tennessee Williams to say, "I'd walk the waterfront for Numie any day." But this "NewMe" stud quickly finds himself trapped under the blood-red sun of the Florida Keys between six powerful, desiring lovers--male and female. (Credit Porter's keen observation, his novels are pansexual--not gay, straight, or bi--because real sexuality is fluid across an erotic spectrum of desire.) And in MIDNIGHT IN SAVANNAH, the search is on once again to cast the part of BUTTERFLIES' devastating sex machine.Hauntingly, a body worshipped by its conquests as "a walking streak of sex" lies rotting in Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery. It's Danny Lewis Hansford--the moody, bad-ass gigolo allegedly murdered by antique dealer Jim Williams in Berendt's MIDNIGHT. His reputation for taking both men and women over the edge was so tempting that, to this day, many of Savannah's locals resent Williams for having shot the 21-year-old hustler before they could sample his wares.But centerstage in Porter's MIDNIGHT

Over the past few years, I have become addicted to the novels of Darwin Porter. These have included BLOOD MOON and RAZZLE-DAZZLE. In both cases, I read them twice. To begin with, I'm entertained. For a man who grew up during the Television Age, my attention span for reading is not that great. But I stayed up until I'd finished every delectable page of Mr. Porter's latest novel. Set in Savannah at the end of the 20th century, it is more than a mere stepchild to the world-famous work of nonfiction, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Whereas that book was "closeted," MIDNIGHT IN SAVANNAH deliciously describes the lives of six residents, both male and female, who have taken up residence in this decadent Southern city, which is so unlike the rest of Georgia. Although from the beginning, some of the characters seemed doomed, we enjoy the fictional ride to its bloody conclusion. Although a drama, there is fantastic humor here in both the depiction of Southern gay life, and in aging Southern Belles of any gender. Instead of Tennessee Williams' wilting moth, Blanche Du Bois, we get the lusty Lavender Morgan, the most recent in a string of the world's great courtesans. We are treated to the likes of Tango, the beautiful black drag queen who's ready to reign as Empress of Savannah, dethroning The Lady Chablis. And we are presented with some lusty young men, ranging from the sexy, and usually oversexed, screenwriter Phil Heather to the handsome cop from Marien, Georgia, Brian Sheehan, with whom Phil falls in love. Jason McReaves has something every man and woman wants a part of, and his wife, Lula Carson, is the most evocative portrait of a Carson McCullers clone I've ever read. The rest of the cast of characters, from Norma Dixie, who claims she was the maid to Mae West, to Gin Tucker, a Truman Capote clone, bring today's South brutally alive in the seething tale of corruption and greed. Steamy Savannah was never steamier than the way it appears in this novel.