The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Kissing with Teeth
By Daryl Banner
Published by Frozenfire Publishing, 2023
Five stars

When I wrote my first vampire novel back in 1988, my raison d’etre was to make the vampire a good guy. Not necessarily a hero, but a man with integrity, not a predator, looking for nothing more than a happy life (over and over again).

Needless to say, I’m a little jumpy about contemporary gay vampire fiction, because people still love to make vampires bad guys. Something about Daryl Banner’s “Kissing with Teeth” attracted me (including the picture on the cover, which is intriguing rather than erotic). Indeed, while some of the blood-drinkers (the word vampire is never once uttered) are highly malevolent, the central characters in the book, Tristan, Kyle, and Elias, are desperately trying to be good. To be human.

The whole book is like something by Albert Camus that I read in college—surprisingly existential, morally complicated, and at its core, painfully human. It makes you think as well as feel, and its thrills are not cheap. It is also a rather wonderfully perverse twist on the LGBT Young Adult trope of nerd-meets-jock and falls in love (something Albert Camus never dealt with). A strong theme running through the storyline is the corrupting influence of power, and how having power leads to moral carelessness and cruelty.

Kyle is a small-town Texas football star, gradually realizing he’s gay and growing more and more distanced from his once-close jock friends. At the same time, he is the clear runner-up in his own family, less well-loved than his younger, violin-playing brother Kaleb. His strained relationship with his parents and with his teammates in high school make him especially open to the quiet approaches of the eccentric outsider at school, Tristan.

In fact, this book is filled with trauma, punctuated with a few points of bloody violence; but it is also filled with tenderness and yearning (which, oddly enough, is also rather bloody). Kyle’s journey from loneliness to something like community is tortuous, but the quiet appeal of his character, the fundamental goodness of his nature, provides an anchor in the midst of all of the moral confusion that drives the narrative’s three major parts.

This was enough for me. Banner writes well, and his characters are appealing, however flawed. There is a second book promised, and I really want to read it.