The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Dionysus in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Gothic 1)
By E.H. Lupton
Winnowing Fan Press, 2023
Five stars

There are so many good things about this book—the writing, the characters, the fresh twists on magic and the spirit world set into the mundane calm of a university—but I have to confess the fact that the central character, Ulysses Lenkoff, shares a rare given name with me made me weirdly happy. To amplify that, my best friend in high school and college was a boy named Wellington—but called Sam, an eerie echo of the other central characters, Dionysus Sterling (aka Sam). Beyond that, there is absolutely nothing parallel between the book’s plot and my life, but the names were enough—because, as we learn, names are important.

The world of University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus is captured wonderfully, giving the reader an actual place from which the story’s strangeness can spiral nicely. The time is also interesting—1969, when I was only fourteen, but my older brother was caught up in Vietnam War protests and the traumas of the early baby-boomers. I don’t know Lupton’s reasons for choosing this place in time, but it works wonderfully when you focus on the fantasy of her world: there is a department of magical studies at University of Wisconsin, and Ulysses is getting his PhD in that department. Magical users are exempt from military service because they are thought to be generally unfit to react to military scenarios as “normal” people do. The exception is Ulysses’s younger brother, Lazarus, whose particular magical skill makes him ideal to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force. It is a small detail, barely noted in passing, but it sets up a world in which the real and unreal mix very neatly.

Ulysses specializes in dealing with ghosts, and helping them with their particular problems. It is an unusual skillset, making him wonder about his career path after he writes his dissertation. But then he hears of, and then meets, Sam Sterling, son of a local industrialist, an archivist in the Historical Society, which is right on the Madison campus. Dark forebodings about danger on the way don’t seem to jibe with Sam’s mild-mannered personality, and Ulysses (with his big motorcycle and James Dean affectations) finds himself unaccountably attracted to this smart, nerdy, theater-managing guy.

Of course, both families, the Lenkoffs and the Sterlings, become important participants in the narrative, both illuminating and explaining why these men are who they are, and, ultimately, why Sam’s given name of Dionysus is important—and threatening. The connection between Ulysses and Sam is unusual, until it begins to feel somehow inevitable, and even essential. Magic does strange things, and while Sam declares that his family has no magic at all, circumstances seem to say otherwise.

All of the characters are interesting and significant, and even minor figures add dimension to the increasingly strange goings-on in wintry Madison with all its bodies of frozen water and buildings full of sentient books. Lupton writes her story and her people very well, and catches the reader up in this surreal world that begins to seem all too plausible.

I have already started reading the sequel to this: Old Time Religion.