After scourging gay Hollywood in last year's Tricks of the Trade, Tyler turns his satiric sights on reality TV with incendiary results. Those with a taste for malicious mischief will enjoy this heady concoction of plot-heavy, door-slamming farce mixed with explicit gay sex and Tinseltown name-dropping (with the latter fictionalized just enough to avoid legal action). Although it's generally all in good fun, there's a trip to a dungeon (run by the priest at St. Ethel Mertz the Divine) that may separate the men from the boys. When a scandal gets Hamilton Peabody demoted to the position of programming director at a small local TV station in Dulcit, Iowa, he comes up with an idea to get himself back into L.A. and the limelight. He creates the reality TV/game show Hunk House
(a mixture of Survivor, Real World
and Queer as Folk) to resuscitate his career. Six gay men volunteer to be holed up in a haunted Victorian mansion equipped with cameras to record their every move, and one household member gets voted "out" each week. However, the small town can only find five gay contestants, so Bull, the station's straight repairman, is coerced into joining the show. Readers may be able to guess the results but not all the twists that the story takes to get there. (July 16)
Forecast:With the paperback of
Tricks of the Trade coming out in June along with Tyler's inclusion in the May anthology
Summer Share, the author will have a high-profile summer for his gay beach reading. The nearly naked hunks on the jacket and national advertising won't hurt, either.
