Through It Came Bright Colors

by Trebor Healey

Book Overview

Neil Cullane is a closeted, conflicted 21 year old who lives in two worlds light years apart. At home, he's the dutiful son of Frank and Grace, and devoted brother to Peter who is battling cancer. But... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560234520
• ISBN13: 9781560234524
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Southern Tier Editions
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Ninety Per Cent

I read with this fellow at a bookstore in LA and listened to him from the front row, hanging on to his every word, as he tore through the first half of a piece called "Pancake Circus" from the new edition of BEST GAY EROTICA 2006. When time constraints forced Healey to break off from reading the story halfway through, the whole audience groaned as if in one breath, like one prevented from coming by, what, a discovery or an emergency. On the flight back home I started reading his novel THROUGH IT CAME BRIGHT COLORS about which I had heard quite a bit but from which, I confess, I had averted my eyes due to the extreme garishness of the cover, one of Harrington Park's specialties, throwing a rainbow glow over everything they touch like Willy Wonka or Sammy Davis Jr. Anyhow once I tore off its covers and tossed them towards the whirring propellors of the prop plane engines, where they went confetti like down the runway, the book was a delight. "Pancake Circus" has its own magic, but BRIGHT COLORS is a horse of a different, though equally estimable, what, well, color of course. Healey has many gifts, and the book tells three stories, alternating back and forth between two of them like clockwork. In one story a boy of 21, Neill Culhane, finds the courage to come out to his family in a dreary suburb of San Francisco. In the second storyline he helps his younger brother Peter, who is trying to live with cancer and is always in and out of the hospital. In the third story, Neill finds himself the erotic prey of a dangerous youth, Vince Malone, one of the damaged boys who frequent the alleys where I live, South of Market here in San Francisco. Vince is trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for victim, for in far off and icy cold Buffalo New York, as a boy, little Vince was forced to have sex with his father in the shower and now he can barely stand to be touched, always keeping his T-shirt on even in bed with Neill. He split from his family at age 12 or 14 and hasn't looked back since, except every minute of every day when not nodding out that's what he is doing, looking back to the years of his abuse and blaming everything that's happened to him since on a pair of uncaring and abusive parents. Neill's parents aren't so great either, but as Neill learns, it's better the devil you know. Healey gets all of it right, down to the details of the furnished flophouse room Vince hibernates in, with a triangulated sink in one corner, the green coverlet, the nosy yet oddly permissive desk clerk. Tourists from the theater district sometimes turn their noses up at the human refuse at their feet, and yet as Vince says they don't use San Francisco fully, none of us do, we only use ten percent of our brains and we only use 10 percent of San Francisco as well. Healey proceeds in metaphor, literally; that's the way he develops his story, in accretive segments of "this is like that," and it has a powerful, mesmerizing effect on the rea

A NOVEL GRACED WITH THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY

?In THROUGH IT CAME BRIGHT COLORS Trebor Healey creates believable, sympathetic characters (people any of us might meet in the urban landscape), then twists the plot elements just right to keep the reader a bit off-balance, while handily avoiding the "gay novel" ghetto with a strong narrative thread involving the protagonist's brother's cancer and its effect on his family. Peter (the brother) and the parents may be less fully fleshed out than protagonist Neill and his love interest Vince, but that is how it should be. It is ultimately Neill's story - and a good one. A favorite scene for me has Neill looking at SF and seeing the Sierra Nevada mountains. Healey leads us to the similarities between the two landscapes and, in doing so, highlights the vast difference. I love being in the Sierras so the section where Neill takes Vince up there was particularly enjoyable for me - and the unexpected direction it took was most effective. In the mid-70's I lived in a residence hotel in San Francisco and the experience was much as Healey describes life in Vince's home, the Baldwin Arms. Thus I find Healey's writing to be authentic when set against the standard of my own experience. But it is Healey's use of language which sets this novel apart. His is clearly a poet's language and brings much pleasure simply on its own. Certain sections and individual lines jumped out at me and have lingered long after I put the book down. To cite just a few examples (without ruining any plot elements): On page 53 he writes "Love was a much more physical thing than I'd ever understood it to be. It lived where his fingers touched mine; it's what made the water bead up on his shoulders and roll off; it's what made his skin warm, glowing and soft. I'd always thought love was some feeling in the mind, but this was the physicality of love: the love of the body, so much simpler; so much more useful." He is referring, in that passage, not to a lover, but to his brother's cancer-wracked and mutilated body. The feeling that passage planted within me was unexpected and profound. I wish I'd written "the long bulb-studded strands of kelp unanchored and ambushed by flies"(p.77). I have seen that image on the beach so many times but never found the way to such a clear and accurate description. And on p.135: "Her eyes were like thick, clear glass when I reached her, as if her tears had set up permanent residence atop her irises, refusing to recede of fall." This line not only describes a physical appearance, but uses that physicality to get deep into the being of the mother in a way that a more direct attempt to describe what she was feeling could never have done. These are only a few of the many fine individual passages which work together to make this wonderful book something to treasure. It is hard to believe that this is a "first novel." I am eagerly awaiting his next one and hope that his poetry, especially a series of rare and increasingly hard to find chapbooks, is soon made

Complex characters, Gripping Narrative

For those of you, like me, who are sick and tired of the cookie-cutter characters present in many gay coming-out first novels, "Through It Came Bright Colors" is a welcome breath of fresh air. The characters are unlike any others I've experienced in recent gay literature. They're human in every sense of the word: real, complex, imperfect, and, at times, unlikeable. They've stayed with me well after I've put the book down, which is the highest compliment I can give a writer. The other posters here have nicely summarized the novel, but let me just add that "Through It Came Bright Colors" is ultimately about going into the wilderness (both literally and figuratively) to find one's true self. That wilderness (be it cancer, a run-down boarding house, or a hike in the mountains)transforms each of the characters, as they journey to discover the truth about themselves.

rough and sexy and pure

From the first sentence, I felt pulled in. Trebor Healey starts his book with a poetic metaphor, but rather than being flowery and sentimental, it's a hard-hitting, earthy, and, yes, romantic opening that made this reader feel that he was in extremely capable hands.The end of that chapter is as beautiful and perfect as a poem. It hit me the way a poem does, like a revelation, as if the page caught fire and blew a veil off my eyes, and then burned a layer of insulation from around my heart.This book makes me remember when I first came to San Francisco, when I was young and living on Skid Row. My experience was nothing like the experiences of Vince, or Neill, or Peter, but I believe those characters, and I like them. Hell, I love `em, to tell the truth. They got into my heart in about two minutes flat and are staying there quite comfortably. It's so easy to love all the people in `Through It Came Bright Colors,' because the writing comes from such a deep place.Reading this book, I sigh, and ache, and love, and remember, and sigh again.But oh Lord, the last chapter. The whole book cast a beatiful spell on me, all rough and sexy and pure, but that last chapter spun the whole thing into orbit. Brilliant and holy: my mouth was on the floor reading it, and my heart felt as if an ancient knot was being unfolded and loosened at last. A few days ago, I wanted to start rereading it, having forgotten I had already given it to my best friend!

A Clear Heart

Trebor Healey's first novel affirms today's headlines: the suburbs make people sick. In following the story of a suburbanite aching to come out loving another young man, Healey uses the unlikely metaphor of illness as teacher. It's an absorbing read of real characters, contemporary issues, and writing that regularly shimmers. This is the kind of first novel that leaves you anticipating what will follow.Neil, his college drop-out protagonist, faces an illness more serious than even 'burb-induced obesity and depression. Though the latter secretly haunts him, it is the cancer diagnosis of his athlete younger brother that forces Neil to become anchor to a family drifting under the siege of a stricken adolescent. To cope with the smothering role of caregiver, Neil escapes his Northern California bedroom community for the Skid Row bedroom of Vince, a compelling, righteous survivor of both child abuse and a cancer battle of his own. With his alluring looks and "What Would Satan Do?" T-shirt, Vince helps Neil break down his inhibitions and express love. Problem is, Vince just can't accept it, let alone return it. Here's an oversimplification of the plot: Boy meets boy meets heroin. That's where the strength of this writing is at its best, for while cancer has a known cause and, in theory at least, a cure, serious drug addictions remain unfathomable and usually hopeless. Healey deftly portrays Neil's suburban naivete: that his abundant good will can stabilize Vince just as it stabilizes his stricken brother and suffering parents. The hard lesson is that his most powerful refrain, "That's what cancer taught me," is no match for the diagnosis of addiction.In fresh language, Healey shows how young people have to find their own way in the wilderness of love, especially gay love. His tour of the suburbs, though sketchy, is all that's necessary: the vague, dutiful parents, the formulaic schools, and the underlying dysfunction of the world of tract houses. His portrait of Neil as the good-humored closet case, second best even as an older brother, is so accurate it's painful to read. Descriptions of tumor recurrence, skin grafts, and night nurses will have a queasy familiarity to anyone who's stayed by a sickbed.Healey's writing comes even more alive in following his characters into San Francisco's gritty street life, and, briefly into the Sierras for a backpacking trip. His depth of detail makes each environment solid; perfect stages for his characters. There's something unusual about Healey's ability to retain and express the complexities of adolescent emotional development, especially through a gay lens. Even at their most authentically tortured, there's a clarity to the feelings this author conveys. Best of all, it's not for homos only; Through It Came Bright Colors should have a strong following among anyone who likes good, substantial writing. This book is tailor made for adolescent readers. Its honest and detailed affirmation of