For me, this was a book of two halves. If I could I would award it 3.5 stars, but 3 seems too mean for the stories I enjoyed, so 4 seems most appropriate.

If I were putting this collection together, I think I would switch the order of the pieces, as I felt like the first and last stories were the weakest. I almost gave up during the first story (Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones) because I found the timeline hopping jarring and the characters largely unlikeable. I simply struggled to understand their behaviour towards each other, probably because I felt like we never really got under their skin. As for The Masker, the story at the end of the book, I thought it felt rushed and I had no time to care about the lead in the story, but I have no doubt that other readers will feel differently.

But I thought that The Chaser and Stag Dance (the main novella in the story) were remarkable. Here Torres really allows her reader to get under the skin of her characters and to understand the choices they make. You can feel their confusion, desperation, affection, yearning, anger, passion, disgust and more. As a reader I felt drawn in rather than kept at arm's length like I did during the other two stories, and for me the ending of Stag Dance was the highlight of the whole collection.

I was thrilled to read Stag Dance, having previously enjoyed Peters’ Detransition, Baby. Going in, I didn’t realize this was a collection of four short stories rather than a novel, which slightly shifted my expectations. As with many short story collections, some pieces resonated more than others. The first story was my personal favorite, while the titular Stag Dance didn’t fully work for me.
One of the biggest challenges I faced was the abrupt endings and the disjointed feel between the stories. There was little continuity, which left me wanting a stronger thematic thread to tie everything together. Additionally, Stag Dance itself didn’t explore its premise as deeply as I had hoped based on the blurb and title. Compared to Peters’ previous work, I found the social commentary and depth of exploration a bit lacking.
That said, one of Peters’ greatest strengths—character development—remains a highlight. Each story introduces well-fleshed-out characters with unique narratives and perspectives, making for an engaging read. While this collection wasn’t entirely for me, I appreciate the opportunity to experience these different voices and stories.

3.5/5 stars

Torrey Peters has a lot of fun here playing with genre as much as with gender. Written over the course of ten years, there's a clear throughline from story to story even though their settings and tones vary.

Going to buck (ha!) a trend I'm seeing in other reviews and tell you that I loved the title story the most. The argot of the lumber pirates sings, and the difficulty the Babe Bunyan has with facing and articulating something there weren't really words for then is so vivid and heart wrenching. I know that Babe's going to hang around in my mind and my heart for a while.

The other stories are shorter than "Stag Dance", and those that have been available before ("Infect your Friends and Loved Ones" and "The Masker") are really worth re-reading in this context. The order of the stories here feels very intentional, their themes build on one another so effectively.

If you enjoyed Detransition, Baby make some time for Stag Dance, you'll be glad you did.

Many thanks to Penguin Random House and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Stag Dance is a stunning and extremely memorable collection of short stories. The title story, more like a novella in length, is a truly exceptional allegory of our society's treatment of the trans community and truly encaspulates the hurdles that trans people face in even the most basic aspects of life. The other stories are also very high quality and I enjoyed the entirety but Stag Dance in particular was a real stand out for me.
This collection is heavy on trans experiences but also explores other themes such as discrimination, illicit relationships and gender in a more general manner. These stories are insightful and witty, I will be highly recommending this book.

A beautifully written book. four stories that somehow merge and become one.
This wasn't for me though. It didn't grab me.
It wasn't anything to do with the topics of the book, I just couldn't relate to anything.

I had read and loved two of the stories from this book a while ago since they were available on Peters’ website.

Review of The Masker - Krys is a young trans woman trying to learn who she is. She goes to Vegas for a convention, of sorts, for trans women. At a party she meets an older trans woman who takes a shine to her and wants to help guide her. However she also meets a trans-fetishing man who wants to be her sugar daddy. Krys finds herself with a pretty intense decision to make.

This is dark & filled with longing. Krys is someone you want the best for but it’s unclear if she knows how to find it for herself. The entire thing feels almost dreamlike and as though the edges of reality are frayed. A great short read!

Review of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones - In a post-apocalyptic world no one can produce hormones so everyone has to choose their gender. Lexi, who was trans before the event, has carved out a small life for herself in this new world. We see glimpses of her past in The Before & also what/who is motivating her.

I got more from this than I have from some full page novels. There was an entire narrative arc here in under 100 pages and although I will always read more Torrey Peters, I felt very satisfied upon finishing this.

The story I hadn’t read, The Chaser, is set at a college and is from the POV of a guy who says he is straight but is fooling around with his roommate. He’s also pretty keen for said roommate to wear women’s clothes for him.

The novel, Stag Dance, was so wildly unexpected. It’s about loggers living in a camp deep in the forest who are looking forward to a dance. The men can decide to mark themselves as women for this dance but for the MC it seems to run just a little deeper than that.

As I said I loved the two stories I had already read, I liked The Chaser (there is a description of animal cruelty that I actually had to skip past it was a bit much) and I was so surprised by Stag Dance. I think Peters writes about transness in the most original and captivating ways, illustrating that the trans experience is ultimately infinite. It can be lived in so many different ways by so many different people. And for that reason I really think Torrey Peters has the range!

Detransition, Baby was one of my favourite books of 2021 so I was extremely excited to read Torrey Peters’ new book, Stag Dance (which is out in March).

It’s made up of three short stories, and one longer novella. The first story, an early work of Peters - a dystopian bio-terrorism hormone sci-fi - is good, but I was really grabbed by the second novella, The Chaser. Set in a boarding school in the unfolding relationship between two boys, it immediately reminded me of Peters’ fantastic gift for story and characters. Stag Dance is the much longer novella and is utterly fantastic. Queer lumberjack escapades and folklore, filled with the most wonderful, immersive dialogue and terminology. The internal voice of the protagonist, Babe, is so charming and earnest that I was sad to leave the world that Peters created. The final story, The Masker, is probably the darkest turn of the collection (although these are all undeniably dark stories in one way or another) and looks at the dilemma of being faced with a profound choice about who you are and seeking easy fantasy over a difficult, vulnerable reality.

One of my favourite things about Peters is how she writes about desire - the cruelty present in both going without, and in being too desired; and the purely vulnerable, often humiliating nature of desire. The way people rejected by the world both turn to and turn on each other to claw back what limited power they can access. She paints the various power imbalances and negotiations of relationships (both in intimate relationships and within communities) with an excruciatingly fine brush. It feels great to see a writer like this, who writes so fearlessly and honestly, be embraced by the mainstream as she has, particularly in the current climate. It couldn’t be more well-deserved.

I never read anything of the author before, so this collection of stories was such a. Brilliant introduction. Each narrative stands independently, with no direct relation to one another beyond the shared exploration of gender. Despite this separation, the cohesion of the collection works beautifully together, creating a powerful reading experience that I loved. The exploration of the different styles and different storytelling was so refreshing for me, it had some topics that made me feel uncomfortable completely and some point of views that seemed not okay in my own point of view but as a reader I kinda think the author is allowed to express himself ik the way she wants. In the end are just stories. I really need check her work and read a bit more of her work after this brilliant book

I was a huge fan of Detransition Baby and wanted to like this book so much. However, I knly.managed 60% and had to abandon it. The story just didn't engage and I couldn't connect with this. Peter's writes beautiful but this book just want for me. I'll definitely read more of Peters' work, though.

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is an intriguing, genre defying collection of short stories and one novella that proved to be a bit of a mixed bag.

My favourites were definitely Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (dystopian sci-fi) and The Chaser (coming of age romcom with bite) - both of these were tender and clever.

Unfortunately the central novella, Stag Dance, just didn’t work for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t get along with the language and writing style, and that I also had no idea what was going on half the time (the dialogue between the characters was very confusing to me). I really liked the concept (described as Brokeback Mountain but more trans) but not the delivery sadly.

The Masker I just didn’t enjoy. Too much violence and abuse on the page.

However the first two short stories I read were excellent, and the fact that each story is borrowing from a different genre and has different language and writing styles coming from the same author is impressive and unique! Overall a fresh and experimental collection.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

STAG DANCE is a collection of four short stories, the longest of which gives the book its title. As inevitably happens with collections of short stories, I enjoyed some more than others, resulting in an average of four stars (which means I really liked it) across the book as a whole. Each story feels completely different from the next, the characters individualised and the control of genre masterful, and each has a unique take on gender identity and sexuality.

"Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" is a page-turning read, which moves between the time before and after a contagion that prevents people from naturally producing hormones, and thus requires everyone to choose their own gender. I really enjoyed both the premise and the way it is executed, but there is also much more to this story, and I loved the way we get to see two perspectives on the same event (as we also do in "The Masker"). As someone who doesn't always love dystopia, the way this story balanced those elements with a sort of Trans utopia really worked for me.

"The Chaser" is my favourite story in the collection. Described by Peters as a teen romance, it tells the story of a relationship between two roommates at a Quaker boarding school. I just loved how visceral the emotions of this story felt: both the tenderness of the romance, and the adolescent rage of the main character. I also really liked the way Peters explores how homosexual expression is permitted within heterosexual all-male spaces (as she also does in "Stag Dance").

"Stag Dance" recounts how an illegal winter logging outfit entertain themselves with a dance at which some of the loggers must volunteer to attend as women. I really liked the way Peters plays with the idea of gender as performance, but I have to admit that this was my least favourite story in the collection. I found its length a bit of a slog, but fans of the western genre will probably feel differently.

"The Masker" is another favourite for me, set during a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip where a young crossdresser must choose between exciting power games with a mystery man, and the unglamorous reality being offered by a cynical trans woman. I loved the sexiness of this story, with its dark undercurrent, as it explores the world of cross-dressing and fetish. I also found it a genuinely affecting read, and its mix of fun and heartfelt emotion is sure to appeal to fans of DETRANSITION, BABY.

Stag Dance is the follow-up to Detransition, Baby, a collection of three novellas and one short novel that use genre to explore different narratives of transition and gender. There are two previously self-published novellas, 'Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones' and 'The Masker', which explore trans community and desire from a speculative fiction and horror perspective respectively, and then a new novella, 'The Chaser', which tells a teen drama story in a boarding school. And then there's the titular 'Stag Dance', a short novel about an illegal logging camp in which a winter dance brings to the forefront a rivalry between two 'jacks'.

It's hard to summarise my anticipation for this book, even with the fact that I'd already read the two self-published novellas before. I didn't know how it would work with the four different stories, but as Peters herself explains in the closing acknowledgements, they come together as using genre to explore transition, each written at a different time for Peters but also taking a very different framing. The world of trans community and hormone farming in 'Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones' feels just as relevant now, and was just as punchy as when I first read it, and I think I enjoyed 'The Masker's depiction of a horrifying choice amidst the wannabe glamour of Las Vegas more this time, with its echoes of trans media to come post-2016 (for example, a very different version of I Saw the TV Glow). 'The Chaser' felt very different again for Peters, with boarding school teen drama not a genre I'd expected, and it sits nicely with Idlewild and ideas of pre-transition relationships and desire.

And then, there's the titular story 'Stag Dance', which if you'd told me the summary without the author, I would've assumed there was no way I'd enjoy it, but instead, it turned out to be an incredibly written and gripping look into what a transition can be in a completely different context. The honesty of costumes and crossdressing for trans people becomes something fresh in this world of lumberjacks in which some are pretending to attend a dance as a woman, but for others, that is entirely revealing. It is written in such a specific way and I found that fascinating: as I've heard Peters talk about, her writing often is interpreted as having a trans audience through the vocabulary and what she does or doesn't explain, but in 'Stag Dance', that is not explaining any of the 'jack' vocabulary and just letting you pick it all up through context. It shows how much language shapes our understanding and our ideas of gender and transition, with the narrator having a very different way of describing transition, but still having one nonetheless.

Stag Dance is funny, insightful, horrifying, deeply sad, and won't be for everyone. I've heard a talk in which Torrey Peters spoke about the fact (in a far more nuanced way than I'm putting it) that there should be "trans" every genre rather than the idea of "trans literature" and Stag Dance is doing that work, four stories at once. Entirely predictably, I loved it.

The range!! Raw, uncomfortable, beautiful, reflective and completely varied. 4 stories with no relation to each other outside of experiencing gender, and it works BEAUTIFULLY. loved it.

An interesting and very varied set of stories! I realised once I started reading this that I’d already read Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker, so it was interesting to revisit those a couple years on. The former I really enjoyed (a dystopian short story about an very trans-coded apocalypse scenario) and would have loved to read more of, the latter (a short story about different forms of transness and their conflicts within them, with a creepy almost horror-y feel) I found unsettling enough that I didn’t really enjoy it but was an interesting reread.

Of the two I hadn’t read before (The Chaser and Stag Dance) - I really enjoyed The Chaser, the themes of coming of age and teenage repression with queer and trans themes really drew me in, and I thought it was beautifully crafted as a short story (despite the very gory part that I would not recommend reading in public - I’m sure my face was a picture). Stag Dance - the titular novella and longer than the others - I wasn’t really drawn to, I thought it was masterfully written, especially the language, which really world built very well, but the slow build didn’t really keep me engaged and I think overall logging party novella is probably not a story I’d be super interested in regardless of all the trans themes!

So overall a 3.5 from me.

This was exactly what I've been looking for in speculative/dystopian and Peters once again discusses gender in such a poignant nuanced way that I have never come across before. A sensational follow up, will be recommending to all!

I loved all of the stories in this collection. They were so different from one another but the writing and emotions were consistently powerful across each of the different genres.