REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | May 23, 2005 Fred in Love, by Felice Picano. Terrace Books, 100 pages, $14.95 hardcover. The "Fred" of the title is a feline – but it's memoirist Picano who cats around, in this mildly gossipy, sweetly nostalgic, and incidentally erotic slice of a writer's life through the post-Stonewall '70s. A few years before the acclaim derived from early bestselling thrillers like The Lure, and decades before the fame – and, in fundamentalist circles, the infamy – of co-authoring a revised edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, Picano was an unpublished writer, sometime bookstore clerk, and randy young homosexual living in Greenwich Village. Easy sex with handsome men was available enough, but the author's strongest emotional attachment in those years was to affectionate Fred, a foundling kitten rescued from a euthanistic fate. More a chatty personal essay than a reflective, revealing memoir, Fred in Love is a companionable footnote to Picano's three previous novelistic memoirs (Ambidextrous, The Men Who Loved Me, A House on the Ocean, a House by the Bay). As he does in that memorable trilogy, this skilled raconteur mines his private live with amiable universal purpose. Hunter's Pursuit, by Kim Baldwin. Bold Strokes Books, 318 pages, $15.95 paper. Skilled assassins, a steadily mounting body count, sustained beatings and vicious knifings and murderous gunshots...what's a nice girl like Katarzyna Demetrious (Kat) doing in a book like this? Trying to retire from an undercover life of offing bad guys, as it happens. But someone out there wants reclusive Kat dead. Very dead, and at any cost. That's the premise of this fierce first novel, an action-packed thriller pitting deadly professional killers against each other. Hunter's Pursuit isn't a book for the violence-averse: Baldwin's fast-paced plot comes wracked with pain and soaked in blood, as a succession of hired hit men – and, ultimately, one woman motivated more by hatred than by money – track Kat to her isolated but not entirely impregnable winter hideaway. The mayhem, though extreme, is neither gratuitous nor implausible; and it's leavened, as every intelligent adventure novel’s excesses ought to be, with some lovin'. Even as she fends off her killers, Kat finds the woman she wants by her side – and in her bed. The Order of the Poison Oak, by Brent Hartinger. HarperTempest, 216 pages, $15.99 hardcover. Ah yes, summer camp. Teenage counselors corralled in an environment where shirts are off, nights are hot, and hormones run wild. In this stand-alone sequel to the young-adult novel The Geography Club, gay 16-year-old Russel – and his two best sophomore friends from the Gay-Straight-Bisexual Alliance they founded – are working at a summer camp for youngsters severely scarred by burns. Russell's heavy crush on a 19-year-old senior counselor figures prominently in the gently sexual plot, which is a tad steamier than that of the first book. But the story transcends queer kid romance angst: more essentially, it's about personal growth, as Russel, still something of a pariah at school for coming out, discovers within himself how to earn the respect of his rowdy cabin of outcast 10-year-old boys. The Order of the Poison Oak, with its easygoing emphasis on the virtue of tolerance and the value of friendship, is a well-pitched novel for teen readers – but one that will appeal to grownups with a yen for intelligent, humorous coming-of-age fiction. Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort, by Karen Christel Krahulik. New York University Press, 256 pages, $29.95 hardcover. With its cruisy sand dunes, drag queen extravaganzas, summer Bear gatherings, and lesbian party weekends, Provincetown for years has been a popular gay tourist destination, as well as home to a community of year-round queers. The author's keen-eyed cultural history charts the small town's evolution – from Pilgrims' landing, to sleepy Portuguese fishing village, to bohemian outpost, to haven for lesbian entrepreneurs, to a kind of gay Dionysian Disneyland – with both chatty accessibility and well-footnoted academic insight. Provincetown doesn't gloss over ongoing tensions between straight and gay residents or low-income townspeople and wealthy day-trippers; nor does it shy away from lamenting a graceful pace of life lost to the dynamic of commercialism. But Krahulik's entertaining social study persuasively and engagingly details that there are places in America – and Provincetown is one of them – where a kind of vibrant, magical co-existence, accepting and respecting diversity, has taken root and still survives. Featured Excerpt: When Scout's switchblade sliced into her arm, Kat cried out and her hand jerked open in reflex. Her buck knife clattered to the floor. But then her years of martial arts training and close-quarter drills at the Academy kicked in. She shut out the pain. She anticipated Scout would charge her. Her left hand came up to search for what had impaled itself in her right arm. Her fingers closed around the handle of the switchblade. She withdrew it with a grimace and swept a wide arc before her with the weapon, just as Scout launched herself forward. The knife met fleshy resistance. Scout screamed. The scent of blood hit Kat's nostrils. – from Hunter's Pursuit, by Kim Baldwin Footnotes: FLUX IS THE WORD of the month at Alyson Books: in the past few weeks, publisher Greg Constante has been ousted, editors Angela Brown and Nick Street are leaving, and other Los Angeles-based staff are deciding whether to follow their jobs to New York. The turmoil was touched off in April when LPI, the corporate overseer of Alyson – which publishes 35 to 40 lesbian and gay titles a year, more than any other press – decided that operations would relocate to Manhattan. Word from disaffected employees is that Judy Weider, editorial director of all things LPI (including Out, The Advocate, Out Traveler, and Advocate Books, an imprint geared toward queer memoirs and biographies), is looking for a new publisher to reorient the queer press – founded 25 years ago by Boston activist Sasha Alyson – to attract more straight readers. "Alyson is in very exciting shape these days... (and) is about to name a remarkably talented and dynamic person for the job of publisher," Weider said in a statement delivered through LPI public-relations honcho Eric Chandler – who is himself leaving the company. "And once that is in place, more shall be revealed about the direction and locations of Alyson Books, the oldest and most important gay and lesbian book company in America."... SACRAMENTO'S GAY BOOKSTORE, The Open Book, is winding up operations after owners Larry Bailey and Ron Granz failed to find a buyer for their 10-year-old store. They're retiring to travel. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks