Go out. Take a pill. Meet a boy. Dance. Recover. Repeat.

Calvin is sixteen, gay and out of control. The product of a generation raised on Nintendo and Happy Meals, he lives a life of detachment in which everything is transient and temporary. A volatile mix of confidence and insecurity, Calvin is determined to become a part of a world he doesn't fully understand.

When Calvin meets Anthony the two boys form an immediate and obsessive bond. But as he deals with the pain and confusion of first love - struggling to understand the distant Anthony as well as to understand himself - he discovers pictures of Anthony on a website, and is drawn into a world more adult than he could have imagined.
 

Calvin’s narrative is delivered through a fragmented and fast-paced series of emails, text messages, miniature film scripts, and stretches of dialogue along with more traditional descriptive passages. ‘I wanted to suggest the hyper-fast, media-saturated and chemically-altered lifestyle that Calvin leads’, says 20-year-old author, Alasdair Duncan.

He comments: ‘Calvin represents the confusion that many gay teenagers face - he is trying to find his place in a confusing and scary world. There is no one to tell him 'how it's done', and without an obvious path to follow, he has to make his own way and seek out his own experiences. He stumbles across the facts of life and has to make sense of them himself.
 

Calvin, sixteen and living in the boring suburbs of brisbane, serendipitously meets the boy whose pictures calvin has been lusting after since finding them on the internet. The relationship is far from easy, though, as calvin must learn a lot about life and a lot about himself to come out of it unscathed.
This is an extremely caustic work. Calvin is barely a likeable character, just so anthony, mykal (sic) and the rest.

Their outlooks on life are far too nihillistic for any sixteen or seventeen year olds. In opposition to the publisher's blurb, there is no dark humour present. Instead, there is an intense sense of bitterness running through the entire work, never really uncovered but certainly always there. the ending is also predictable - it can be seen coming from the first time calvin clicks on the images sent in that fateful email.

Tags: Alasdair Duncan, Dance Recover Repeat, fiction, gay, teen