Simpleman
Michael Scott Curnes
Down Wind Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1998844043
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (12/2025)
I had more than one reason to be grateful for the chance to review Michael Scott Curnes’ inventive and enthralling new novel, Simpleman. In a book that mixes psychological thriller and scathing noir with dark, deadpan humor and social satire, the author looks at the relationship between three central characters: siblings Ronald and Harlan Simpleman, and the younger Mitch, a dynamic and successful author with whom both brothers have been intimately involved.
The story begins in 2025, and the plot unfolds in reverse, a la Christopher Nolan’s film, Memento. Now, please don’t let this dissuade you, because Curnes knows how to write, and he is careful to fill in just enough space to keep the reader interested and get them to the big reveal, the ending. Or the beginning, since we’re reading backwards.
In any case, the tale begins with Harlan attending his brother’s funeral, and he has no desire to be there. Ronald’s older brother is a bit curmudgeonly, neurotic, but in my opinion, less tortured and more down-to-earth than his little brother. Both are gay, and both have had relations with Mitch, but Harlan’s encounter was basically a one-night stand that didn’t play a big role in the story. In fact, as the plot develops, Harlan takes more of a back seat as the author focuses on the relationship between Mitch and Ronald.
While watching Harlan endure the torture of having to be back in Colorado surrounded by the people he’d gotten away from, we come to learn how the fire started. It turns out that there are incriminating sex photos and Super 8 film of Mitch and Ron getting down to business. The problem is that this film was shot when Mitch was underage, and Ronald was his high school teacher. The rest of the story, unfolding backward into the past, explains to us just what had transpired and how it led to Ronald’s death in the blaze that took the family home.
It turns out that Ronald was simply trying to destroy the evidence he still had, whatever film or images still existed; he wanted them gone. And don’t think that this is because of his love for his former student. No, Ronald has had the devil scared out of him now that Mitch has become a successful writer. He is terrified that he was exposed in his former student’s last publication, and he fears the truth will come out.
This is just the beginning of a very intricately woven web that will take us all the way back to Ronald’s birth in 1946, at which point the author comments that he was not at all happy about the “role he was expected to play.”
This is key, because at the heart of this novel is the concept of life as performance, and the theatre metaphors abound. In fact, toward the end, Ronald is involved in staging Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This is a play in which several characters are in drag or in disguise, and in Simpleman, this theme really resonates. We get to take a look at what happens when role-playing, as well as a lack of real connection and communication with others, becomes the principle by which we govern our lives.
There’s a lot more going on here, and it’s driven home with great character development and ruthlessly dark humor. We get to know Ronald well enough to know that he names his hemorrhoids: Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera, three furies from Greek mythology. In one sentence, we learn that he’s educated and has a dark sense of humor. His brother does as well. As Harlan reflects, he remembers telling his brother to “keep the home fires burning” and makes a joke out of it.
When you’re dealing with darkness, you need a little levity, and this book certainly does deliver. But what most pleases me about Simpleman is that we are at a point now where we can write strong, complex queer characters in ways that are not didactic, preachy, or watered down like DEI videos and bad straight-to-Netflix dreck. We still have many battles to fight, but as the son of a gay man and someone who has been involved in queer rights and legalizing gay marriage, I am glad to see that books like this can be written, and I am glad to see that queerness can be addressed more honestly in a book that portrays characters who are infinitely more complex than any identity designation could suggest. There was never a moment in the book where the author felt that he needed to defend queerness, gay marriage, or any other issue not related to plot and character, and this means we have the freedom to write about our queer brothers and sisters with much more nuance, compassion, and truth.
And by the way, the Lynyrd Skynyrd song will help you with the title!