Simon’s Mansion

In Poe’s third autobiographical novel (after Simon Says), a man struggles to fit into his small Arkansas town after crashing and burning in California. Simon Powell, 37, and his boyfriend, Thad, both recently out of rehab for cocaine addiction, settle into Simon’s family’s ancestral mansion in Sibley, Ark., with Simon’s aging mother, Vivian, in the late 1980s. Thad chafes against small town life and returns temporarily to California to work as a gay porn voice-over artist. Simon, meanwhile, reenrolls at the University of Arkansas to resume his undergraduate studies, having dropped out years earlier to join the Moonies, while his mother suffers a stroke and is moved to a nursing home. When Thad stops returning his calls, Simon assumes he’s relapsed—until a package arrives with a video, prompting him on a daring rescue mission to California and then to Spain. Lengthy, sometimes cumbersome exposition drags down the first half of the novel, though it illuminates details of Simon’s past, such as his previous marriage to a woman from his church, and Poe does a good job developing Simon’s tension with his family over his break from religion. While it gets off to a rough start, this complex character study evolves into a nice page-turner. (Self-published)