When Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa were teenagers in the late 90s, they ran a video game corporation together. They never actually sold a video game, but they worked on an incredibly ambitious text-based (ASCII) game together. Sash was the leader, the idea person who held everyone else to exacting standards. Lilith struggled to design game levels that lived up to her expectations. And Abraxa was the creative who did everything else. When they were young, this game was everything to them. But then it abruptly ended. Almost twenty years later, just after the 2016 election, we meet them as adults, all still affected by their unfinished project.
I grew up a queer teen on message boards, and while I didn’t share a lot of the experiences of the characters in A/S/L—I’m cisgender and am a little younger than them—there was also a lot of overlap. Early on in the novel, we get an extended excerpt from their message board they shared with a bunch of other teens, like this:
< PhilippeDark > Sash! Always a pleasure ^_ ^
< MazeRyder > Hail, m’lady, and merry meetings to you! * MazeRyder tips his tall hat
< sash > hello.
< useless_x > whoa, like, it’s sash, hyuck hyuck
< reficul > hi sash * apollyon nods gravely
It was a flashback to my teen years, chatting on Zetaboards with my online friends. Like Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa, we were building something together. In my case, it was crafting an overly ambitious fantasy world we could roleplay in. Unsurprisingly, we never completed it—we never even came close. But it was a formative part of my adolescence, and I got a lot of nostalgia reading that message board with its concurrent conversations, even as I cringed at it.
While these teens were trying to create an original game, it was deeply influenced by the Mystic Knights franchise, which they hold in almost religious reverence. I was also a geeky teen who grew up in fandoms, so I could relate to the way they kept revisiting those games to glean new meaning—meaning that is more invented than unearthed.
Their teen years are more prologue than anything else, though. Most of the novel we spend with their adult selves. I don’t consider identity a spoiler, so I’ll mention that all three main characters are queer trans women, though they didn’t know it as teens. As adults, they’ve lost touch and are living very different lives. Lilith has just gotten a promotion as a loan underwriter at a bank. Abraxa is pretty nomadic, bouncing from place to place. Sash lives with her parents and makes money as a webcam dominatrix.
Despite the time that’s passed, they all are haunted by their incomplete game, Saga of the Sorceress. Unbeknownst to them, they’re also now all living in or near New York City, and as Abraxa becomes unhealthily obsessed with the figure of the Sorceress and what she represents, their lives are poised to collide again.
This is definitely a character-based story: you really deep dive into these three characters’ lives and interiority. All of them are struggling to some extent. They find community with other trans women, but those relationships (friendships and romances) are fractured and incomplete. Each of them feels lost and aimless, which is part of why they’re nostalgic for their shared purpose as teens.
A/S/L is an absorbing, thoughtful read—though I didn’t think it needed to be 500 pages. It’s melancholic, which made it drag by the end for me. I was especially worried about Abraxa, and I was hoping for more closure. Still, it’s an insightful, ambitious, memorable story that I can tell the right reader will be absolutely obsessed with.
Content warnings for significant transphobia and homophobia, including slurs, as well as untreated psychosis.
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