Nights of Fury

Rating:
Summary: The Survivor
Review: Jason Fury represents all that is good within the human soul. He was born gay and had the misfortune of growing up in the deep South where conformity is the rule and in matters of sex, any deviation from the "normal" way of doing it is asking for harassment, ridicule, and isolation. These life defining forces in his life could not diminish his spirit although I am sure that his trust in people has been severely tested throughout his life.

This is the first of his books that I have read but I will surely eventually read them all. "Nights of Fury" is autobiographical and highlights different phases in the life of this talented writer from the terrible growing up years, battling a tyrannical mother and passive father, the taunting that he endured during his formative years in high school, on through his awakening years in college and then to the real world of the work place where gay people were deemed lower than blacks to the bigots that he encountered.

This book will strike a strong chord to anyone, male or female, who live in a society like ours which professes to be virtuous and Christian, yet is capable of treating non-conformist badly. I believe anyone who reads about his experience at East Carolina college will cringe at the hostility that this gentle creature created. The same psychology that besets mobs seems to operate on those who feel compelled to taunt those who are gay or different. We only have to look back to the Nazi era where homosexuals were imprisoned and murdered, or to the Hoover years when the same hysteria existed.
Fury has a natural writing style which flows smoothly and evokes the mood of the setting excellently. It may be that the harsh maturation that he endured has helped him to develop deeper nsights that make his characters so vivid and real. An excellent book. JT