While there are still far too few queer Jew­ish char­ac­ters to be found on the page, the num­ber is ris­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the realm of fan­ta­sy. There is much Jew­ish folk­lore ripe for rein­ter­pre­ta­tion; per­haps no fic­tion­al crea­ture is so well-known as the golem, an inan­i­mate being brought to life to pro­tect Jews in times of need. It isn’t hard to fig­ure out why the golem might be a pop­u­lar or com­fort­ing sym­bol in these times. The golem also makes for an excel­lent char­ac­ter through which to explore dif­fer­ent facets of queer identity.

In her new nov­el, Love Me Like a Rock Song, Shelly Jay Shore tells the sto­ry of Emmett and Delilah, a golem and a woman respec­tive­ly, as they embark on a road trip across the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States in a van named Roscoe. Emmett is attempt­ing to ful­fil their master’s dying wish; Delilah is try­ing to repair her bro­ken heart and write an album. There is a lot to enjoy in this book: The glimpses of the queer com­mu­ni­ties Delilah and Emmet dip into on their way west; the queer the­o­ry, Jew­ish wis­dom, and men­tal health notes includ­ed at the begin­ning of every chap­ter; the way Emmett’s eyes are opened to the truth of them­selves as they touch the wider world, and the way their nature as a golem feeds organ­i­cal­ly into their new­ly owned gen­der fluidity. 

Speak­ing of Emmett, Shore’s approach to the well-known fig­ure of the golem is fresh. Rather than a hulk­ing, non­hu­man enti­ty made from clay and water, Emmett pass­es seam­less­ly in the human world, appear­ing as a Nice Jew­ish Boy com­plete with kip­pah and tzitz­it. They were not cre­at­ed to pro­tect a shtetl from pogroms, but one man from his grief. It’s an inter­est­ing twist on the tra­di­tion­al tale, one more com­pelling than Delilah’s sto­ry at times, even if occa­sion­al­ly less fleshed out. (Per­haps this is done inten­tion­al­ly to keep Emmett shroud­ed in mys­ti­cism, but it also rais­es unan­swered ques­tions.) Despite the some­times intense sub­ject mat­ter — there is fre­quent talk of death and sui­ci­dal ideation — this book is an over­all light and very enjoy­able read to take you into the spooky autumn months.