An introduction to Evander Mills

Why hello there,

This is my very first Substack post and I have performance anxiety. I used to blog all the time, as referenced by the posts that are years old in the archive. I’ve decided that I want to do it more often as an anchor to my more rambling long-form videos.

With Rosen’s latest installment in his Evander Mills Trilogy, Rough Pages, being published on the first of October, I thought it would be fun to do a mini readathon. So I planned this taking place between the 16th of September and October 1st. However, I have a horrible habit of creating things and then forgetting about them, and with this being Boy Wonder’s Birthday AND the end of Horror Hound, my brain needed a bit of time to recover.

So I didn’t start until the 18th, with the first novel, Lavender House, published in 2022. The one thing I want to say is that Rosen does Queer incredibly well. This novel is penned with incredible care and attention to detail. I think they did a wonderful job of interlacing the aching need to be loved that we queer folk have with the ache of needing to solve this case.

In this introduction, we follow our hero, Evander Mills, who was an Inspector with the SFPD, who was released from his duties because he was found during a gay bar raid. This takes place in the early 50s, it’s illegal to be queer, clubs are raided and if you are unlucky enough to be found, it is bad news bears.