When the electricity between them shifts to Mungo quietly comforting James in his grief that first night, how did you read it? When Mungo visits James's flat the first time, he notices a collection of palm leaves twisted into crucifixes on the dining room wall and startles at the revelation that James is a Catholic-the Capulet to Mungo's Montague, with James's Catholicism yet another obstacle to their becoming friends, let alone lovers.How does his understanding of his family's poverty affect how he sees and experiences the city where he lives? Have you had similar experiences of limitation regarding your own hometown or region? Yet as the novel unfolds, Mungo in particular sees other possible lives for himself as he is exposed to the world beyond his specific housing scheme and to the many layers of Glasgow, a city with immense beauty and diversity.

Mungo, Jodie, and Hamish are each hyperaware of the limitations that poverty puts upon their lives, and they each make choices according to these limitations.How do you think that plays into his decision to band together with Hamish in the brawl with the Catholics that even Jodie insists he join? What about his risky acquaintance with Chickie Calhoun, whom the boys of the scheme consider 'sub-human, sub-them' (p. As a queer young man in a tough Glaswegian scheme with a baked-in allegiance to a violent brother, Mungo has no safe means to express himself and nobody he can trust.Does naming our dark sides help rob them of power? Is there a point-as in Jekyll and Hyde-when this coping mechanism loses its power? If that point comes for Tattie-bogle, when? The characters Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, made famous by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, speak to the presence of good and evil in all of us, indeed to the drive to distance ourselves from our dark sides by naming them-by making them-'other.' At age eight, Jodie conjures the name Tattie-bogle for Mo-Maw's dark side.To what degree do you think a queer boy's survival in a homophobic atmosphere depends on his ability to read body language over spoken word? Does Mungo's ability to find love also depend on it? Don't we all have nervous behaviors and tics that reveal things about us? Yet Mungo so often misses the meaning in other people's words.

The author communicates a great deal about the characters through their physical idiosyncrasies: Jodie with her 'Haaah-ha' and Mungo with his facial tics and compulsive picking, as well as the body language of other characters toward him.

How did you experience the repeated shifts between these two settings-Mungo, Gallowgate, and St Christopher at the loch, and Mungo, James, and the Hamilton family in Glasgow? How did you interpret the overlapping of the novel's two basic genres: a thriller tinged with violent horror and a queer romance?

The novel takes place on two distinct time lines, and the painful connection between the two eventually becomes clear.

Douglas stuart mungo