No Man’s Land by Sally Malcolm
LGBTQ+/Paranormal/Historical Romance
November 21, 2024- Self-published

Review by Kate H

This is the romance I didn’t know I needed.  

No Man’s Land by Sally Malcolm is a gay historical paranormal romance. It is set during the First World War, both at the war front in Flanders. Amidst the horrors of war and the brutal workload of a Red Cross medic, Josef Shepel tries to photograph what he sees at the front in the hopes that it will change minds at home. The senseless deaths of thousands of men in the name of imperialism infuriates him. He is a socialist, a conscious objector, and a photographer for one of the underground papers in London. During a break, Josef meets the enigmatic and aristocratic Captain Winchester, who is and isn’t who he says he is.  You could call this an enemies to lovers romance, because of Josef’s antipathy to the upper class and his mistrust of the Captain and his skirting of the truth. Josef is gripped with the desire to know and expose what he believes is a new weapon of war: an infection that is taking over soldiers, leading to stench and rot on their bodies.

The book asks the question: during this war, when soldiers’ and civilians’ minds turned to fantastical explanations for what they saw and experienced, what if at least one of those explanations were true?  We get to watch Josef, who is idealistic but also rooted in the world of evidence, grapple with understanding what is outside the boundaries of realistic thought.  The Captain is a reluctant guide, immersed as he has been all his life in concealing the fantastic truth.

Now none of this sounds very romantic, but in truth, the way in which Josef and the Captain come together is so compelling. Their first night together, in Flanders, seems like a clandestine escape from the front. The Captain invites Josef to his rooms. Being caught, two men together, poses less of a threat for the Captain than Josef – the privileges of class. But the sheer intimacy of their time seems more like making love than sex. The meaning is there, even if it will take a lot of push-pull before they can accept it.

There are some readers of m/m romance that repudiate historical romances that stay true to the homophobic norms of their period. Though this is paranormal, it stays within the realism of the period: where gay men had to conceal their casual sex encounters as well as their relationships. It is definitely one thread of tension that is important to the plot. Another reality that Malcolm doesn’t abandon is the class rules and distinctions.  They don’t magically disappear as Josef and the Captain fall in love, but I promise there is a happy ending.

Grade: A