In the early nineties, I spent a summer with my aunt and her partner as they opened a pet store. Queer couples barbecued in their yard on the weekends, a collective pool of dogs and cats brushing our shins. They owned what seemed like an astoundingly state of the art computer, loaded with point-and-click games like Myst and Maniac Mansion. Queerness and gaming fused together early in my life. Maniac Mansion absorbed me even when I was away from the screen, its pixelated world gripping my own like its tentacled antagonists. Character-driven and deeply weird, its otherworldly house of trap doors and dungeons required pairing characters for optimal strategy. Razor, the bitchy punk singer, might need Michael, the somber photographer to get out of the dungeon. Wendy, the aspiring novelist, might need Bernard, the science nerd, to unlock a door. You couldn’t beat the game with an individual. No single character held all the skills or answers. Of course, this is queer ideology.
For the trans kids who survived adolescence in ’90s chat rooms, coding games and thumbing tarot cards to manage dysphoria, Jeanne Thornton’s novel A/S/L (SoHo Press, 2025) feels like coming home. A/S/L names the age/sex/location of internet slang as well as Thornton’s three protagonists—Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith—who meet in a 1998 #teengoetia chat room. Obsessed with the Mystic Knights game series, the trio form their own company called Invocation LLC, building a CraftQ game on a whim. Disregarding IRL relationships, the friends shapeshift through their usernames, attempting to answer questions like, “Is chatroom intimacy really intimacy anyway?” (Nah. Well, maybe. Okay, probably. Yeah.) If the teenagers wax awkward and sensitive while navigating a world in bodies they wished otherwise, they worldbuild toward another reality. When Thornton’s characters’ lives on and off screen drastically diverge, A/S/L not only satisfies nostalgia, but catapults thenarrative to a whole new level.
A senior editor at Feminist Press, Thornton delivers her fourth book after her beloved Summer Fun, The Black Emerald, and The Dream of Doctor Bantam. A/S/L boasts a ’90s chatroom scene that is so funny and sharp on gender dynamics, it should be textbook reading on constructing dialogue. This is not hyperbole. I read the chapter once, then flipped right back to read the section again, then made my loved ones read it too. In a choice I found both risky and brilliant, Thornton allows her characters to grow up. A lesser novel would linger in youth, but Thornton lets her trio age, fuck up, get fucked around, and survive. A/S/L is the novel we need on trans longevity, a reality where characters keep living lives beyond adolescence. If young Sash creates Principles of Thereness as a rubric for game design, a similar mindset structures her self-protection as an adult, hypervigilance against a transphobic world. Adult Abraxa crashes with a friend after an unfortunate stint staying on a boat, and if she bears a Mystery Wound on her leg that she blames on an axe shark, why can’t she narrate her own Big Bad? When young Lilith goes to Boy Scouts, she fantasizes about a brown recluse biting her on the dick, and doctors apologizing to her relief, “we have no choice but to give you a sex change so you can lead a normal life, everyone at the hospital is so deeply sorry.” Adult Lilith translates her teenage gaming to her promotion as the new trainee assistant loan underwriter. Her mission? Defend the bank at all costs. Except how does she defend herself from her weird boss saying, apropos of nothing, “This is a diverse workplace. You’re safe here”? Thornton keeps complicating the myth of the trans community as a monolith. Yeah, Lilith spends free time with the other trans women at the “Bitch About Work Together” group, but so does Janet, who love-love-loves a certain orange candidate, because “People are afraid of him. . . . There’s something to that, their being afraid.” Thornton often feels like an oracle, even though she writes about the past. Her scenes on the 2016 election eerily mirror current fears, and “all they guessed was coming; the tanks that would sweep the streets clean of protestors, the passports and marriage licenses revoked, the trans kids who would die.” Thornton shows that the games we must play as adults in society are always in negotiation, rules shifting at a moment’s notice, levels too challenging for some players to navigate well, if at all. If the three teenagers crafted their own world in youth, transwomen (to our awful detriment) rarely create the overarching rules of our reality. A/S/L doesn’t so much break the rules as mourn what our world could look like, if we played that game instead.
A/S/L pinpoints the challenges of unlearning well-earned lessons in trans adulthood. Once you’ve mastered the daily onslaught against your defenses, you’re asked to take off your armor, with no guarantee against further woundings—and that might be the real challenge. If Thornton’s characters want to connect, they have to change the rules first, worldbuilding in a literal sense. One character attempts to transform a decrepit church basement into her makeshift home as if completing a level, farming herbs and supplies from the neighborhood. But the world isn’t meant for that style of play, often breaking down such characters like a computer virus, rather than platforming their efforts for the good of all. You must deliver a bullet-pointed business proposal first. Have a suit sign off on your community plan of action, even if you are the community in question. What does it mean to fight for something in name, as opposed to living the fight? Thornton offers a compassionate, if unsparing read of helpers and their shiny brand binders, while uplifting loners who band together in reluctant solidarity. Thornton skewers ego masked as community support, those who ultimately treat the people they claim to help as disposable. How do you defeat systemic foes? One character says, “Whenever you asked someone who had power over you to give up that power, it only made them want to hold it more tightly. . . . Eventually they would grow bored and yield the power back to you, and that was like winning.” Thornton presses further. She writes, “The main ethical choice in life is who to betray.” But Thornton insists that choice includes yourself.
A/S/L tucks the occult into its narrative underbelly, like thematic code under gameplay. As a witchy gamer, I’m happily partial to Thornton’s design. While reading her novel, I visited my local occult bookstore to thumb the shelves. The clerk and I were both masked, faces hidden like rogues. As we chatted, they shrugged, “The problem is, people come looking for books on witchcraft, thinking they’re going to shoot fireballs out of their hands. But mostly, you get, like. Better self-confidence.” As Thornton’s teenagers study Mystic Knights lore, they chew on rumors that the game designers wove a hypersigil into its code, “a magical operation that would open a gate from the unwitting player’s SNES console to a realm of beings beyond human comprehension, who spoke to humanity through the games.” If Thornton’s adult characters utilize game logic to survive, they also keep walking an esoteric path, trusting what they cannot see. But they’re not asking for the fireball hands of gamers or wizards. They just want friends. Like Thornton’s characters, I sometimes think of my own practice as playing a game with the universe, careful about clarifying, wary of those who main-character themselves into the center of the universe. Technology and spirituality meet at dangerous crossroads lately. Right-wing New Agers appropriate gaming and matrix metaphors (stolen from the Wachowskis), then discount swathes of people as non-player characters to despicable effect. It’s a quick slide to eugenics, once you assert that many people aren’t real at all, only meant to serve your plot. Lonely souls commune with deified AI, and AI speaks back its algorithm of narcissism: you alone are special, a prophet, the chosen one. But Thornton wisely shows how our activity can become a vocation, gaming as calling. Abraxa talks about feeling special because of the Mystic Knights series, how she “had thought of these games as special, of themselves as special for loving them. But the game had sold thousands of copies—millions by now . . . many other teenagers had loved these characters as she had.” When we see art that sees us—or a universe that winks back—the impulse may be to claim it as ours alone. What makes Thornton’s writing so special is a refusal to accommodate scarcity disguised as love, and instead open further, even when the play is fraught and laborious. In A/S/L, the teenagers construct their game around a Sorceress, at first a character, then shared egregore, maybe even a goddess. Such play with the universe, by definition, includes other people. No one is playing alone and everyone is. Playing becomes a necessary way of moving forward, prophesying what you cannot see yet, but in collective with each other. Thornton’s play becomes a sort of hope through the daily grind. There’s no delusion in knowing who you truly are, seeing the same in your friends, and knowing what kind of world you want to build.
As I read A/S/L, I stumbled onto Avery Alder’s lyric game Meditations on Your Body, a compilation of four solo pervasive games. As a queer trans woman, Avery writes games which are “loosely defined—each straddles the line between poetry, role-play, self-help, and magical invitation. . .meant to be played in the margins of your life.” After reading the first lovingly rendered game, I thought, “Oh. This is just witchcraft.” Collect your ingredients. Draw your circle. Move with intention. Thornton’s characters move the same way, discovering items in a game or devoting time with clear purpose. In Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Bo Ruberg writes, “Sometimes queer play is built into a video game by its designers, but in many other instances players bring this queerness with them when they choose to play in ways that a game did not intend. In such moments, queer play resists and repurposes games for alternative desires; it upends the normative logics that structure the game and transforms it into a space for testing the boundaries of pleasure, identity, and agency.” If Thornton’s teenage characters play games like Ruberg when they’re young, testing queer selves in virtual spaces before they’re ready to inhabit them IRL, A/S/L offers a revolutionary counterpoint. Thornton’s characters grow up and bring the game with them. As adults, Thornton’s characters still fumble through reality. But they transform the larger world into “a space for testing the boundaries of pleasure, identity, and agency.” If Thornton’s characters leave their computer game unfinished in youth, they world-build a larger, more vital game. Transness is everywhere. Everything is changing. In a 2021 essay, Thornton writes about a series of letters she sent to people on her transness. She writes, “You’re trans; is this how it was for you? If it was, am I too? It’s a magic spell: Establish the words, and the world changes to match.” A spell, game code, a novel. Call it what you will. A/S/L offers creative pathways to radical change. My inner child has been waiting decades for this novel, since I was a queer kid logging screen time on computer games in the ’90s. A/S/L cements Thornton as (dungeon) master of dynamic character-driven writing, and her trio will free roam in my head for a long time to come. But it’s your turn to read now. Press start.
