Duncan Ryder is one of our Hosted Authors that writes in a very touching and true fashion. Two of his stories, Everybody's Wounded and its sequel, How the Light Gets In show very realistic young men, struggling through life and struggling to connect both with others, as well as with themselves.

CarringtonRJ has done a great review of How The Light Gets In - but I strongly recommend reading Everybody's Wounded first for the full experience of how each person has gotten to the place they are when How The Light Gets In begins.

Review by Carringtonrj
Of course, everyone loves a story about hot guys getting it on at college, but the challenge for a writer in this genre is to be original, sophisticated even, without spoiling the basic premise.

How the Light Gets In by Duncan Ryder is an example of a story that includes many of the ingredients of the classic gay college romance, but it is also a subtle, intriguing and moving investigation into the lives of four troubled young men, each one trying to come to terms with their past and find ways to move on towards a brighter, happier future.

The key element in this story is the trust it places in the reader: it begins with a host of suggestions and hints about its main characters, allowing us to put the pieces together gradually, until we are led to create our own subtle and complex portraits of the main characters out of fragments that Ryder offers us.

So, we soon get to know and like delicate, tormented Luc, but it is not until the tender and beautifully realized revelations of Chapter 15 that we finally understand exactly what happened between him and his first love, Daniel.

Then there’s Matt. Like Luc, he’s returning to college to finish his interrupted course, but his problems were of an entirely different order. But what was he running away from? And what does it have to do with the gorgeous Josh?

The past is what the story really deals with. Even Josh, mooned over by Matt and adored by his current boyfriend Scott, has a history to come to terms with, and has to face some painful revelations about his own past.

And what of Scott? He seems the most in control of all the protagonists, but he too is wrestling with his demons – in particular, he blames himself for Luc’s problems, which he fears were precipitated by an evening Scott and Luc had spent together. It is this guilt that drives the story – leading Scott to suggest that Matt share accommodation with Luc, so that Luc will have someone to keep an eye on him. In this way, all the main characters, with their burdensome baggage in tow, are thrust together and led sometimes to help, sometimes to hinder each other’s progress towards some sort of contentment.

Another of Ryder’s stories is called Everyone Is Wounded, and that might have been the title for this often sorrowful tale. Add to that the fact this story takes its title from a song by the notoriously morose Leonard Cohen, and you might be forgiven for fearing that this would be a read of unremitting gloom. It isn’t. Ryder may favour the dark and troubling, but he also has a fine line in tender romance, beautifully rendered love-making and quiet humour. More to the point, Ryder is able to make us care about his characters and follow their exploits with the concern and care that we might usually feel for friends and relations.

This is a Canadian story, set in Nova Scotia and featuring such exotica as rugby teams and bi-lingualism. Luc’s modest little lapses into French certainly add to his charm. It’s world that is both familiar and strange – which is pretty much what all good fiction delivers when it works well.

In all, Ryder is clearly an accomplished and inventive writer, who has a fine facility for engaging our interest and making us believe in the situations he describes. I would warmly recommend that you go on this journey, get to know Luc, Matt, Scott and Josh, and see how their tangled relationships develop as they variously struggle to come to terms with their complicated pasts. If you haven’t read it already, give it a go. You won’t regret it.