Thank you to Alcove Press and Netgalley for the advanced copy of Disco Witches of Fire Island.

The beginning of this story is pretty slow. But once it picks up, its a beautiful campy story of queer joy and the pain that comes with existing in the LGBTQ community in the 80's. It's a great story of found family against the backdrop of fantasy and magic. Pick this story up not just during Pride month but any time this summer!

Disco Witches of Fire Island is described as a story about a coven of queer witches who takes a young man under their wings in hopes of protecting him from tragedy.

Given the title and description, I was expecting a bit more witchery than what was there. It feels like the covenant is mentioned and the beginning and the the ending without much about it in the middle. I enjoyed Joe's older roommates, so I would have loved to see more from them.

The main focus was more on the Fire Island queer scene of the late 80s. People were losing friends to the AIDS epidemic quickly and they were trying to figure out what life needed to be like moving forward. Joe comes to the situation after experiencing a pretty big loss and has to decide if he has it in him to trust a new relationship. There end up being a lot of real-world experiences and worries described along the way.

Thanks to Alcove Press and NetGalley for an eARC of this book for an honest review.

Disco Witches Of Fire Island by Blair fell, Joe is still mourning the loss of his one true love Elliot when his best friend Ronnie a gay jock convinces him to go work for the summer on fire Island. Ronnie wants to be a motivational speaker and to fall in love with a rich older man and promises Ronnie they have bartending jobs at the most popular bar on the island with room and board. Joe is hesitant but ultimately agrees. Joe arrives a week after Ronnie and no one is there to meet the ferry who Joe does meet is too older gay men Howie and Lenny. Joe finds the two older men sweet but it seems they find something special about Joe that has nothing to do with his sex appeal nor his beautiful Polish smile. they give Joe their number and tell him if everything doesn’t work out to give them a call. When he finds his best friend Ronnie cleaning rooms in the closet sized room of his own Joe seeks out Howie and Lenny to see if their offer is still good and it is. Joe just arrived on fire Island and has a lot going on he’s worried because his best friend Ronnie doesn’t get along with Howie and Lenny, his hot Irish boss is a jerk he gets a job as a bartender but can’t remember any of the recipes but soon with a little help from his new friends life on the island is going to get better… Weirder but better. Let me just say they had a lot of sex in the book and none of it had to do with love making swoony endeavors or sweet dalliances i’m talking about scenes that would make a transsexual prostitute blush now let’s move on, I did enjoy the campy vibe of the book, the magical mystique and whimsical overtones. It was set in the 80s and totally loved the references to not only modern 80s music and the disco mentions, I also appreciated the phrases from that era like gag me and other phrases from the day. I would’ve loved to visit Howie and Lenny‘s home for the weekend. I also thought Joe was wrong for being so sneaky in their house after they so kindly invited him I do want to say the ending wasn’t what I thought it would be and although I really look forward to this book it took me almost 3 days to finish it and not because it was long because it seemed when it would get to a sex scene I wanted to put the book down cleanse my pallet and return. I still recommend this book for those who love a narrative with a quirky vibe a wish fulfillment found family novel with lots of sex would definitely enjoy this book. I really believe if you like this book you’re going to love it there was a lot of scenes in the book I didn’t like but overall there were scenes I absolutely loved having said that take my opinion with a grain of salt because this book isn’t for everyone. #NetGalley, #TheBlindReviewer, #MyHonestReview, #BlairFell,#discoWitchIsOfFireIsland,

This book was a wild ride. The beginning was a bit slow, and it took me a while to get into it, but I really enjoyed it!

✨ Review ✨ Disco Witches of Fire Island by Blair Fell

Thanks to Alcove Press and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

This follows Joe, and his best friend Ronnie, who set off to Fire Island to be bartenders and live the gay summer dream with sun and fun, sex and drugs. However, things quickly aren't how they thought they'd be, and Joe ends up living with two older men - Howie and Lenny. He takes a job bartending at a sort of ramshackle bar, and having fun and working through his grief.

I loved the multi-generational aspect of this with Joe as a sort of baby gay, and Howie and Lenny as sort of mentor / parent figures + all of the supporting characters really created a messy and (mostly) loving community for Joe. The ever looming danger that Howie and Lenny fear is always lurking, and it creates a sort of messy mixed genre for this book. While it's promoted as a romance, to me, it felt more like literary fiction with some fantasy and romance elements.

This is filled with queer joy and freedom, offset by the pain and trauma of the late-80s HIV/AIDS epidemic. The layers of pain made it hard to read sometime, and I read it in sort of fits and starts. I was delighted with the premise of magic generated by epic disco playlists and the community aspect of it. But the grief and the pain were heavy. With all of that said though, I still really enjoyed this book, and my only regret is that IT DIDN'T INCLUDE A PLAYLIST of the ultimate 23 magical disco hits!

This book is a messy wild ride, but one that you won't regret you took!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: literary fiction / romance / fantasy
Setting: Fire Island
Pub Date: May 6, 2025

Read this if you like:
⭕️ messy stories of 1980s queer joy and pain
⭕️ disco music and magic
⭕️ found family
⭕️ wild summers on Fire Island

I really enjoyed this! It's rich in history and I felt it was so grounded in the time period. I think it's especially important for a historical fiction book to had interesting and fleshed out side characters and this definitely did. The main character's grief also wasn't overwhelming which I appreciated. This book is so much more than just one thing.

The only hang up for me was the pacing past 50%. I actually really enjoyed the set up and all the exploration of this new world and then I felt a little lagging on wanting to pick it up. Totally worth it for all the feels at the end though.

Thank you to Alcove for the eARC!

I really loved this. It's hopeful and sad, reflective and forward-looking, scary and sexy. A lyrical ode to love, disco, and the joy of gay sex, it's about the competing pains and joys of youth and of age and wisdom. The book is highly uninterested in the question of whether magic is "real"—there are certainly threats to the gay community in the summer of 1989, and these dancing queens will fight those threats wherever they are called to do so, with bells on. This is a semi-autobiographical book by Blair Fell and the events and feelings experienced by the characters hit with veracity.

This one…..*sigh* oh how I wanted to love it. It was such a wonderful campy premise and I put aside the fact that I usually don’t touch fantasy because of it being queer, but it just felt rushed and off kilter to me somehow? I also didn’t love the sexual violence, it seemed completely unnecessary

It took me a while to get into this book, but once I got into it, I was hooked! I am not normally into fantasy novels. I wanted to read this one because it was queer. I loved how loyal the characters were to each other. I also loved how the characters communicated and worked through their issues. The end of the book was so wholesome!

Dear Blair Fell,

I stumbled across this author’s debut audiobook when it was a daily deal at Audible in 2022 (which for some reason feels like last year). The Sign for Home made my Best listens of 2022. (I have a brief review of it at Goodreads, here). So, when I saw there was a new book I had to pick it up.

It’s about as far away from his debut book as it is possible to be. It’s set in 1989 and has paranormal elements. But the writing style was familiar and welcome. I found myself sliding into the book like a hot knife through butter – at least initially. As the book progressed, I had moments of disconnection. It’s true that the writing style always held my interest and there were portions of the story which sang.

Joe Agabian is a 29 year old gay Philly native. It’s 1989, the height of the AIDS crisis and life is difficult. Joe’s boyfriend, Elliott, died of the virus 18 months earlier and he’s still grieving. There’s clearly more to their story than is revealed at the start of the book, but what is consistent is Joe’s deep grief and his fear that his entire life will be defined by AIDS, one way or another.

When Joe meets Ronnie Kaminski, tall, a Fabio-haired, muscle-bound Chippendale-type famous within the city, Ronnie tells Joe he can just tell from looking how old someone is. When he guesses 24, Joe doesn’t have the heart to tell him he’s wrong. Besides, being 24 again is a kind of do-over and it may be just what Joe needs. After their first meeting, they both realised they were not destined to be lovers and instead Ronnie took Joe under his wing to teach him how to be a “good gay”.

Joe seemed to me much younger than his 29 years, lacking in self-awareness and having a more youthful selfishness to him which fit better (but not perfectly) with him identifying for most of the book as 24 and far less when I remembered he was actually nearly 30. Joe felt emotionally stunted for much of the book and I didn’t find a lot in the narrative to support the extent of it.

Ronnie has a grand plan to go out to Fire Island for the summer. He’s going to work at a fancy gay bar and pick up a wealthy daddy to treat him right forever. (Of course, things don’t quite go to plan.) In any event, he invites Joe to go with him.

“Um … you know I don’t know anything about bartending, right?” Joe said.

Ronnie waved his hand. “Nothing to it, especially in a gay bar. You just have to be cute, smile, flirt a little, and slosh some booze into a glass. A beagle could do it if he had thumbs and looked hot in a T-shirt!”

When Joe arrives a few days after Ronnie, he finds that the largesse promised by Ronnie is nonexistent – there’s no job and no place to live. Ronnie is a messy character, at turns rude, selfish, unkind and ungenerous and at others, he’s the best friend Joe could hope for.

Luckily for Joe, he kind of falls into an arrangement where he rents the attic of the home of a couple of “old queens”, Lenny and Howie.

“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever been in,” he said. “Thank you so much. You really didn’t need to do all this.”

“Oh, poo!” Howie waved his hand. “We’re gay. We’d redecorate the inside of a milk carton given the chance.”

Howie, Lenny and their friends, Saint D’Norman and “Dory the Boozehound” are part of a coven of disco witches. Their leader, Max, is in hospital in the city sick with AIDS-related illness and whether he can make it to Fire Island during the summer is in doubt. Whether he can make it until the end of the summer is in doubt.

From the start, Howie sees something special in Joe. Every now and then, the coven is called upon to use it’s boogie magic to protect a tortured soul. Usually, that person is 29, not 24 though. And there are other things which are “required” for them to be the “chosen one” but still, for Howie, Joe’s aura is telling him to pay attention.

In addition to a place to live, the coven ends up helping Joe find a job so he can survive for the summer.

Joe works in a rundown bar at Asylum Harbor with a grumpy Irish bear of a bar manager, Vince. And he meets a local ferryman, Fergal (who seems to be a magical being himself). A nice little romance develops between Joe and Fergal but it takes a long time to get started and the sailing is not smooth for the pair.

Fergal laughed. “But I got a little surprise waiting for you over at your house.”

“A surprise? For real?” Joe’s heart did a little flip.

“Yep.” Fergal leaned over the bar until he was touching distance from Joe.

“What is it?” Joe let the tip of his finger touch Fergal’s, eliciting a smile.

“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

Vince groaned like he had stabbed himself with broken glass. “Ah Jaysus feckin’ Christ! Get the hell outta here already! The both of you! Please. Before I have to rip my ears off! Go! Now! Feck off! And use protection!”

AIDS and how the gay community was being treated, how they were involved in self-advocacy, how their community was dying in droves, the juxtaposition between a kind of desperate denial over the summer and the in-your-faceness of it all as Joe watches bar customers sicken and disappear over the summer, pervades the book.

How did Howie and Lenny do it? The vast majority of their friends still living either had AIDS or were HIV positive. Howie had told him that he and Lenny had lost eighty-two of their closest friends to the disease so far. How do they breathe without crying?

From reading the acknowledgements at the end, it seems there is at least a part of the story which is semi-autobiographical and I have a feeling it is that part of the story which resonated more strongly with me.

I was a little jarred by the disco witches – their manifesto and methodology was very camp and fun but what was behind it was very serious indeed. It sometimes gave me a little emotional whiplash.

While “boogying,” they chanted the sacred questions together: Knuf annaw uoy OD? Em htiw Knuf annaw uoy OD?

(Hint, read the chant backwards.)

I suspect that the whole witchiness of the book made the dire situation of the gay community due to AIDS a little less heartbreaking to read about but it was still desperately sad. There are references to the Gay Mens Health Crisis and famous activists, familiar to me from The Normal Heart and And the Band Played On, both of which document AIDS in the 1980s in different ways. (Fantastic books but enraging, heartbreaking, terrifying at the same time as being uplifting and motivating.) Notwithstanding the paranormal elements, the story is firmly grounded in history.

Overall, the book was a bit of a mixed bag, with parts a bit too kitsch for me and the story a little meandering and others touching, or funny, insightful (or a mix of all three). There was a large cast of characters and many subplots. At times I wasn’t sure exactly what the book was going for. Then again, I’m a straight, Australian, cis woman so…

Grade: B

Regards,
Kaetrin

A great rollicking read that I worry may drive away straight viewers with its perfect title. Too bad for them! This was a beach read before Pride month even hit and I suspect it will make a hoot of Netflix adaptation.

Note: I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is so campy, and there were so many parts that made me feel connected to my community while reading. At the same time, there were quite a few scenes that made me very uncomfortable. Just some sexual violence that I didn’t feel added anything to the book. This book was big on tell don’t show which also made it hard to sink into. I think unfortunately it just wasn’t for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alcove Press for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Content warnings as mentioned by Storygraph users: Graphic: Drug use, Pandemic/Epidemic, Death Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Vomit, Grief Minor: Homophobia, Violence, Sexual violence

Disco Witches of Fire Island is set in the late 1980s, and it deals with themes like queer identity, LGBTQIA relationships, and emotional resilience. The focus is on the community during the height of the AIDS crisis (which was actually called the “gay plague” by unfeeling people and even the press.) Because of that, there’s a lot of emotional depth to this book that focuses on the historical part of the LGBTQIA community during the Ronald Reagan years, whose administration did very little to help.

There’s a fantasy element to Disco Witches, and while I normally veer away from that genre, I appreciated that aspect of the story. There’s so much grief and trauma to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but ultimately, Disco Witches also has themes of hope and queer solidarity.

I have mixed emotions about this book. It was written very well, and it transported me back to the late 1980s, when I was a teenager, and it seemed like the AIDS epidemic was on the news all the time, with little response from the White House, but there were some parts that could be triggering, like the sexual violence. I would still recommend the book if you don’t have problems with heavy content.

I'm grateful to the publisher for offering me a free copy but this was not the book for me. I had the hardest time with the repetitiveness as well as the dialogue.

The premise is intriguing—a MM romance and disco-era magic during the AIDS crisis—but the fantasy elements in Disco Witches of Fire Island did not have a point. The central magical plot is never clearly explained and adds little to the story, often distracting from the emotional core rather than enhancing it. The love story was completely rushed, and the book was surprisingly less sexy than advertised.

I definitely picked this one up for the title but I am so glad I did! It was wild witchy fun but still felt really rooted in the reality of queer history. In some chapters I felt like dancing, in some I felt like crying, but I always wanted to keep reading.

DNF 18%

I don't like giving star ratings to books I don't finish, but there's no option to leave it unrated! I requested this book because the premise sounded really interesting, but unfortunately the execution fell flat for me. I find the writing style dull and I'm not interested in any of the characters. I kept trying to push through to at least get to the magic elements, but it's just not holding my attention, and I think it's time to move on.

Really wanted to like this, but the characters felt immature and childish, regardless of their ages in the book. I think the author did a great job of setting a realistic world that unfortunately revolved heavily around the AIDs epidemic.

This book sounded fun and I had hopes of it being a nostalgic trip to a late 1980s summer. Add in a touch of magic and it seemed like a great fit. However, I knew within the first few pages that this was not a match for me.

Joe is 29 and is stagnant in life. He has dreams of being a doctor, but has made no move to finish the undergraduate work he needs for that. Some of that has to do with the loss of his boyfriend to AIDS, as this book takes place during a volatile time in that crisis. Joe befriends Ronnie and the two spend the summer in Fire Island, although when Joe gets there, it is not at all as expected.

The writing style and tone were off for me in the portion I read. We start in Joe’s point of view, but then quickly shift to almost everyone that comes on page. Sometimes this was done by chapter and sometimes we were in a different point of view within the same scene. It wasn’t confusing so much as an awkward way to handle scenes and it was too many viewpoints for me.

There is a magic element woven into the story, as Joe meets two older men as he arrives in Fire Island. Everything was a mystery with these men and I couldn’t be sure if they were actually witches or had mental health issues.

At halfway through the book, I still knew this wasn’t for me and chose to stop there. This one might work for a different reader.

Fire Island, 1989, a place where gay men and women could feel a little freer while the AIDS epidemic raged on.
I am a little late with my review because I was on a cruise and had little time to read, but I came home and finished today.
As others have stated, this is not a book for everyone, but the themes of grief and love are universal.
Joe and Ronnie meet at a gay bar in Philadelphia, become friends, have a tepid hookup, and decide to spend the summer on Fire Island as bartenders. The jobs fall through, but Joe meets two very gay men and is invited to live in the attic of their house.
They get him a job as a bartender, and he becomes part of a family. He does not believe the stories that his friends belong to a coven of witches.
AIDS has cut a swath of death through the community, and how each character deals with this moves the story forward.
Joe has lost his first love and his grief and the mystery around the actual truth of the relationship, as well as how the witches look after him propel the story forward.
The climax is quite exciting, and many of the characters have life changing epiphanies.
I would recommend this book to liberal minded people who will not be surprised by the gay characters and suggest that though this is specifically a gay book, the themes are universal. I hesitate to say this as in a discussion of another specifically gay book someone mentioned the universality of the theme, and some of the gay members objected to that. Read the book and make your own decisions.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. This is my honest opinion.