The finest cuisine in indie books

 - by Jack Chandler
   Entertainment Columnist

Do you ever get tired of chain restaurants and their market-tested menus? Ever get the itch to discover a hidden gem and earn bragging rights with your friends?

If that’s you, there’s an undiscovered world of flavor in indie books—the publishing equivalent of mom-and-pop restaurants.

Try Grafton Carter’s Campfires and Desires. It feels lived-in rather than researched. It doesn’t follow the tired recipe for publishing-house MM romance.

Campfires and Desires is the literary equivalent of choosing Vito’s Italian [in NW OKC] over Olive Garden.**

Welcome to Havenwood, Grafton Carter’s fictional town where being LGBTQ is no more scandalous than having brown eyes. Imagine a friend group that includes straights, gays, a drag queen, and a non-binary person who uses they/them pronouns. In red-state America, that sounds utopian.

In Havenwood, it’s just Tuesday.

Havenwood is a delightful Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood for grown-up gays. It’s the kind of place many of us wish existed. For 268 pages, it does.

Campfires and Desires is Grafton’s third Havenwood novel. In many ways, the town is the secret ingredient that keeps readers coming back for another helping.

The book opens with a daring hors d’œuvre. Liam, owner of the Stag and Lantern bar, is being orally serviced by a rando he met online. MM romance readers would call it spicy. I just call it hot.

Afterward, the rando asks Liam if he ever gets tired of such hookups.

Nope. Bye-bye.

I told you it’s a daring first course. Most MM romance treats sex as dessert—page 136 or so, maybe even later—and then the author starts clearing the table, as if they don’t really know what should come next, as if the closest they’ve come to gay sex is watching a few porn clips. But I’m digressing into a hot-button gripe of mine.

We learn that Liam is neurodivergent. He’s got ADHD, which explains so much about him.

I perked up at this point. I have a loved one who has ADHD. I’ve seen it up close and know both the unique challenges it presents and the thrill of watching a mind connect dots in different ways than mine.

I had a hunch that Grafton was writing from experience, so I emailed him about it. Sure enough, his husband has ADHD. See what I mean about lived-in?

And then there’s Liam’s pastime of going to gay campgrounds, the clothes-are-optional, sleeping-arrangements-are-fluid kind of campgrounds. This setting, too, seemed genuine, although I must admit I wouldn’t know firsthand.

The last time I went camping, I woke to skittering sounds. A tribe of raccoons had taken over the campsite. They were prying open the ice chest while another inspected one of my sneakers with obvious disappointment.

Since my camping experience begins and ends with raccoons, I can’t vouch for the veracity of Grafton’s hot-tubbing-with-bears scenes. But, as I suspected, he and his husband do the camping circuit. Again: lived-in.

So far I’ve talked about Havenwood, hookups, ADHD, and campgrounds. I haven’t even gotten to Sam. If Liam is the savory hookup king, Sam is something sweeter. Gentle. Caring. Kind.

Yes, this is a friends-to-lovers trope. Those are common in MM romance, but I’ll bet you’ve never read one where the cautious character tags along on a camping trip and watches the wild one do his bear baiting.

Ever read a MM romance with a three-way?

Have I got your attention? This isn’t Olive Garden, folks.

The three-way isn’t there for mere titillation. It changes things between Liam and Sam, but you’ll have to read the book to see how.

So the next time you’re hungry for something beyond the publishing equivalent of endless breadsticks, pull up a chair in Havenwood. The menu’s different there.

**Shoutout to Cathy Cummings, founder of Vito’s and friend of gays. Rest in peace, Cathy. **

The Gayly online. 8/23/26 @ 6:37 p.m. CST.