Odd Man Out follows an adult Dennis Munce as he recounts his time at a summer camp that changed his life for the worse. During a trial period of the Black Mountain Camp, a group of nine boys with little adult supervision, fuelled by their deeply-embedded sexism and homophobia, turn on one of their fellow cabin mates. What results is something that Dennis Munce has never been able to forget.
Despite the interesting premise, Odd Man Out unfortunately failed to deliver. Instead of offering any insightful or innovative ideas about bigotry and homophobia, it becomes another tired book that espouses continual sexism, homophobia, and racism at the expense of the victims themselves. Instead of offering up criticism of the perpetrators, and those complicit in the terrible acts that occur in this book, we are asked to sympathise with them over and over again.
The book centers a heterosexual man, Dennis Munce, who thinks of his time at the Black Mountain Camp for boys after his church congregation votes to disallow Boy Scouts from using their building for meetings, as they had recently decided to grant membership to gay kids. The homophobia of those who voted at church, causes Dennis to reflect on what happened at camp when he was fifteen-years-old – though to call that simply homophobia would be an under-exaggeration. Still, by the end of the book, this is still the focus of the book. That Dennis, who was complicit in the hate crime at camp, has now seen some error of his ways and can now go about trying to change the minds of people who hold similarly homophobic ideas.
While there is nothing innately bad about a book that considers the extreme consequences of homophobia – especially the homophobia that ‘bystanders’ can still be complicit in – there is something wrong with a book that essentially disregards the very people it’s supposed to be about, and instead focuses on the redemption arc of its deeply problematic heterosexual characters. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Dennis often seems to consider himself a kind of victim of the hate crime at camp. After the event, he claims that “for a while [he] dreamed it was [him]” that it had happened to.
At the end of the day, Odd Man Out is a book that centralises the self-pity of its hateful and bigoted heterosexual characters at the expense of its only gay character. Sitting through 150 pages of rampant sexism, racism, and homophobia does not result in any kind of a thought-provoking or satisfying conclusion.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
