A/S/L – Jeanne Thornton

[Soho Press; 2025]

Picture this: three teens working together on a video game. It’s the mid 1990s and they’re spread across the United States. The game they’re making is nothing special and they don’t even know each other’s real names, let alone looks. Just a set of handles on IRC.

This is the background of Jeanne Thornton’s new novel A/S/L, but it could also describe what I was up to just a few years later in Canada. Mine was a circle of late-night roleplaying sessions on IRC and later MSN Messenger: we’d dream up Dragonball Z characters and stick them in that universe. One was Lissa, who played Krillin’s daughter. Another was Niki, a travelling healer with a pet cat. I was one of the other androids. We hung out, dreamed up elaborate universes, and wrote pages and pages of fanfiction. Sometimes we plotted how to travel great distances to hang out—me to Halifax or Calgary, them to Toronto or Buffalo. Ultimately, we never did, drifting apart and losing touch. Even though I used to talk to them almost every day, I hadn’t thought about them for years until I finished A/S/L.

Set in and around New York City, A/S/L follows three trans women in their 30s, all of whom worked on a video game as teenagers. There’s Lillith, a loan underwriter at a bank and something of a pushover. There’s Sash, a part-time domme who has the kind of autism where she can only function by turning everything into checklists. And there’s Abraxas, a freewheeling and homeless woman who drifts from coast to coast. In the 1990s these three planned to change the world, but instead they drifted apart.

Now it’s 2016 and they’re unknowingly circling around each other. Both Lillith and Sash are going through the motions of their lives when Abraxas buses into town after a near-death experience in the Pacific Ocean. As Abraxas reflects on her life, she decides to get back into coding the old video game. A blog post using the company’s logo draws the other two women back into her life.

Thornton’s world is melancholy and tinged with magic. Abraxas lives a life on the fringes, eking out a bare existence by stealing food and sleeping in an abandoned building. She communicates with spirits from a Super Nintendo game and seems capable of things greater than herself. She dominates the narrative, a larger-than-life personality who touches all those around her while also being self-destructive in the way that only someone lacking self confidence can be.

Sash, meanwhile, is a woman we encounter largely through scenes that read like computer code or video game dialog. She speaks in bursts and struggles to relate to others in real life, but online she’s charming and able to communicate. In her chapters, Thornton uses the second person to good effect: Readers get the impression of someone who has to think of things in terms of a video game just to make it through the day and her part time job as an online dominatrix. It’s never explicitly stated, but understood she’s neurodivergent. And Thornton handles her with care, never making her feel like a stereotype or someone readers should look down on: She struggles but she grows, and she has a small circle of people who care for her. Here’s how she explains her daily routines:

One of your jobs, as the adult transsexual daughter in whose important research assistant job your parents agree to pretend to believe, is to keep the house tidy. This is less daunting than it may seem: neither of your parents is home long enough to mess it up, and neither of them have friends they invite over. . . . A mess is impossible to know you’ve completely cleaned. Where is it appropriate to stop cleaning? What is the state of being clean? Does it stem from social agreement . . .

You can see how Sash breaks down and analyzes the mundane: She has taken a routine task and made it something like a game, where she’s never quite sure where it finishes and how her parents would decide it’s finished. But more than that, her clipped thoughts, the way they rapidly follow like her mind’s stumbling down a rabbit hole of distraction. In such moments, Thornton makes her come alive.

Finally, there’s Lillith, the only one of the three with anything resembling a steady life. She has a job, her own place, and a partner. But it’s come at a cost: She views everything through the lens of her teenage boy scout years (the phrase “a good scout always . . .” frames her inner monologues) and comes across as a pushover, a wallflower who goes through life following directions. But she’s also never been confident: In the 90s, she constantly wondered what the other two saw in her and why she was part of their company. She was also the first to leave.

These three remain tied by the top-down role-playing video game they planned but never finished. But they’re similar in other ways: all are trans and knew each other as women-presenting online personas, but none have really come out to each other. And they’re inhabiting a world that’s just past the “trans tipping point” when society was paying lip service but starting to backslide on trans rights. They’re never quite rejected, but they’re othered by the cis characters throughout the book: one is looked on as a fetish object by her boss, another notices when drivers avoid eye contact in taxis and rideshares. They feel all these little microaggressions and the way they pile up pushes them to a breaking point.

Late in the book, Lillith’s partner sends her a sneering text: “Sorry, I don’t speak bottom.” And that word sort of gets to it all with these people. They’re all submissive in various ways, letting themselves get carried along with the tide and feeling like they deserve less than what they’re getting in life. That the other shoe is about to drop and ruin everything for them. By the time Lillith gets that text, Thornton’s shown how being passive has led both Lillith and Sash to inertia and aimlessness: they drift along, going through the motions. It isn’t until Abraxas shows up that their lives get shaken up.

But it’s also about this axis of three women becoming better versions of themselves. How Abraxas gets Lillith and Sash to reconnect and learn to step up and grow some confidence. Or as Sash might have put it, to stop being a NPC of their games and become the main character. By the book’s back half, their three threads intertwine to become one rope.

In her 2021 novel Summer Fun, Thornton used letters and second person narration to take us into fandom and world building: the 60s band The Get Happies and one woman’s intense connection to their music and lead songwriter. In A/S/L, she uses IRC chat logs and emails to take readers inside these three women. The resulting story is bittersweet and moving. Indeed, I kept putting off and delaying reading the final chapters because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to these women who reminded me so much of myself, the IRC and MSN chats I used to hang out in, and the characters I used to role play as.

 With A/S/L, Thornton has written her compelling book yet, one that builds on the strengths of Summer Fun, without being tied to an epistolary format. It’s an enjoyable ride, but make sure you’re ready for a cry.

Roz Milner is a freelance writer and critic who lives just north of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Lambda Literary, PRISM International, Broken Pencil, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book of short fiction.