Mark McNease

Listen to a 20 minute sample – Narration provided by Wondervox

I’ve just released an audiobook edition of ‘A Marriage Below Zero’ by Alan Dale. You can listen to a 20 minute sample by clicking the audio file above OR HERE. It’s just $3.99 at my Payhip storefront storefront, and provides a Zip file with all individual chapters, AND a single MP3 with the entire audiobook.

More about the book …

This month I’ve released a very hidden gem: A Marriage Below Zero, by Alan Dale. It’s one of the earliest published novels to deal with same-sex attraction, narrated by a woman who married a man with a secret life.

About ‘A Marriage Below Zero’

A Marriage Below Zero (1889), written by Alan Dale, is a pioneering work of early gay fiction and one of the first English-language novels to center a homosexual male character in a serious, tragic narrative. The story is told from the perspective of Elsie Bouverie, a young woman who enters into what appears to be a promising marriage with the charming and refined Arthur Ravener. At first, their life together seems socially enviable—secure, respectable, and filled with the expectations of Victorian domestic happiness.

But beneath the surface, something is wrong.

Arthur grows emotionally distant, evasive, and restless. Elsie senses that she is not the true object of her husband’s affection. Gradually, she discovers the devastating truth: Arthur is romantically and physically involved with another man. In an era when homosexuality was not only taboo but criminalized, this revelation shatters her understanding of marriage, loyalty, and identity.

Rather than portraying Arthur as a villain, the novel presents him as a man trapped between societal expectations and his authentic self. The “marriage below zero” becomes a metaphor for a union devoid of warmth, passion, and truth—frozen by repression and secrecy. As scandal looms and emotional tensions escalate, the story moves toward a tragic conclusion that reflects the harsh realities faced by gay men in late 19th-century society.

This is exciting. As a way to attracted subscribers to my long-running website, LGBTSr.com, I decided to offer free books of select public domain works. Fiction, nonfition, poetry, more will be revealed.

I’m also publishing them for the general public, as both ebooks and paperbacks.

This month I’ve released a very hidden gem: A Marriage Below Zero, by Alan Dale. It’s one of the earliest published novels to deal with same-sex attraction, narrated by a woman who married a man with a secret life.

About ‘A Marriage Below Zero’

A Marriage Below Zero (1889), written by Alan Dale, is a pioneering work of early gay fiction and one of the first English-language novels to center a homosexual male character in a serious, tragic narrative. The story is told from the perspective of Elsie Bouverie, a young woman who enters into what appears to be a promising marriage with the charming and refined Arthur Ravener. At first, their life together seems socially enviable—secure, respectable, and filled with the expectations of Victorian domestic happiness.

But beneath the surface, something is wrong.

Arthur grows emotionally distant, evasive, and restless. Elsie senses that she is not the true object of her husband’s affection. Gradually, she discovers the devastating truth: Arthur is romantically and physically involved with another man. In an era when homosexuality was not only taboo but criminalized, this revelation shatters her understanding of marriage, loyalty, and identity.

Rather than portraying Arthur as a villain, the novel presents him as a man trapped between societal expectations and his authentic self. The “marriage below zero” becomes a metaphor for a union devoid of warmth, passion, and truth—frozen by repression and secrecy. As scandal looms and emotional tensions escalate, the story moves toward a tragic conclusion that reflects the harsh realities faced by gay men in late 19th-century society.