Book Title: The Strange and Unbelievable Tall Tale of Mighty Max
Author: Duncan Gaye
Cover Artist: Vaselina Georgieva
Release Date: May 12, 2026
Tense/POV: third person/past tense
Genres: Contemporary MM, magical realism
Tropes: Size difference, body worship, psychological, opposites attract, friends to lovers, small town, lumberjack
Themes: A meditation on how love, belief, and storytelling blur the line between imagination and reality—until the distinction no longer matters.
Length: 35 000 words/113 pages
Is it a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
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A weary writer falls for a literal tall tale and must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice to keep that love breathing. Tender, wry, and quietly desperate, this is a book about belief, desire, and the work it takes to hold someone in the world.
Blurb
Brian Dunleavy comes to the North Woods to write a serious novel. Instead, he falls in love with a kitschy paper towel mascot.
It begins with a whistle in the trees and the unmistakable sense of being watched. A bootprint the size of a bathtub. Then a muscular, 43-foot-tall lumberjack steps out of the forest.
Mighty Max is handsome. He is kind. Broad-shouldered and blue-eyed, he lives in permanent flannel. He claims he was born from tall tales and campfire legends—back when giants were needed, and believed in. But giants fade when they are mocked. Legends disappear when they’re forgotten.
As solitude turns to intimacy, myth turns warm and very, very tangible. Brian finds himself lifted in the careful palm of the colossal man whose shadow stretches across the meadow like dusk itself. Beneath cold stars and beside impossible bonfires, he discovers that loving a giant means choosing to believe in him even when belief bends reality.
Reality is definitely bending. And when Max is reclaimed by the forest, Brian may be the only one who can write him back into being. If stories invent their tellers, who is keeping whom alive?
Strange, tender, playful, and proudly queer, The Strange and Unbelievable Tall Tale of Mighty Max is a mythic romance about loneliness, longing, and the radical act of loving something larger than life.
For readers who cherish the mythic queer devotion of The Song of Achilles, the tender whimsy of The House in the Cerulean Sea, and the wistful magic of Puff the Magic Dragon.
Max moved with a profound gentleness, careful not to scare Brian or disturb the fragile balance of their coexistence. His kind, giant eyes looked at Brian with deep understanding. It made Brian feel like an open envelope, with his thoughts exposed before they were even formed. As Max knelt, his massive knee pressed into the earth, rocking it with his weight, and his huge fingers wrapped around Brian’s torso. Brian felt himself lifted in Max’s enormous hands, as if waiting to be read. As Max stood up, he towered in the clearing like a character from a fairy tale. Brian felt small, overwhelmed by Max’s size. The all-encompassing sensuality of being close to Max replaced the cruel laughter from town.
The gesture that held him now felt at once intimate and infinitely recursive, repeating itself in visions of softness and doubt. Would Max unfold him to find he was nothing? Was this comfort real? As the wind shifted around them, a vast uncertainty stirred with it, like the brush of ink on paper. Brian saw the form of Max’s bearded cheek close enough to be certain and pressed a delicate kiss to its outline.
“Thank you for staying,” he whispered, hearing the sharp fragility in his own voice, “I need you.”
He watched Max’s expression, feeling himself poised above the threshold of a new world, or an old one revisited. He watched, waiting for the giant to laugh and let him fall, but the flannel-bound chest only lifted with a breath of beautiful, unbearable quiet. The touch of Max’s mouth was less real than he had expected, softer than the insistent paper fibers that had pulled him all the way here. Brian wondered who, among them, was more insubstantial. The cabin. The road. Max. Himself. It was all simply different stories, he thought. He too could be someone’s imagination fading away.
As if reading the trajectory of this thought, Max slowly nodded. His brow furrowed as if he was trying to calculate something. It felt like every meaning flowed through his remarkable presence before turning into words. The huge hands set Brian gently down, a precious offering back to the earth. Max sat down, showing his carefulness once more. He looked Brian straight in the face. In that moment, Brian felt small, as if the cabin and everything around them faded away. In this long moment, they both could see who was telling the tale and who was written by it.
Max watched him with a gaze that pierced the boundary between real and unreal. Brian felt overwhelmed by that intense scrutiny. It reminded him of sitting on the vinyl stool at the diner. But here, there were no laughing patrons or mocking sneers. Just the ghostly image of himself: unreal, unsure, exposed. He recalled the grizzled man’s words—stories that should stay hidden. In Max’s presence, he believed it even more. Yet there was softness here, too, inviting wonder. Brian met Max’s ancient, open eyes. Their color amazed him: blue as an impossible sky, blue as a wildflower, blue as the only truth in a world of shadows. Brian waited, feeling that familiar weightlessness in his chest. It felt like all the air was leaving him at once. This was the moment when these lines might finally unravel.
Max was silent for what felt like a lifetime. When his voice came, it was like the surprise of an old song overheard in a new place. “I…I need you too.” There was not a trace of irony in it. Brian saw himself reflected, a tiny figure who thought he was dreaming a giant, only to learn the giant was real. He tried to reconcile this impossibility, to fit these fragile pieces together in his mind without breaking them.
Was it enough? Was the sheer depth of Max’s presence enough to convince him? The thought came unbidden, like a clever punchline whose joke you almost missed, and for a moment Brian could not even recognize it as his own.
Duncan Gaye lives in River Forest, Illinois. He believes magic can be found anywhere, even the suburbs. He writes the kind of love stories that sneak up on you—queer, tender, and just a little strange. His books are full of burly big-hearted men, tall tales, impossible odds, and the kind of endings that leave you wanting more.
When not writing, he likes to read, travel and relax with his adorable senior dogs, Spotty and French Fry.
The Long Shadow Series by Duncan Gaye is a thematic anthology series of stand-alone LGBTQ+ novellas and novels that tell love stories shaped by the extraordinary. Blending elements of speculative fiction, magical realism, tall tales, and literary drama, these are stories where intimacy and identity meet epic strength and emotional vulnerability.
From the mythical to the mundane, each book explores larger-than-life characters—strongmen, bodyguards, super soldiers, and other giants. For fans of emotional intensity, queer desire, and stories that stretch the boundaries of realism, this series offers a new kind of legend.
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