Review: All Hookers Go To Heaven by Angel B.H.

All Hookers Go to Heaven by Angel B.H.

My Quick Take: With the utmost candidness, this book allowed me to enter the main character’s world of sex work, and the moral ambiguity that it brings.

Thanks to Alicia Elliott (editor) and Invisible Publishing for a gifted copy.

***

This book came to me by a circuitous route. One of my most loved books of 2023 was Alicia Elliott’s And Then She Fell, and when Elliott posted that she’d just finished her first full-novel edit for indie Invisible Publishing, I jumped at the chance to read the book when she offered. The blurb promised a compelling story of a young woman emerging from a fundamentalist religious background and finding the world of sex work as a potential career.

This novel is an open, candid and explicit exploration of Magdelena’s time as a young woman who makes the choice to pursue sex work to make a living. Spanning several years, the beginning does indeed explore her adolescence in an evangelical family, but these chapters are brief, and very soon she has left that world behind, disillusioned and seeking something different. She’s drawn to Supersexe, a Montreal strip club where she gets a job, afflicted by what she calls “the Hustler’s Curse,” the pursuit of money at all costs. Money is god here, not the church.

Privately, I believed that one of the Supersexe sirens had something to do with it. I imagined some salacious stripper-witch, chain-smoking between shifts, catching sight of me scuttling down Sainte-Catherine Street and placing a Hustler’s Curse upon me. A curse that inspired in me an obsession with money–along with a taste for drama and chaos, a propensity for self-sabotage. I blamed this witch, and the curse, for leading me into the club, for introducing me to all sorts of unsavoury characters, and, ultimately, for propelling me into a lifetime of trouble.

The pages flew by. This is a readable, absorbing journey into the world of sex work, and it’s a story and a topic that is always timely. I can only speak to my own perspective, but I had so much to think about as Magdelena blurred her personal boundaries, made calculations about her own safety, and sometimes questioned the wisdom of her choices. As this story forced me to question my own mores–to do with fairness, feminism, economic realities and exploitation–I watched Magdelena also confront her own biases at times. The author’s exploration of female relationships was a strength of the novel, both with co-workers and in her intimate relationships.

That said, this is a straightforward narrative, and Mag doesn’t do a ton of introspection. Indeed, if this is a minor quibble for me, it could also be seen as a deliberate choice on the author’s part. There is no apology here, no hand-wringing, no deep moral questioning about the nature of sex work. Some of the dangers felt so real as written. On one occasion, Mag goes out of country with a client, and I felt her vulnerability when she realises her safety is entirely at his discretion. One of the book’s strengths is showing us the nature of the job; I was surprised how unsexy writing about explicit sex can be, and this reflects Mag’s view. Mag sees sex work as a job, with clear savings goals: the love of money is the hustle. That’s the high. And if there are occupational hazards along the way, well, there are many hazards in many other ways to make a living.

In this way, All Hookers Go to Heaven deals with a specific situation that speaks to Mag’s experience as a fairly privileged woman in the industry, and not anyone else’s. That’s fair. Even so, she’s subject to sexual assault and coercion at times, none of it easy to read. We see a glimpse into other, more ethically fraught sex work when Mag visits Thailand with a friend, but it’s a quick nod to the perils more disadvantaged women face. There’s no mention of coercion, illegal trafficking, and women forced into this life with no other options. There doesn’t need to be–this is Mag’s story alone–but I was thinking about this as I read.

The author raises some issues of fairness, addressing some real world issues that impact sex workers, such as when a US Senate subcommittee accused a publication called Backpage of facilitating prostitution through its ads in 2017. Backpage suspended that service, so that sex workers, who had often shared information about safety and bad dates in the ads as well, were less able to have a way to find work and support themselves safely. And in Mag’s experience in the book, a safer workplace clearly makes a huge difference to the workers, and can mean life or death.

So here I am, even as I write this, contemplating how to think about the book as it is offered to us. All Hookers Go to Heaven was an interesting, absorbing book. It’s valuable to have a story that is not focused on the trauma of sex work and views it as a job, even if Mag rues her susceptability to the Hustler’s Curse of the love of a dollar. On the other hand, it left me thinking of these moral quandaries, and the perils of such a choice on Mag’s part, even though the perils are rightly critiqued as a function of a system that doesn’t support safe sex work. In the end, I suppose it leaves me nodding, realizing that these are the very issues that society has with sex work, and why writing about it, and giving us different stories from different points of view, is a very useful and necessary thing. It can start a conversation.