Back to Oz: Gregory Maguire, whose hit novel Wicked brilliantly inverted The Wizard of Oz, returns with a sequel, Son of a Witch--and this time there's gay stuff!

What's more wicked than Wicked? At readings and public events for his best-selling revisitation of L. Frank Baum's classic novels of Oz, Gregory Maguire used to joke that he'd call his sequel Son of a Witch. But he didn't feel drawn back to his magical land until he began receiving fan mail from teenage girls who'd seen the hit Broadway musical of Wicked (which opened in October 2003) and then read the much darker and more disturbing book on which it was based. In particular, they were worried about Nor, a 14-year-old girl, a political prisoner whom the not-so-wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, tries--and fails--to get released.

"I wrote the book for adults," Maguire says, "and adults know that there are in fact political prisoners who won't be released while they're alive. In my vision, a magical world doesn't have to be all unicorns and rainbows. It can reflect these realities. I saw the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib, and I knew I couldn't go to Iraq and picket, but I could pay attention to my muse, who was stirring. So those letters and Abu Ghraib and my depression after the election all caused my muse to roll over in bed, sit up, and tell me to get out of the way."

Readers who embraced Wicked will be delighted to return to Oz with Maguire in this complex and surprising sequel. Even darker than Wicked (it opens with face scrapings--and they aren't a spa treatment), Son of a Witch follows Liir, a teenage boy who may or may not be the dead witch's son, as he struggles to find Nor. In Maguire's words, it's about "how people thrive and draw nourishment under an oppressive regime." That's the earnest underpinning to a world that also includes talking animals, a half-elephant princess, officious Munchkins, and magical broomsticks. Not to mention--new for Maguire--a gay sex scene, between Liir and a male officer of the kingdom's home guard.

Maguire emphasizes that he has never felt obligated to write gay characters or situations simply because he himself is gay. "I'd always thought Liir had a gay side," Maguire says. "But it wasn't going to show up just to titillate me. I could do that in the privacy of my own bedroom!" In Son of a Witch, Liir's same-sex desire serves to sharpen his conflict with Oz's religious regime. "This book was ... more and more about the way governments can harness false piety in order to preserve their own power," Maguire explains. "And one of the things piety does best is to issue pronouncements about what constitutes moral behavior. Plus," he adds, "it was fun and I liked it and I found it romantic and sexy."

Maguire, who wrote 12 children's books before launching his fame with Wicked, married his partner of eight years, the painter Andy Newman, last year in their home state of Massachusetts, and they have three adopted children. The kids are too young to read Maguire's books, and "they're blissfully unaware of what we do for a living," he says. "They think we dabble. People send me copies of Wicked to sign, and they'll just sigh, 'Oh, Wicked.' They haven't seen The Wizard of Oz yet, but they know Wicked!"

Marler is the editor of Queer

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