Review: Men in Granny Panties: A Love Story

Men in Granny Panties: A Love Story by Seamus McGraw
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Seamus McGraw is a regional treasure. He’s written and spoken about fracking and other profit-driven/screw-the-future assaults on the natural resources of our shared Northeastern Pennsylvania home. He’s supported other local artists (even though I’d never met him, he once took a good hour to talk with me about one of my own projects), and he’s tireless in fighting the good fight while making time to laugh.

I didn’t know until now, though, that he’s also a fiction writer, and Men In Granny Pants turns out to be to “NEPA” (as we call Northeast Pennsylvania) as Carl Hiassen’s work is to Central Florida. It’s a series of absurd characters who, in their greed or naïve efforts to preserve what we still have, get caught in a web of stories.

At the heart of this is Benedict, a professional wrestler who lost his capacity to feel pain some years before. As a result, he can take all sorts of abuse in the ring. He’s pining for his lost love, Madeline, who’s been addicted to drugs to keep her under the control of his manager who has a scheme to make a fortune off of Benedict throwing a match.

Then, at the same time, a local hack politician pins his re-election hopes on a campaign to keep alive a brain-dead racist pseudo-religious con man – who, it turns out, enjoys wearing granny panties and posting about it.

There are even more off-the-wall sorts – a slacker druggie who turns up everywhere and a college professor and granny-pant wearer himself among them – and all of them come together in a climax that involves a broken-in-body Benedict and the aftermath of his refusing to take a dive.

Funny and compelling as the plot is – and [SPOILER] moving as the final scene is when Madeline finally has a moment with Benedict – the real effectiveness here comes in the same sort of sardonic worldview that Hiassen has mastered. This is a thoughtful writer showing us our insanity. We’re invited to strip away the exaggerations, but then we’re still left with what isn’t exaggerated at all: we have politicians in power in our state and region who care nothing about what we’ve already learned in the aftermath of thoughtless mining history.

In other words, this is funny every page you turn and then, when you’ve turned the last one, you find out it isn’t so funny after all.


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