Heaven is Other People: A Review of Angel B.H.’s All Hookers Go to Heaven

All Hookers Go to Heaven
Angel B.H.
Invisible Publishing
2024, 368 pp., $23.95

“Heaven. That desperately sought-after celestial climax, awarded to those who persevere in a lifelong journey of purity and self-restraint,” muses Magdalena, the protagonist of Angel B.H.'s debut novel, All Hookers Go to Heaven. “The ultimate pay-off.”

Growing up in a strict, deeply evangelical Christian sect in the remote Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, Mag (as she is nicknamed in the novel) yearns with almost tangible pangs of longing for heaven, the reward promised to her by her religious upbringing. It keeps her from “sin” and from “impurity,” but only for so long. Far-off dreams of heaven are not enough to override the more immediate pleasures of life: particularly, her love for another young woman in the evangelical training program she enters. Neither is the spectre of hell.

Like Mag, I spent my childhood in a Christian bubble and attended a Discipleship Training School (a different one, in another country). I too felt early bisexual stirrings that didn’t seem to fit within what was allowed by my faith. And I recognized in myself, reading this novel, a version of what Mag calls “the hustler’s curse”: an almost pathological need to create a home for yourself in a world where you feel precarious, where safety is not guaranteed. I deeply felt her assertion that the promise of heaven in Christianity was “more refuge than reward.” If she could get there—remain morally upright and earn her way in—she would experience not overwhelming joy but rather “that final satisfaction, that glorious, everlasting relief.”

Mag’s sense of safety comes first in the righteous knowledge of eternal reward, then in money. “Possessed by the spirit of capitalism, we create our own mythologies,” she narrates. B.H. cleverly draws a parallel between Mag’s Christian upbringing, which teaches her that the threat of hell is around every corner, and the precarity of her next career path: sex work. (Her name, a riff on Jesus’s disciple Mary Magdalene, canonically known as a biblical sex worker, plays with this connection, and might gesture toward the historical intertwining of the sacred and the sexual.)

The novel is clever, thoughtful, and engaging, drawing the reader through a never-ending rotation of cities, countries, and jobs. Mag leaves her rural East Coast enclave for Montreal, then New Orleans, Jamaica, Berlin, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore through the course of the novel. Throughout, her work takes her from such disparate locations as Montreal’s famous Supersexe strip club to Australian brothels and swinger’s clubs in the States.

B.H.’s style is funny and sharp, attentive to the details, no matter how minor, of life. She captures the subtle shifts in mood, body, feeling, and affect that frizz between two people in any sort of relationship, which makes her a powerful writer of both sex and love (including friendship). As a character, Mag cultivates this same attentiveness for the purpose of her job, which necessitates careful observation to evaluate potential clients and ensure her own safety.

She captures the subtle shifts in mood, body, feeling, and affect that frizz between two people in any sort of relationship, which makes her a powerful writer of both sex and love (including friendship).

The book steers clear of tired tropes about sex work and instead presents a clear-eyed portrait of the day-to-day freedoms and struggles that come along with living as “a hustler,” as Mag thinks of herself. It is all about the hustle, whether Mag is putting up ads on Backpage or scanning a bar for a potential client; it’s also about avoiding the pitfalls of social systems that are built to criminalize or unequally punish this work. Safety is easily compromised; when Backpage is shut down by the U.S. FOSTA/SESTA laws, Mag loses her income stream and ability to vet clients. (The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act were billed as measures to curb child sex trafficking, but shut down sites like Backpage which were used by sex workers to consensually find and book clients.)

At Hedonism II, an adults-only all-inclusive resort in Jamaica, her personal boundaries are violated, and the class and race dynamics of Caribbean resorts become painfully clear as she finds herself caught between the worlds of the white vacationers and the Black local residents who staff the resort. At an Australian brothel, a set-up that seems potentially empowering turns dark under a controlling Madam. Clients push drugs, attempt to manipulate, or refuse to meet her demands for identification.

The book’s ire is most clearly directed at systemic problems, the political disenfranchisement of sex workers and the ways in which policies such as the Nordic model (in which the selling of sex is decriminalized but purchasing sex is punishable) pacify neoliberal sensibilities while making life harder and more dangerous for those on the ground. One of the most traumatizing violations in Mag’s story occurs not at the hands of a client, but the U.S. government, when she is stopped at customs, interred, interrogated, and deported. As Mag is detained in a holding cell while officers pore over her private journal, looking for evidence of illegal sex work, one feels her fear, how completely trapped and vulnerable she is, despite an officer’s reminder that the barred room is “not a prison.” The dehumanizing experience is conveyed as viscerally as a moment of physical violence.

But Mag’s stories offer transcendent spaces of connection as well—often with other sex workers, friends, colleagues, or romantic partners. These moments of connection occur predominantly outside of client relationships, though sometimes within fulfilling transactional partnerships as well. B.H. probes the power dynamics inherent within these different permutations of intimacy, exploring the ambiguous line between a “real” relationship and one that is paid for. 

B.H. probes the power dynamics inherent within these different permutations of intimacy, exploring the ambiguous line between a “real” relationship and one that is paid for.

B.H. has said that the book initially began as a series of short stories, which she wrote during the COVID-19 lockdowns. This lineage feels discernible in the finished novel, with its rotating cast of characters and episodic nature; at times, it lends the book a quality reminiscent of a memoir, and creates occasional tangents that distract from the momentum of the narrative. That said, the digressive structure of the novel is also an effective depiction of sex work as an ever-changing profession that is vulnerable to shifts in (de)criminalization and plain old market demand. And by the end, as Mag reflects on her years-long journey in the industry, the reader feels that they have made that journey alongside her.

The book’s strongest section comes at the end, taking place over New Year’s Eve in Thailand, where Mag is travelling with her friend Rory. After years of navigating relationships with clients that range from comfortable, even loving, to downright abusive, exhaustion wears on her; she finds herself overwhelmed by the grabbing, groping, and leering men on the beaches and streets of Bangkok who play into the neocolonial role of the sex tourist. But her story culminates in a refusal to dehumanize the men around her in the way that sex workers are always threatened to be dehumanized. Instead, she attempts to see everyone with the same complexity she affords herself: “Couldn’t I, more than anyone, appreciate the nuance? Appreciate that hiring hookers, just like hooking itself, was neither exclusively bad, nor exclusively good, but equal parts both?”

There is an inherent hopefulness to the book, shot through as it is with humour and moments of delicious pleasure. Heaven, that pay-off that Mag longed for all those years ago in her hometown, is available here on earth, she realizes. In the rush of a new year, in the warmth of a community, in the overwhelming sweetness of a new relationship, in the constancy of good friendship, and in the ecstatic process of creating, of writing it all down.