Red X
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.
Men are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.
Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.
A bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Demchuk (The Butcher's Daughter) wows with this genuinely hair-raising queer horror novel. Set in Toronto from the 1980s to the 2010s, the narrative spotlights a series of gay men, many on the margins of society, who suddenly disappear, leaving their friends and lovers with no answers, while the police make little or no effort to trace them. Among the vanished are aspiring artist Ryan; Suda, in Canada on a visitor's visa to work at his brother-in-law's restaurant; and Julian, "the kind of pleasant but nondescript young man whom few people would have glanced at twice." Readers catch glimpses of a young Scottish man with a tattered red leather notebook who often appears near these victims before their disappearances; his deceptively quotidian appearance, however, masks the supernatural power behind the macabre and often surreal attacks and deaths that span these decades. A meta discourse on queer horror periodically interrupts the action, sharing Demchuk's musings on the genre while building tension as dread slowly creeps in. Demchuk masterfully combines pure human horror—homophobic violence, the AIDS epidemic—with supernatural scares to keep the pages flying. This will have readers sleeping with the lights on.
