After the Blue Hour
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3.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The "shocking, erotic, and suspenseful" winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction from the author of City of Night (Out Magazine).
John Rechy's first novel, City of Night, an international bestseller, is considered a modern classic. Subsequent work asserts his place among America's most important writers. The author's most daring work, After the Blue Hour is narrated by a twenty-four-year-old writer named John Rechy.
Fleeing a turbulent life in Los Angeles, John accepts an invitation to a private island from an admirer of his work. There, he joins Paul, his imposing host in his late thirties, his beautiful mistress, and his precocious teenage son. Browsing Paul's library and conversing together on the deck about literature and film during the spell of evening's "blue hour," John feels surcease, until, with unabashed candor, Paul shares intimate details of his life. Through cunning seductive charm, he married and divorced an ambassador's daughter and the heiress to a vast fortune. Avoiding identifying his son's mother, he reveals an affinity for erotic "dangerous games." With intimations of past decadence and menace, an abandoned island nearby arouses tense fascination in the group. As "games" veer toward violence, secrets surface in startling twists and turns. Explosive confrontation becomes inevitable.
"A beach read for those who prefer to thumb Genet rather than Grisham on the deckside chaise." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Mysterious, intriguing, and brashly amatory, Rechy's take on gamesmanship, power, domination, and deception is a welcome return to form for the author and a wild ride indeed." —The Bay Area Reporter
"Steamy . . . with a kind of Gatsby-by-way-of-Henry James subplot. Beautifully written." —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rechy's (City of Night) latest is tense metafiction, pungent with desire and emotional cruelty. Its narrator a writer named John Rechy accepts an invitation from Paul Wagner, a fan of his transgressive fiction, to leave Los Angeles in 1960 for a summer on Paul's private (and suggestively described) "inland island." Almost immediately John becomes caught up in games played by Paul; his petulant teenage son, Stanty; and Paul's mistress, Sonya, as Paul seeks to validate his own peculiar appetites with regard to the sexual encounters chronicled in John's fiction. Early in the course of the group's interactions, John senses "a benign surface over an undercurrent... a current that was gathering pressure," and the eruption of that pressure is foreordained in the book's title, which refers to that brief moment when daylight gives way to night and "everything reveals itself as it is." Rechy's prose is lean and sinewy, and he adds an element of intrigue to the novel by having John, in his role as a character who is writing up his experiences on the island, reproduce passages of the text that end abruptly when they begin to veer into territory outside the bounds of the novel as Rechy has written it. The novel is unflinching in its candor even as its events have a tantalizing aura of mystery.
