X
A Novel
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3.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A thrilling portrait of political terror and the violent pleasures found in warehouses, bathrooms, and dungeons across New York City, X is a novel that delves into the psyches of characters on the margins
The world is ending, and down-and-out sadist Lee spends their days working for a big corporation and their nights wandering the streets of Brooklyn listening to true crime podcasts. But everything changes when Lee is dragged to a warehouse party by their best friend, where they find themself in the clutches of the seductive and bloodthirsty X. When Lee seeks her out again, she’s nowhere to be found.
Amid the steady constriction of civil rights and the purging of migrants and refugees, the U.S. government has recently begun encouraging the semi-voluntary “exporting” of undesirable citizens—the radicalized, the dissident, and the ungovernable. Word has it that X may be among those leaving. If Lee doesn’t track her down soon, she may be gone forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis (The Earthquake Room) delivers an astonishing speculative tale of sex, power, and gender. In a near future, marginalized and unwanted people are "exported" by the fascistic government to camps and abroad. Lee, the narrator, is a sadist in Brooklyn, trying to find X, the woman they have become obsessed with after X topped them in a backroom at a warehouse concert. With few clues to X's whereabouts, Lee navigates through play parties, sex workers, and partners future and past to find X before she—or anyone else they know—is exported. Interspliced with Lee's pursuit are memories of neglect as a child and love as an adult. Along the way, Lee explores their relationship to pain as both an expression of punishment and of affection. Vivid and witty, Davis's prose hurtles between moments of beauty and darkness, often in the same breath. Here's Lee recounting how they would hold a former lover underwater in the bath: "she struggled, her breasts rising and sinking like feeding koi. In the water, her face was like an angel: shining, many-eyed, misshapen." It's just one of many ravishing explorations of the margins of a punishing world. This one hits hard.
