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by David Demchuk
A terrifying supernatural entity haunts Toronto's gay village in the '80s in this gruesome, metatextual modern horror classic that spans decades of queer community and history. RED X is a masterful experimental work already heralded as one of the great horror novels of the twenty-first century, now reissued with deluxe materials, including a new introduction by Gretchen Felker-Martin and an essay by Anthony Oliveira.
In 1984, a young gay man vanishes without a trace, leaving behind a community of friends and lovers desperate for answers. Instead, they face everything from casual indifference to outright prejudice. As decades pass, more men vanish, revealing a terrifying, centuries-old demonic presence at the heart of the disappearances.
Interspersed throughout, the author shares autobiographical vignettes: his earliest brushes with death and fear, his observations on queer culture and the horror genre, on representation and erasure, culminating in an elegiac and brilliantly woven narrative that blends fact and fiction, and has already been heralded as one of the great horror novels of the twenty-first century.
"Demchuk wows with this genuinely hair-raising queer horror novel...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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Can a horror novel be too disturbing? David Demchuk's RED X begs that question, not because of any excess of gore or violence but because of its singular and unflinching dark vision. That's a good thing—too much contemporary horror fiction plays for easy shocks and even easier sentimental tears, and Demchuk is clearly after something deeper." —Toronto Star
"When they speak of seminal works of queer literature a hundred years from now, David Demchuk's RED X will most assuredly be included in that conversation. A tremendously influential novel so arresting, so brutal and yet so delicate that its labyrinthine complexity should be studied and praised. A merciless and truly daring masterpiece of queer fiction." —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
"One of the greatest horror novels of all time, period. Fight me. It's exactly the book we need right now: scary, angry, horny, and packed with memorable monsters both supernatural and systemic." —Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between
This information about RED X was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Demchuk is the award-winning author of The Bone Mother, RED X and, with co-author Corinne Leigh Clark, The Butcher's Daughter. After many years in Toronto, he now lives with his husband in St. John's, Newfoundland.
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