RED X

Synopsis

A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year • A CBC Books Pick for Best Canadian Fiction • Aurora Award Nominee for Best Novel  A terrifying supernatural entity haunts Toronto’s gay village in the ’80s in this gruesome, paratextual 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 and a new introduction by Gretchen Felker-Martin. “[A] seminal work of queer literature . … So arresting, so brutal and yet so delicate that its labyrinthine complexity should be studied and praised.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke In 1984, a young gay man in Toronto vanishes without a trace. He leaves behind a community of friends and lovers desperate for answers but facing the casual indifference, or outright prejudice, of the broader world. As decades pass, more men, all gay, vanish in the same way. As the novel reveals a terrifying, centuries-old demonic presence at the heart of the disappearances, the author David Demchuk intersperses autobiographical vignettes from his own life: 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.