RED X

Toronto's gay village in the 1980s is being stalked by something that does not belong to this world. In 1984, a young gay man disappears without a trace. His friends and lovers search for answers and find little help: the people they turn to meet them with shrugs at best and open prejudice at worst. Years go by, and more men go missing. Slowly it becomes clear that the cause is a demonic presence far older than the city itself. David Demchuk does not tell this story in a straight line. Between the episodes of horror, he steps forward in his own voice with autobiographical fragments: his first encounters with death and fear, and his thoughts on queer culture, on the horror genre, and on who gets represented and who gets erased. Fact and fiction are woven together, so that the haunting and the history keep pressing against each other across decades of a community's life. The result is a gruesome, experimental and elegiac work that has been widely called one of the great horror novels of the twenty-first century. This reissue adds a new introduction by Gretchen Felker-Martin and an essay by Anthony Oliveira.