December 18, 2023:

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Red X

Red X

Red X

A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.

Men are disappearing from Toronto’s gay village. They’re the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.

Woven into their stories is David Demchuk’s own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.

About the author

David Demchuk

David Demchuk

Award-winning author David Demchuk has been writing for print, stage, digital and other media for more than 40 years. His debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Adult Fiction category. It was listed in the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2017, came in at #22 in the National Post’s top 99 books of the year and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon.ca. His troubling new novel RED X was published by Strange Light in August 2021. It was listed as a Rakuten Kobo Top 20 of 2021 selection, a CBC Books pick for Best Canadian fiction of 2021, and a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021—one of just three Canadian novels on the list. David Demchuk is represented by Barbara Berson of the Helen Heller Literary Agency. After many years in Toronto, he now lives with his husband in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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