Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A stunning evocation of gay desire in the moment just before AIDs by the acclaimed author of City of Night: "Taut writing and unapologetic sexual energy" (The Dallas Morning News).
It is 1981, a hot summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Jesse, "the kid," is celebrating one year on the dazzling gay scene and plans to lose himself in its transient pleasures. Clint has fled New York with a sense of unease in the wake of a vicious gay-bashing. Buzz, Boo, Toro, Fredo, and Linda are cruising the city looking for danger, and so is Dave, a "leatherman" devoted to S&M and testing limits. And a priest is searching the streets for a young hustler named Angel, determined to bring him to Jesus.
In this city of night we meet a black cowboy, a bodybuilder obsessed with his sexual prowess, a drag-queen porn director hired to rehearse her stars for a closeted Hollywood mogul, and a middle-aged romantic hiding from a new gay world increasingly obsessed with youth and beauty. As the Santa Ana winds, renowned for stirring up desires and violence, breathe fire down the hills of Los Angeles, this cast of characters circles ever closer to the night—and to a confrontation as astonishing as it is inevitable.
The Coming of the Night is an ode to the golden age of promiscuity and an unflinching exploration of the dark side of desire. "As exciting as it is chilling," it proves once again that John Rechy, the trenchant chronicler of gay life, has no parallel (Los Angeles Times).
Praise for The Coming of the Night
“The question Rechy asks is still potent: Would you die for sex? Rechy’s sizzling literary response . . . is as exciting as it is chilling.” —Pamela Warrick, Los Angeles Times
“A remarkable fusion of taut writing and unapologetic sexual energy.” —Jameson Currier, Dallas Morning News
“An elegy of a lost era.” —Lester Strong, Arts & Understanding
“With his ground-breaking City of Night in 1963, Rechy wrote the manual for gay representation in contemporary literature, and. . . . With his latest, The Coming of the Night, the author comes full circle, having narratively mapped the entire span of modern gay consciousness . . . [His] style has a lyricism and emotional content that belies its simplicity . . . There is no escape from the coming night.” —Flaunt
“A rhapsody of odd, quirky, hilarious people trying to find meaning and chaos in Southern California . . . The ending to the novel is frenetic, sweaty, almost religious.” —El Paso Times
“An erotic, passionate, somewhat violent tour of over twenty gay male lives during the summer of 1981, complete with pre-AIDS, uninhibited sexuality. Already making waves for its brazenly controversial content and unabashedly candid prose, Rechy’s new work is nothing short of combustible gay erotic fiction.” —Metrowest Daily News
“The Coming of the Night follows a cast of colorful characters as they confront the dangers of being gay and passionate . . . Rechy creates a stark, stinging, and anxious atmosphere in which desire makes people do awful things, and lust commingles with promiscuity, obsession, self-hatred, depression, and narcissism.” —Library Journal
“Rechy doesn’t skimp on plot, character or action, and the ingenious ending takes an unanticipated but thoroughly logical turn. In its gritty evocation of time and place, the novel goes beyond its narrow subject matter, reaching for a broader and deeper understanding of an era.” —Publishers Weekly
“One of the most talented writers of his generation. His latest novel, The Coming of the Night, may be his most astounding . . . The book’s climax is an apotheosis of simmering violence and pressure-cooker sexuality . . . The plot . . . unfurls in the reader’s mind like good cinema . . . slowly and expertly meld[ing] into grand gestures that proclaim sex as delight, as danger or as self-hatred . . . Its trip into darkness is dreadful yet alluring. Read it, if you dare, in one long session.” —Bruce Benderson, Paper
“Complex and discomforting.” —John Sanchez, San Antonio Current
John Rechy is the author of seventeen books, including City of Night, the New York Times bestseller Numbers, and the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Rushes and The Coming of the Night. He has received many awards, including PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal award for Distinguished Achievement in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Lifetime-Recognition Award from the University of California at Riverside. The author lives in Los Angeles.