Author: David Demchuk

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.

Publisher: Penguin Random House
Published: 06/30/2026
Pages: 333
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.05oz
ISBN: 9781641298476

About the Author
David Demchuk‘s debut, The Bone Mother, was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Best Novel. RED X was listed as a CBC Books pick for Best Canadian Fiction of the Year, and a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. He now lives with his husband in St. John’s, Newfoundland.