on reading 'red x' by david demchuk

Not much to say here, apart from the epiphany that sometimes, when reading, a work does not sit well with a reader because they have their own book.  My experience of being queer in North America is certainly not this author's, and vice versa.  But he's using a familiar toolbox, the tools are anyone's to use, & I do not believe what he has built is very like what I have built.  It's been a couple years since I decided to create a queer horror novel; I think mine stands on its own, and does not make the choices made here, because--  I'm not writing for the marketplace.  I don't want to write for the market.  I think orienting oneself towards that goal neuters the actual emotions of apprehension, anxiety, nervousness & fear that power such work.  All that said, 'Red X' is not a bad book; but it is not a Great Book, as horror / folklore goes.  It reads like work by a writer who feels beholden to the broader history of horror, as chronicled in the twenty-first century; it feels like 'Danse Macabre' and many other King books besides; it echoes too many other things, and speaks not enough for itself.  It feels like a second novel, shepherded to print with the assistance of an editor who's looking to make their career off a Hot Young Author.  But mostly it feels like I need to stop reading it, soon, because I have forty pages to go and too little patience left.