Red X: David Demchuk's novel is multi-layered horror of the most unsettling kind
10 Oct 2021.

by Drew Rowsome - photos by Sean Leber

David Demchuk (The Bone Mother) was, like all of us, struggling with the PTSD that resulted from learning that a serial killer was living among us and preying on our community. His process of grieving and expressing his anger was channeled into creating the brilliant and extremely unsettling horror novel Red X. Beginning with a brief history and topographical description of Toronto's unique and fading place in the world, he then begins to chronicle an explanation. Divided into disappearances of gay men that occurred in 1984, 1992, 2000 and 2016 (with a horrific detour way into the past) Red X provides a linear and compelling horror novel structure. This novel weaves together a variety of myths and legends that builds to a contemporary and cathartic climax.

But it is what is happening in the subtext and margins that is the most horrific and creates an almost unbearable unease. Demchuk inserts himself into the narrative, first with biographical (whether real or invented) stories, then with interactions with the characters we have come to fear for. This allows him to pull back the curtain on what he is doing, what his themes and concerns are, but without for a second lessening the tension. Like Song of Susannah or Stoker's Dracula, the reader actually fears for the narrator, the omniscient narrator, and ultimately themselves. If it can happen to these people, and to our guide, it can happen to us. The effect may have been more intense for those, like myself, who are familiar with the world where Red X is set. But the skill with which Toronto's gay history is evoked is so tactile, and so realistic, that I suspect it grounds the story as firmly as a novel set in Castle Rock or Isherwood's Berlin. 

Alexander Wood,  Allan Gardens, the Club Toronto bathhouse, and innumerable bars and queens of the past make appearances in Red X. While I have personal fond memories of Toronto's Toolbox, Demchuk's description of it in its heyday and then the decayed building it became, is used for his own eerie purposes. Demchuk is exploring the particular way that LBTQers, particularly gay men, tangentially the BDSM community, constantly straddle the line between fear and desire. The thrill of the unknown and the aphrodisiac of potential danger. How anonymity can be simultaneously sexually arousing and heartbreakingly lonely. Even the evil that lurks and preys, has a history that creates sympathy if not empathy. We both hate the monster and feel for it. Demchuk even spells it out with an essay exploring queers in horror. It is a concise and thoughtful seeming break in the narrative, consolidating much critical theory on queer horror into digestible and thought provoking paragraphs. We are cast as victims of our desires but more often as villains. As monsters.

From there Demchuk inserts himself into the novel again and using graphic design (a very queer tool), perpetrates the most shocking whiplash moment in Red X. One that made me gasp and have to put the book down for a moment to catch my breath. In the essay portion, Demchuk notes "it was better to be seen as monster than to remain unseen." This monster leaps off the pages. Another of the major themes of Red X is the destructiveness of the closet. All of the deaths, including - Spoiler Alert! - that of the monster (that is if the monster ever really dies) are either the result of, or abetted by, a characters' inability to live authentically. Demchuk has much empathy, again, for those who are seen as holding the closet doors shut, they are as destroyed by it as are those trapped inside. 

Red X posits that the solution to the disconnectedness of queer life is community. The motley crew of characters who care for each other, struggle to love each other, and band together to fight the monster, are composed of the spectrum of LGBTQ. But, as in life, it is the trans and lesbians who wind up doing the heavy lifting. Demchuk timelines Red X using horror film and pop culture references and then, probably chuckling while he typed, lifts the climax of Red X from a pop culture/horror juggernaut from the '70s, just before the main action of Red X begins. Evil is timeless. But that isn't the climax. There is an epilogue of deep humanity where all the disparate threads and characters throughout the sprawling timeline achieve a sort of catharsis. Even the heterosexuals, who in lesser hands would be clearly either villains or victims. But not Demchuk. Not the reader. There is still a shadow looming.

Aside from all the overarching themes and intellectual rigor, Red X is a gory, flat-out horror read. Demchuk weaves together folk legends (the Cabbagetown tunnel monster and the barghest) with the fairy tales of kidnapping faeries (which of course riffs on the pejorative slur 'fairy') and a riff on the Necronomicon. There is symbolism tied to red Xs, but Demchuk doesn't belabour it. It is enough to show the decline of Toronto's gay village and how the world has changed, evolving and devolving, while remaining resolutely the same. It is an elegy to what we are constantly in danger of losing. But Red X isn't all darkness, gay wit abounds. The horror of AIDS hovers over Red X but becomes not the monster but a darkly comic plot device. And I laughed out loud when a character reflected on the two years he worked as a hustler. "The money was nice, but he found it exhausting. Bad kissers, bad breath, too many boundary issues, too much emotional labour. He might as well have stayed in the theatre."