In Red X, a terrifying supernatural entity haunts Toronto’s gay village in the ’80s in this gruesome, metatextual modern horror classic that spans decades of queer community and history.
Yay LitStackers! Get ready to add another title to your “TBR” list! A reissue of Red X by David Demchuk is in presale and generating serious buzz. This horror novel from Strange Light is set for publication June 30, 2026, and has readers ecstatic. We’ve sneaked in through the basement to show you what’s on the book cover, from the publisher’s official description to the reviews that confirm this book is one you want to pre-order today. Here we go!
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In This Spotlight On Red X
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About Red X
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, including a new introduction by Gretchen Felker-Martin and an essay by Anthony Oliveira.
In 1984, a young gay man vanishes without a trace, leaving behind a community of friends and lovers desperate for answers. Instead, they face everything from casual indifference to outright prejudice. As decades pass, more men vanish, revealing a terrifying, centuries-old demonic presence at the heart of the disappearances.
Interspersed throughout, the author shares autobiographical vignettes: 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, and has already been heralded as one of the great horror novels of the twenty-first century.
Praise for Red X
“Demchuk wows with this genuinely hair-raising queer horror novel…Demchuk masterfully combines pure human horror—homophobic violence, the AIDS epidemic—with supernatural scares to keep the pages flying. This will have readers sleeping with the lights on.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“When they speak of seminal works of queer literature a hundred years from now, David Demchuk’s Red X will most assuredly be included in that conversation. A tremendously influential novel so arresting, so brutal and yet so delicate that its labyrinthine complexity should be studied and praised. A merciless and truly daring masterpiece of queer fiction.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
Red X is “One of the greatest horror novels of all time, period. Fight me. It’s exactly the book we need right now: scary, angry, horny, and packed with memorable monsters both supernatural and systemic.”—Sam J. Miller, author of The Blade Between
“Can a horror novel be too disturbing? David Demchuk’s Red X begs that question, not because of any excess of gore or violence but because of its singular and unflinching dark vision. That’s a good thing—too much contemporary horror fiction plays for easy shocks and even easier sentimental tears, and Demchuk is clearly after something deeper.”—Toronto Star
Red X is “A book full of heart and righteous fury, an urban nightmare with some retro-horror stylings that sidesteps that genre’s usual pitfalls of splatter and pessimism to deliver a story of emotional heft and guarded optimism. While it’s relentless and can be incredibly disturbing, there are also moments of beauty, hope, and a certain melancholy. It’s a complex, disturbing, challenging, and compulsively readable work that commands your attention, and indeed deserves it.”—Tor Nightfire
About David Demchuk, Author of Red X
David Demchuk is the award-winning author of The Bone Mother, Red X and, with co-author Corinne Leigh Clark, The Butcher’s Daughter. David’s writing has also appeared in numerous anthologies as well as Toronto Life, Hazlitt, Winnipeg Review, Chronotope, Unfortunately, JAKE, Weird Horror and Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse. After many years in Toronto, David lives with his husband in an old house by the sea in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
You can connect with David Demchuk on his website, and on Instagram.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Strange Light | Penguin Random House
ISBN Trade Paperback 9781641298476
Release Date Jun 30, 2026
LitStack Spots
Here are a few other thrilling titles that we are absolutely adding to our TBR stack, including The Bone Mother by David Demchuk, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, and Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle.
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As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Malaprop’s, Books-A-Million, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, 2nd & Charles, Amazon, NameHero, Envato, and Place-It, LitStack may earn a commission—at no cost to you—when you purchase through our affiliate links. We appreciate the brands we work with, and also appreciate that using our affiliate links may help you find your next great read, a book or two or more, in whatever form, while simultaneously supporting LitStack. When you use our affiliate links, you help keep LitStack running—and for that, we thank you.
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