Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Equal parts detective story and sociocultural history, James’ new novel takes a deep, harrowing dive into the tragic consequences of violent homophobia. The “disappearers” of the title are Orrin Turner and Matt Chin, who dominate this decades-spanning saga without being seen or heard through most of it. They are two of the gay men—“battymen” in Jamaican idiom—who show up at a Kingston house on a June night in 1988 to rehearse for a production ofFortune and Men’s Eyes, a play set in a prison. The group is savagely attacked by a mob, leaving one of the actors dead, one blinded for life, and the rest bloodied and injured. Survivors of the attack spend most of the succeeding years recovering from both physical and psychic wounds, among them Jordan Brown, who describes himself as “full-time battyman, sometime prostitute. Occasional thorn in somebody’s backside,” and Eddy Porteous, who arrived too late at that fateful rehearsal to become a casualty but nonetheless is haunted, like Jordan, by the inexplicable disappearance of both Turner and Chin since the attack. Despite constant carping between them, Jordan and Eddy team up roughly six years after the attack in search of clues to their friends’ whereabouts. While the process yields few hints, their inquiries on the streets, in bars, and at other gathering places for Kingston’s battymen contribute to a grim but illuminating collective portrait of the country’s gay community at a time when the AIDS crisis was in its early, often frightening stages and of the alarmingly widespread homophobia leading to that brutal attack. As in his Booker Prize–winningA Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), James brings multilayered life to a troubling era in his homeland’s recent history. He engages with his landscapes and the diverse characters populating them with intensity, passion, and bountiful, often graphic detail. With the same affinity for Dickensian storytelling he’s shown in his sword-and-sorcery epics, James tells this searingly realistic tale through interview fragments, journal entries, letters, and, in recreating the horrific attack, with random, frantic voices that leave unsettling echoes. Even when it stress-tests your senses, this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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“I wonder what it feels like when you don’t care anymore,” reflects 19-year-old Eddy Porteous, one of many narrators in the breathtaking latest from James, who won the Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings. It’s 1988 in Kingston, Jamaica, and Eddy, who’s costarring in an underground community theater production of a play about queerness in prison, is having trouble coming to terms with the despairing character he’s playing. Jamaica itself is a prison for queer people, middle-aged director Havelock Titus points out to the bickering and skeptical cast of gay men, given the country’s ingrained homophobia and prohibition on sodomy. There’s also Jordan Brown, a young man who lives out of his car and turns tricks for a pedophile pimp; and Matt Chin, a beautiful and mysterious white-collar worker whom Eddy lusts after. During a rehearsal, the cast and crew are beaten by a gay-bashing mob. One is killed, another is blinded. Eddy, the only cast member not present for the attack, is wracked with survivor’s guilt. Later sections include transcriptions of a journalist’s mid-1990s interviews with Eddy and Jordan about the attack along with chronicles of the pair’s attempts to find Matt and another cast member who went missing after being released from the hospital. Here and later, with Havelock’s letters to a friend about his university days in 1950s London, the novel swells into an ambitious and astonishing portrait of queer life, taking on intergenerational tensions, the self-annihilating effects of trauma, the defiant sexuality called for by John Rechy, whose writing inspires Jordan, and much more. The author has outdone himself. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)

Library Journal
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In 1988, eight men meet in Kingston, Jamaica, to rehearse a play about gay life in a reformatory. They're all gay—some openly, others not. When they meet one night in private to let off pressure, they are attacked by a violent mob. One of the actors winds up dead; another is blinded. In the years that follow, one of the survivors contracts AIDS. Others invent heterosexual lives as covers. Some just vanish. But memories of the attack constantly remind them there's no place for them in Jamaica. They'll never be able to live there as they want; they'll just survive, and then only if they're always watchful. This language-rich novel is filled with vivid slang—"bomboclaat," "raasclaat," and above all "battyman" (a slur for "gay")—and explicit sex scenes, with no details left out. As always, James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) writes exceptionally well. VERDICT This book may remind readers of works by John Rechy, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Hubert Selby, but James is his own man.—David Keymer

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Booker Prize–winner James’ (Moon, Witch, Spider, King, 2022) latest captivating and epic novel is about a group of gay men in late twentieth-century Kingston, Jamaica, in the aftermath of a brutal and traumatic attack. When eight disparate men gather to begin rehearsals for a play in 1988, their community is a dangerous and deadly place for queer people. One night, the group is the target of a murderous mob’s violence that leaves one of them dead and the survivors coping with the devastating repercussions. James follows these characters through their lives and relationships as they grapple with the many ways in which people can disappear when they live on the margin of a society that is hostile to their existence. Told through multiple perspectives and with scenes of graphic violence and sex, the often harrowing stories of these unforgettable characters are about struggle and survival, longing and reconciliation. James renders his characters’ tumultuous inner lives with striking imagery and energy; their dialogue is rapid, keen, and hard-hitting. In all, a gritty, powerful, and gripping read.