“We didn’t even know how good we had it back when it was merely skyrocketing unemployment and crumbling civil rights.”
I typically love a freaky sci-fi mess with a compelling monster and a confusing plotline, but this just kept losing me. Maybe it was the bit that it was grounded in reality and seemed like a satire. Maybe it was just a bit too confusing in a bad way, like more of a fog than a feeling of disorientation. Not my favorite :/

This novel is an incredible joy and I can't recommend it enough. The prose is sharp, darkly funny, and surprising. None of the language feels cliche or familiar. There's a dystopian backdrop to this story that masterfully blends in real-life issues in the U.S. today; immigration, deportation, LGBTQ+ rights, capitalism, and poverty, among others. I'm so intrigued and delighted to see a queer sadist as the protagonist, as so often stories about BDSM focus on the role and psychology of the masochist. I love how almost claustrophobic and insular the narrative feels and how little is explained for the sake of a cishet audience. This book feels like an "if you know, you know" moment in the best, most gratifying queer way.

Davey Davis can surely write, that’s for sure. There are turns of phrases in this book that are so clever, each like a tiny piece of machinery with its own universe of logic.

X is a sort-of speculative novel about the queers who occupy the seedy underground Brooklyn scene. Davis' is specifically a trans milieu populated by horny, fucked-up dykes and they/thems into BDSM who make Torrey Peters’ trans characters seem pedestrian by comparison. Davis’ painstakingly rendered illustration of this environment, and how the protagonist (the word protagonist being debatable) occupies it, is where this book really shines (A sliced-up thigh "hashtag[s] my skin like the char on grilled ham", a lighting fixture is a "single ugly frosted tit.")

However, despite the sexy(-ish?) dread that permeates through every page, there are certainly flaws to this novel, the majority to do with structure and plot rather than style. The novel really feels like it could have had a few more rounds of edits.

The fragmented structure of the novel, which cuts back and forth in time as the narrator Lee searches for their one-time BDSM encounter-partner X, often becomes confusing. The usage of this device feels too transparently deployed for the sake of tension, and reads almost as if the narrator wrote a single linear narrative and rearranged it into fragments, and didn’t quite have a handle on the final product. There are some plot events that also feel overly convenient (the demise of the podcast hosts, for example) and others that read as extraneous. The novel also hints toward but refuses to answer several crucial questions as to the narrative of why Lee is so fucked up (there is an early history of hospitalization whose nature is extremely vague, previous relationships crucial to the encounter with X whose conclusions are also left vague, as well as the actual relationship with X itself). These are clearly intentional moves by the author, and I love a good open ending (see again: Torrey Peters) but as a reader, to have this many narrative loose ends can become a frustrating experience.

Though flawed, X is clearly the work of a tremendously talented author, a dizzying, dazzling feat of prose styling. It's a fine addition to the literary subgenre of stories of fucked up trans people trying to survive in New York, though I know it could have been even better, and I wish it were. (3.5 stars, rounded up.)

Well, I suppose score one for diverse reading. Doesn’t get much more diverse than this…this deliberately subversive sexual odyssey of a Brooklyn-based sadist. Or maybe a sadomasochist, after all, after an encounter with a mysterious X who throws this top to the bottom and makes them love it.
And then X leaves and the protagonist spends their entire time looking for her. Or them. It’s difficult to tell, but just about everyone in this book is queer, fetishist and them, so that’s probably the safest pronoun to use.
Tons of sex, tons of kink. Curious enough, like gawking at a weird museum, but unless you’re specifically into some of this or have interest in it, the contents might not be for everyone.
Reasonably compelling which is odd for a book about generally unlikeable, unpleasant and unsympathetic character, but ultimately not quite enough to justify reading.
A strange trip into a world that reads as foreign as the rings of Saturn, but then again there’s a very interesting political commentary going on in the backdrop where the powers that be are going wild with deportations, expelling significant percentages of population back to what they perceive to be their countries of origin. A sort of nightmarish dystopia of a xenophobic utopia. Very eerie.
To each their own; and to a specific audience – this book. Thanks Netgalley.