Rechy returns to the themes and scenes from his best-selling "City of Night" and a bittersweet memorial to a lost world--gay Los Angeles in the moment before AIDS. Set in 1981, Jesse is celebrating one year on the gay scene, and plans to lose himself in its pleasures.
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Rechy returns to the themes and scenes from his best-selling "City of Night" and a bittersweet memorial to a lost world--gay Los Angeles in the moment before AIDS. Set in 1981, Jesse is celebrating one year on the gay scene, and plans to lose himself in its pleasures.
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Add this copy of Coming of the Night (Tr) to cart. $9.09, new condition, Sold by indoo rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Avenel, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2000 by Grove Press.
Add this copy of The Coming of the Night to cart. $11.97, new condition, Sold by booksXpress, ships from Bayonne, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2000 by Grove Press.
Add this copy of The Coming of the Night (Rechy, John) to cart. $72.97, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2000 by Grove Press.
Add this copy of The Coming of the Night to cart. $98.89, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1999 by Grove Press.
Open this book to any page and you'll be bombarded with one graphic, gratuitous, poorly written, laugh out loud sex scene after another (Oh yeah baby give it to me, that's it like that . . . seriously that's how inane the dialogue is). Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Rechy's and some of his work is downright brilliant. I loved City of Night, This Day's Death, The Fourth Angel and especially Bodies and Souls. However, The Coming of the Night is a thinly vieled excuse for straight up porn.
I went into the novel excited, thinking Rechy would have something profound to express about gay life before "the coming of the night", a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Instead I was bombarded with episodic sexcapades of several loosely connected one dimensional characters. The sections involving Clint, haunted by and trying to escape from the mysterious "cancer" killing off his friends in New York; Orville, a handsome gay black male trying to get by in the predominantly white gay community and Thomas, a lonely single "old queen" who just wants to be loved were the only compelling and interesting characters to me. As an ardent supporter of AIDS awareness and a gay black male getting up there in age, these characters could have really got a message across. Instead they, and the rest of the novel, are squandered away under the weight of the grossly explicit sex scenes that appear on EVERY page.
Other characters were pointless. Za-Za LaGrand's sections (a thinly veiled reference to porn director Chi Chi LaRue) were utterly pointless and did nothing to further the plot along. Dave, the sado-masochist leather biker man and Ernie, the body builder with endowment issues were one dimensional characters I could care less about and Buzz, Boo and Fredo, the homophobe gay bashing punks were predictable and boring.
It's sad that this novel is so bad because it really had a lot of potential to get across some extremely powerful messages. Instead of focusing on the characters, fleshing them out so I could care for them, Rechy gets too wrapped up in the sex scenes, the majority of which are poorly written with some of the worst dirty talk dialogue I have ever read. Read this only if you've read every Jackie Collins novel and long for a dirtier gay version of what she does. Rechy must have wrote this for the money because it really stinks. PU.
