They stay at a friend’s flat after a messy split, have a day job at a large business, and spend their free time listening to true crime tales and hooking up with individuals they meet at bars and parties. But there is one distinction.
They say, “When I go for my late-night walks, salt squeaking beneath my boots, I listen to the murder podcast.” “I’m not a pedestrian or a possible victim in the dark. I am the street silhouette that those inside see, or don’t see. I’m the one who poses a threat. I enjoy that.”
In addition to attempting to put their lives back together after a broken relationship and navigating the dystopian society that America has become, Lee is a sadist with a propensity for violent fantasies. X is a stunning and poignant novel about what it means to be an outsider in a world that is disintegrating around you. It is not your typical love tale.
At the beginning of X, Lee is in a dungeon after agreeing to participate in a woman’s sinister dream. They’re satisfying the woman’s “Lynndie England fetish” – she wants to waterboard Lee for her enjoyment even though Lee loves to cause pain rather than receive it. She tells them that it’s “simply sexy, not political.”
At the beginning of X, Lee is in a dungeon after agreeing to participate in a woman’s sinister dream. They’re satisfying the woman’s “Lynndie England fetish” – she wants to waterboard Lee for her enjoyment even though Lee loves to cause pain rather than receive it. She tells them that it’s “simply sexy, not political.”
Because they believe the lady may know where X, a woman they met at a warehouse party, is, Lee is giving in to the dream. X’s moody atmosphere draws Lee in right away “As in the Helmut Newton photographs of Grace Jones and Sigourney Weaver locking eyes in the middle of an orgy, remembering each other from a past life, there was something about her that was familiar, the way she held and moved her body, a visual scent twisting against itself, and a dynamic tension. Even though I didn’t know her, I realised right away that she was unlike anyone I had ever seen.”
In a punk commune, Lee follows X to her room where she engages in a furious, cruel sex session with Lee on a bench with stirrups. Naturally, I sobbed, Lee says. “I anticipated what she would do, but I wasn’t upset… I was searching for my rage but couldn’t locate it. After that, X vanishes, and Lee, who is now fixated on her, looks for her in the gay bars of New York.
It’s a challenging search. The government is allegedly pursuing a programme to bring in persons they deem undesirable, including people of colour, Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists, “drug users,” and sex changers and the story is that X is preparing to “export,” or depart the nation, after being forced to do so. —outside of the nation. When your fascist regime urges you to leave, it’s all fun and games, Lee observes.
Lee is also thinking about their failed relationship with Petra, his ex-girlfriend and the masochist to his sadist: It’s certainly inappropriate—in a sense reminiscent of queer theory—to ask why I’m a sadist, but I do, says Lee. “similar to Petra Despite everything, I was in love with her, and I realised this as soon as I began thinking about how I would dress her for her viewing before her funeral. Although it’s not natural to desire to see your sweetheart dead and gorgeous, it’s always seemed normal to me.”
X has sex scenes, as one might expect from a book set in the kink community, and Davis manages them brilliantly. Nothing in this book is done for shock value. (However, if you were outraged by the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, this novel will most likely make your head explode.)
Davis is an astonishingly confident writer, and X is a stunningly gorgeous work that offers an intriguing glimpse at a subculture that mainstream American art has usually avoided. It offers a sombre perspective on what occurs when a government cedes to bigotry and hatred and abandons its citizens. Accordingto Lee,
