John R. Gordon

Brooklyn-based poet DuVone Mapley-Stevenson is already struggling with fragile mental health when his white husband Jack gets a promotion that means them relocating to all-white Kwawidokawa County, upstate Maine. At first it seems this could be a fresh start for the financially-stretched family, even if the house Jack has found them is suspiciously cheap.Determined to make the most of the move for the sake of their young son, stay-at-home dad Vone is at once destabilized by the racial, cultural and geographic isolation. When strange sights and sounds start to press in on him, he initially doesn't dare share with Jack what he at first assumes must be recurring delusive thinking. And then he starts to fear that the increasingly threatening uncanny phenomena are real.As a series of terrifying events begin to tear apart the boundaries between sanity and reality, myth and science, Vone finds himself fighting a life-and-death battle with both the monsters who roam the mind and those that slither across the boundaries between their worlds and our own...Fusing a convincing portrait of psychosis and its aftermath with occult and indigenous lore, the legacy of New England witch trials, gothic Americana and the lived experiences of a multi-cultural queer family in a world of racial and social discord, award-winning John R. Gordon's new novel of unease will set your pulse racing and have you looking over your shoulder for things glanced in mirrors.

John R Gordon is the winner of the prestigious 2019 Ferro-Grumley Award for best LGBTQ fiction."Hark mixes several genres with grace, aplomb and undeniable queerness. It's audaciously provocative, sexy and spooky all at once. And very much of the zeitgeist " -- Craig Laurance Gidney (A Spectral Hue)The night the statue of a Confederate colonel is torn down in the center of a dying, opioid-scarred and racially divided Southern town is the night two wild teenagers meet and start to fall in love. White working class Cleve is broke and drifting into criminality; black, bourgeois Roe is alienated and rebellious. They say opposites attract, and who could be more opposite than Cleve and Roe?When Cleve finds himself, at age 17, home alone for the first time in his life, he summons the courage to invite Roe to stay over. The young men's relationship looks set to move to another level when they are interrupted by Hark, a mysterious black vagrant who seems to possess supernatural powers, and takes them on a strange and troubling journey into the past.Hark is a touching, vividly contemporary coming of age story; a compelling, fast-paced and ultimately hopeful tale of gay interracial love; and shows us how necessary it is to confront the evils of our shared history, however painful it may be to do so.John R Gordon is the author of the black gay antebellum epic Drapetomania. Hailed as "an all-out masterpiece" by Patrik-Ian Polk (Noah's Arc, Blackbird, The Skinny) and "a dazzling work of imagination" by Michael Eric Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop: Sermon to White America).

A compelling, thrilling tale of love in slavery times.When house-servant Abednego is sold away south, his broken-hearted field-hand lover Cyrus snaps and flees the estate on which he has lived his entire life. Leaving everything he knows behind him, and evading patrollers and dogs to head north and find freedom, in the midst of a dismal swamp Cyrus receives the revelation that Abednego is his true North Star, and, impossible though it seems, he determines to find and rescue his lost lover from slavery.Ten years in the writing, NAACP Image Award nominee John R Gordon's Drapetomania is an epic and exciting tale of black freedom, uprising, and a radical representation of romantic love between black men in slavery times."We've seen the African-American slave narrative told from many perspectives, but in this groundbreaking novel, Gordon becomes the first to explore this experience through the eyes of a gay slave. The result is an all-out masterpiece. With this bold, painstakingly historicized effort, Gordon arguably makes a bid to join the ranks of some of the greatest writers of the African-American experience - Baldwin, Haley, Morrison, Walker. This book is just THAT good. It's no easy task to write what feels like a classic American novel in the 21st century, but Gordon has done just that."- Patrik-Ian Polk (Blackbird; The Skinny; Noah's Arc)"John R Gordon's novel, Drapetomania Or, The Narrative of Cyrus Tyler & Abednego Tyler, lovers is a riveting, masterful work. Set against the brutalizing, material captivity meant to break the soul, that came to define the chattel enslavement of Africans in the American south, "Drapetomania" tells the compelling story of two men whose love for each other reimagines the erotic contours of what was possible under the whip and scrutiny of catastrophic bondage. Here is a story of love so powerful, so achingly present, it dares to consider not just the past but the future, as vital to freedom; and in doing so, defies any notion of the black enslaved body as an ugly, unpalatable thing, unworthy of the sweetness of love. Gordon's novel enters the company of such classic works as Edward P. Jones's The Known World, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. We will be reading and talking about this extraordinary novel for years to come."- Alexis De Veaux, (author, Yabo and Sister Outsider: A Biography of Audre Lorde)