Cover Reveal: Dead Boys Don’t Cry

In the mood for something lush and mysterious?

Here’s the back cover copy, although personally I think it always does art a disservice to be described rather than experienced:

“Dead Boys Don’t Cry is a queer cosmic-erotic slasher and anti-murder mystery about disaster gay Chris Fournier, who has one big problem: He can’t stop getting murdered.

On the outside he leads a charmed–yet closeted–life. On the inside, the ghosts keep piling up. During an epidemic of disappearances in his small town, Chris is the recurring victim in a series of surreal gay sex-murders happening in the back rooms, alleys, and outdoor liminal spaces where men meet in secret. Every time he dies, he returns to the puzzle of his impossible life, enduring in a world where everyone is guilty. Everyone has something to hide. Chris must resolve and embrace the mystery of his survival amongst the forgotten and disappeared, or risk remaining lost in an ongoing cycle of longing, revenge, and rebirth.

Told from multiple, shifting points of view in a narrative that defies linear time, this composite novel is for fans of Cruising, The Sluts, and Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers. Koch’s writing is fluid and artful, crafting a hallucinatory experience. An examination of memory, sex, and identity, Dead Boys Don’t Cry is a devastating ode to the inescapable power of queer desire.”

And here’s an excerpt from a review on Goodreads that I rather like:

“DEAD BOYS DON’T CRY unfolds more like a dream than a conventional narrative, with horror, memory, emotion, and atmosphere bleeding into one another. Some things make perfect sense; others remain elusive, more impression than explanation. There’s a constant feeling of being suspended somewhere between nightmare and waking life.”

The book will be released on June 1, 2027, but if you’re on Netgalley, ARCs are available now. Please consider reviewing, adding to your Goodreads shelf, or pre-ordering now so you get a little gay present next summer for pride month. All of these efforts help the godforsaken algorithm. I’m sorry to say that such things do matter.

Add Dead Boys Don’t Cry on Goodreads

Pre-order Dead Boys Don’t Cry on Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

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