Red X exposes the dark side of Toronto the Good

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/12/2021 (1388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

David Demchuk’s new novel Red X is on one level a startling portrait of the city of Toronto. Beneath the veneer of a city celebrated for its diversity and culture exists a meticulously detailed hunting ground where the most vulnerable are prey to monsters both human and otherworldly.

Demchuk makes us see Toronto the Good through the uglifying lens of a horror novel, centred on a malevolent spirit stalking the city’s vulnerable gay population over centuries, although much of the action is set from 1984 to present day.

It is no coincidence that 1984 is the year Demchuk moved to Toronto from Winnipeg to pursue a career as a writer. He started as a playwright and segued to journalism before finally determining to be a novelist while well into his 50s. The Bone Mother, published in 2017, adapted from his own play The Thimble Factory, was his first novel, but reads like the work of a seasoned pro, taking the reader on a fearsome tour through a menagerie of monsters tied into the Slavic mythology of Ukraine and Romania. It was nominated for the Giller Prize and a Shirley Jackson Award, among other laurels.

Red X , which appeared Tuesday on CBC’s list of best Canadian fiction in 2021, is even more ambitious in its scope. The deathless entity at its centre, laying claim to some of the city’s most at-risk gay men, was inspired by a real life monster, and the novel provocatively dances between the fiction of Demchuk’s imagination and the grim reality that inspired it.

● ● ●

Earlier this month, Demchuk returned to Winnipeg for a few days, visiting friends and taking care of the last belongings of his mother, who died in 2017. If you’ve read Red X, you’ll know theirs was a fractious relationship marked by his mom’s disapproval of Demchuk’s homosexuality, among other things.

“I could only write Red X after she was dead because I malign her so … in an honest and accurate way,” Demchuk says during an interview at Inn at the Forks. “I lay our relationship pretty bare.”

Demchuk, 59, is referring to his own appearances in the course of the novel, manifest in “essays” interspersed in the action that see him share aspects of his own life, as well as describing the dynamics behind “queer horror.” The subgenre once disguised itself as mainstream (Dracula’s Daughter, Nightmare on Elm Street 2), but has in recent years asserted itself more openly in the culture (Jennifer’s Body, The Babadook and, most recently, director Don Mancini’s Chucky TV series).

Demchuk has been committed to queer horror from the start of his career in the early ‘80s.

“The very first play I wrote was called Why the Dishes Can’t Wait Til Tomorrow. It was a queer horror play,” he says. “It was workshopped through the Manitoba Association of Playwrights years ago when I lived there and Harry Rintoul did a workshop production of it (in 1991). But there was always this feeling of: There aren’t a lot of plays like this and you can’t expect to do a lot of plays like this.

“There’s just not a lot of room for horror in theatre, particularly Canadian theatre,” Demchuk says. “No one will really say it as much as they should, but (Canadian theatre) has a certain cultural mandate that it has to uphold.”

There was no such inherent limitation in the realm of novels, so Demchuk went all out with Red X after the affirming success of The Bone Mother. But the new novel is very much informed by the real horror afflicting Toronto’s Church Street gay village, though he had started the work – as a play – well before the disappearances were tied together as the work of a single serial killer.

Demchuk, who lives in Toronto’s Cabbagetown near Allan Gardens (a key location in the novel’s dark geography), says the gay community in Toronto has always been afflicted by disappearances of gay men, which authorities have been quick to dismiss.

“That’s what we saw with the recent murders in the gay village,” Demchuk says, referring to the case of Bruce McArthur, a serial killer who was sentenced to life in 2019 for the murders of eight gay men in the Church-Wellesley neighbourhood.

“Every single one was treated as an isolated incident right up until the day that they announced that there was a serial killer,” he says. “The day before, they were announcing there was not a serial killer. It was ridiculous.”

Demchuk was friends with one of the victims, Andrew Kinsman, murdered along with Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Dean Lisowick, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, Skandaraj Navaratnam and Soroush Mahmudi.

“It was a way of writing about the bitter reality using the fantastical as a kind of a cushion,” Demchuk says. “I started this as a play in 2014 and the idea was that it would be staged in Buddies in Bad Times (theatre company). At this point there were probably about three men who had recently gone missing in the village.

“I wanted to explore this a phenomenon and I wanted to treat it as a kind of a ghost story. It didn’t really work as a play for various reasons, so I shelved it,” Demchuk says. “Once The Bone Mother came out and it was successful, I thought to myself: I wonder if I have anything else?

“So I returned to Red X. I dumped a lot of the stuff that was very theatre-specific but kept a lot of the research and stuff that I had done about the area, and I kept the monster,” he says. “But I decided to take an approach that would work really well for an experimental novel point of view.

“By the time I did that in 2017-2018, more men had gone missing and it became more unsettling to work with the material because you were aware of the fact that these are real people.”

Demchuk was considering abandoning the project altogether, but a journalist friend, Ing Wong-Ward, urged him to stick with it.

“She was like: ‘No, you have to go on. Now more than ever, you have to tell the story.’

“I said: ‘OK, if I’m going to do this then I’m going to have to go all the way.’”

That meant inserting himself into the story as a way of being upfront about his connection to it.

“I am implicated in the story,” he says. “I found this to be an attractive story to tell and a necessary story to tell. That meant I had to put myself in there.

“I didn’t realize to what extent I was going to put myself in there,” Demchuk says. “But I knew that I had to engage fully.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

Twitter: @FreepKing