In the Flesh: X (Novel)

There’s a scene in X, author Davey Davis’s sophomore novel, in which the protagonist, lifestyle sadist Lee, idly observes that most emerging queers go through a period of adjustment during which they still prefer the company of straights. By contrast, the only present-day appearance of a straight man casts him as a faceless, voiceless menace referred to only as “it”, a bluntly vicious reappropriation of a common verbal tactic cis people employ to dehumanize trans people. X is a novel deeply and unsentimentally rooted in the world of dykes, a world at once subjugated by and separate from the greater sphere of straight, cis existence. Set in our immediate future amid the rollout of a draconian federal policy known as “exportation”, a bureaucratic initiative by which various groups of undesirables are ejected piecemeal from America, their citizenship revoked, Davis’s novel has a grimly prophetic feel to it. That it depicts a federal ban on cigarettes and released mere days after the real-life banning of Juul pods only adds to its portentous weight.

Like all great speculative fiction, X doesn’t forecast the future so much as diagnose and dissect the present. Failing power grids, ICE running rampant, queer people fighting and clawing to exist at the margins of a society increasingly desperate for a scapegoat to cast as the source of its own terminal afflictions. Sex workers squeezed further and further from safety and fair labor. Endless Kafkaesque office complexes where data entry drones, paid at their employer’s whim if at all, prepare informational packets for people who’ll never read them. Queer venues raided by export and deportation officers, rent climbing as wages sink, fished-out dyke dating pools and a sense of slowly but inexorably mounting pressure. A world where almost everyone has at least contemplated the easy way out of what feels increasingly like a burning building. .

Davis’s prose is intoxicating, a mixture of Chandler and Hawkes’s hard-boiled, acidic procedural rigor and Nabokov’s lyrical and obliquely sly descriptive genius. The book is heavily influenced by film noir, packed full of smoke and shadows and swirling liquor, and its crisis images — an ex-girlfriend’s imaginary funeral, a woman fighting for her life as she’s held under bathwater strewn with rose petals — recall the dramatically staged horrors of Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, and other genre staples. Davis makes frequent allusions to the stars of Hollywood’s heyday — Cary Grant, the Hepburns, Greta Garbo, etc — and Lee’s white-knuckle, handog narration wouldn’t be out of place alongside Philip Marlowe or Jeff Bailey. They are forever waking up battered and hungover, accumulating injuries both consensual and accidental as the story progresses in its sidelong fashion, reflecting on their cuts and bruises. They’re more in tune with the language of pain than they are with the network of friends, exes, and intimates they slowly push away over the course of the novel.

Themself a seasoned SM practitioner, Davis gives this tangential New York dyke scene an immersive, grimy feeling full of characters any dyke worth their salt will recognize instantly. Rich bitches slumming it in designer sweatpants, beautiful nightmare dykes clawing their way out of the bloody wreckage of one relationship and into the unsuspecting host body of the next, poseurs and frauds who like the idea of being into sadomasochism and other forms of power exchange more than the reality of experiencing it. In the midst of it all is Lee, a dyed-in-the-wool sadist who begins suffering uncontrollable nausea and light-headedness during scenes until a chance encounter with brutal and mysterious dominatrix X leads to a transcendent brush with taking punishment at someone else’s hands. Lee’s desperate hunt for X is the novel’s inciting incident, the motor which drives them through warehouse parties and awkward coffee dates with horrible past play partners, but it’s the specter of their most recent and most devastating breakup which forms the story’s emotional cover. It’s a web of intersecting dyke drama, rumor, sex, obsession, and agony in which characters struggle for self-defintion and stability.

The novel probes at truly ugly subject matter, dealing with frankness and subtlety with the specter of intimate partner violence among dykes, delving into the childhood and young adult traumas that can contribute to the formation of paraphilias and fetishes. Rape. Incest. Kidnapping. Corporal punishment. Davis refrains from any of the easy one-to-one linkages that would “make sense” of their characters’ sexual inclinations, recalling the near-bottomless complexity with which SM artists like Bob Flanagan have explored the psychosexual origins of their sexual practices. A parent beats you. A playmate denies some trivial gratification. The right film is playing at the right time as your plastic, unformed brain begins to bubble with the right mix of deranged preadolescent hormones. Where other authors might draw connections to drum up empathy from outsider audiences, Davis writes from an insider perspective, and their narrative is full of absences, of failed explanations, of refusal to look inward. Lee and the dykes around them chase the dragon of SM for a thousand reasons, for no reason. They want to believe that punishment and justice are real. They want to usurp the power their parents once held over them, or reenact their helplessness with someone they know they’re safe with. They want to kiss the hem of Death’s dress without making a lasting commitment.

Set opposite this world of intentional pain-seeking and infliction is a clever little subplot about a pair of noxious true crime podcast hosts whose obsession with violent crime and flimsy, tepid feminist beliefs lead them to espouse increasingly rancid conservative ideology under the guise of common sense liberal thought. Oh sure cops are bad, but don’t we need them to protect ourselves? Why shouldn’t we call them on strangers when we could die if we don’t? It’s too bad some innocent people are getting exported, but if the government says these are threatening groups, maybe it’s safer. It’s a special type of maddening to listen to people undermine your humanity while constantly congratulating themselves on how rational, open-minded, and compassionate they’re being, and their pathological fear of discomfort, unease, and pain form a strong counterbeat to the novel’s thematic thrust. Each human life is shaped by pain from beginning to end, Davis’s novel suggests, and while embracing that pain offers no guarantees of a happy outcome, shrieking at and fleeing from it can lead only to the empowerment of tyrannical forms of governance. X is a modern masterpiece of noir erotica, real and alive and with its breast bared to the existential horror of life’s fundamental uncertainty.