Dead Boys Don’t Cry

Shirley Jackson nominated author Joe Koch’s 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.