From Publishers Weekly
In a return to some of the themes of his first novel, the gay classic City of Night (1963), Rechy follows an ensemble cast of mainly gay characters over the course of one day in 1981 Los Angeles, just before the AIDS crisis hits. As the Santa Ana winds, said to provoke violence and desire, blow fire toward the city, the characters are introduced in short, interlaced sections. Beautiful Jesse, celebrating a year on the gay scene, plans to abandon himself to unlimited desire; Clint has fled troubling experiences in New York, where the first rumors of AIDS are surfacing; Dave, into leather and s&m, is looking for new and dangerous pleasures; Father Norris, a troubled priest, searches gay haunts for a young hustler named Angel, who supposedly has a tattoo of a naked Jesus on his back. Meanwhile, a trio of armed thugs is intent on gay bashing, and everyone moves inevitably toward a West Hollywood park, and tragedy. The gay characters are obsessed with sex, hustling, body building and cruising; sex scenes are plentiful, graphic in the extreme and certainly not for the squeamish. At the same time, Rechy doesn't skimp on plot, character or action, and the ingenious ending takes an unanticipated but thoroughly logical turn. In its gritty evocation of time and place, the novel goes beyond its narrow subject matter, reaching for a broader and deeper understanding of an era. (Aug.) FYI: Rechy recently received the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 10th annual Publishing Triangle Awards for gay literature. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Rechy's landmark 1963 novel, City of Night, broke new ground through its open portrayal of a sexually active homosexual underworld. His newest novel continues to document that life. Set in Los Angeles in 1981, The Coming of the Night follows a cast of colorful characters as they confront the dangers of being gay and passionate. Police harassment, gay-bashing, and public scorn and humiliation are ever-present dangers. And AIDS looms on the horizon, blowing into the lives of Rechy's characters like the Santa Ana winds that also figure into the narrative. Throughout, Rechy creates a stark, stinging, and anxious atmosphere in which desire makes people do awful things and lust commingles with promiscuity, obsession, self-hatred, depression, and narcissism. It's pretty raw stuff but a good read. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-ARoger Durbin, Univ. of Akron Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
John Rechy's new novel is a return to the themes and scenes of his classic, best-selling City of Night and a bittersweet memorial to a lost world -- gay Los Angeles in the moment before AIDS. It is 1981, a summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Young, beautiful Jesse is celebrating one year on the dazzling gay scene and plans to lose himself completely in its transient pleasures. He is joined by Dave, a leatherman bent on testing limits. A young hustler, an opera lover lost in fantasies of youth, a gang of teenagers looking for trouble -- as the Santa Ana winds breathe fire down the hills of Los Angeles, stirring up desires and violence, these men circle ever closer to a confrontation as devastating as it is inevitable. Lyrical, humorous, and compassionate Coming of the Night proves again that as a novelist and chronicler of gay life John Rechy has no equal. "The question Rechy asks is still potent: Would you die for sex? Rechy's sizzling literary response Coming of Night is as exciting as it is chilling." -- Pamela Warrick, Los Angeles Times; "[Rechy] very nearly touches greatness . . . feeling his way toward that place within each of us where the ecstatic teeters on the edge of psychic abyss. . . . A substantial artist." -- Frank Browning, Salon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is 1981, a hot summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Jesse, "the kid," is celebrating one year on the dazzling gay scene and plans to lose himself completely in its transient pleasures. Clint has fled New York with a sense of unease in the wake of a vicious gay-bashing and a night in the sexual underground. Buzz, Boo, Toro, Fredo, and Linda are cruising the city looking for danger, and so is Dave, a "leatherman" devoted to S&M and testing limits. And a priest is searching the streets for a young hustler named Angel, determined to bring him to Jesus. As the Santa Ana winds, renowned for stirring up desires and violence, breathe fire down the hills of Los Angeles, this cast of characters circles ever closer to the night - and to a confrontation as astonishing as it is inevitable.

FROM THE CRITICS

Edmund White - Lambda Book Report

One of the heroic figures of contemporary American life...a touchstone of moral integrity and artistic innovation.

Frank Browning - Salon

More than three decades have passed since John Rechy presented himself to American readers as the cartographer of homosexual abandon in his first novel, City of Night. Now a respectable teacher of literature at UCLA and a winner of PEN West's Lifetime Achievement Award, Rechy has returned to the abject territory of the night. Hands -- he had not seen whose, had not had a chance to choose, could not tell how many -- flung him back down on the ground. Mouths licked his body, his balls, his cock. A tongue jabbed into his ass. Cocks slapped his face, stinging his flesh. Hands spread his legs open, wide, wider, hurting, wider. A hand held a cracked ampule of amyl to his nose, cupping it there to enclose the rush...

Somehow, this isn't quite the territory of the good gay Scout and his wing-tipped lobbyist from the Human Rights Campaign petitioning Congress for marriage rights between ensigns on the USS Missouri. Though Rechy regularly appears on the list of this country's best gay writers, his work is fundamentally at war with the current buffed and blow-dried gay rights movement. He has spent his life excavating the cracks at the periphery of American culture, feeling his way toward that place within each of us where the ecstatic teeters on the edge of psychic abyss. And yet this time, the track to the abyss feels worn down, a bit dusty, as though too many feet -- Rechy's included -- have trodden there before.

The Coming of the Night owes much of its form and texture to two earlier American novels: Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which follows the lives of five doomed characters through the day that they converge upon a rope bridge that plunges with them on it into a ravine; and The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West's masterful Depression-era chronicle of two-dimensional Los Angeles caught in an inferno fueled by the relentless Santa Ana winds.

Rechy leads us through another such day in L.A., with (among others) a randy adolescent with perfect loins, a visiting New Yorker remembering an S/M debauch from the previous weekend, a slightly aging biker "dad" with a volcanic cock, a straight couple discovering they both are queer, a frustrated Brooks Brothers queen looking for love in a piss-stained underpass, three stock homophobic crack dealers and a drag porno auteur named Za-Za who entertains a famous studio boss with a droll live-action show on the mogul's lawn in hopes of elevating herself, in his eyes, into the next Truffaut. Finally the wind-fanned fires drive all the porno studs (the rebellious bottoms having rudely upended and ravaged the tops -- is nothing sacred?) bare-assed down into the canyon. By the time midnight arrives, nearly all the rest of the characters have fatefully converged on a little tool shack in a West Hollywood park, where heroism and sacrifice dance the Dionysian dance that we all know (the year is 1981) will send them plunging into the abyss of the epidemic.

Reduced to a plot and character outline, you might say: Over the top? Slightly short on nuance?

Even so, Rechy is a substantial artist, and he addresses what few of the slicker gay literati have even bothered to consider: the question of fate. If most of these characters are a few lobes shy of compelling, Rechy nonetheless targets the psychic collision between history -- the force of action and events beyond individual control -- and will. Further, he manages from time to time to draw us into the inner maelstrom of desire, that place where biology, perception and compulsion capture intention and redefine our sense of inner fate. To that end, The Coming of the Night, however flawed, leaps leagues beyond the work of most of the suburban gay stylists and deserves credit as at least a camp cousin of the writings of those much greater 20th century novelists of history, fate and desire, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Publishers Weekly

In a return to some of the themes of his first novel, the gay classic City of Night (1963), Rechy follows an ensemble cast of mainly gay characters over the course of one day in 1981 Los Angeles, just before the AIDS crisis hits. As the Santa Ana winds, said to provoke violence and desire, blow fire toward the city, the characters are introduced in short, interlaced sections. Beautiful Jesse, celebrating a year on the gay scene, plans to abandon himself to unlimited desire; Clint has fled troubling experiences in New York, where the first rumors of AIDS are surfacing; Dave, into leather and s&m, is looking for new and dangerous pleasures; Father Norris, a troubled priest, searches gay haunts for a young hustler named Angel, who supposedly has a tattoo of a naked Jesus on his back. Meanwhile, a trio of armed thugs is intent on gay bashing, and everyone moves inevitably toward a West Hollywood park, and tragedy. The gay characters are obsessed with sex, hustling, body building and cruising; sex scenes are plentiful, graphic in the extreme and certainly not for the squeamish. At the same time, Rechy doesn't skimp on plot, character or action, and the ingenious ending takes an unanticipated but thoroughly logical turn. In its gritty evocation of time and place, the novel goes beyond its narrow subject matter, reaching for a broader and deeper understanding of an era. (Aug.) FYI: Rechy recently received the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 10th annual Publishing Triangle Awards for gay literature. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Rechy's landmark 1963 novel, City of Night, broke new ground through its open portrayal of a sexually active homosexual underworld. His newest novel continues to document that life. Set in Los Angeles in 1981, The Coming of the Night follows a cast of colorful characters as they confront the dangers of being gay and passionate. Police harassment, gay-bashing, and public scorn and humiliation are ever-present dangers. And AIDS looms on the horizon, blowing into the lives of Rechy's characters like the Santa Ana winds that also figure into the narrative. Throughout, Rechy creates a stark, stinging, and anxious atmosphere in which desire makes people do awful things and lust commingles with promiscuity, obsession, self-hatred, depression, and narcissism. It's pretty raw stuff but a good read. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/99.]--Roger Durbin, Univ. of Akron Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A flat, unsurprising record of one day in the life of various gay men in 1981 Los Angeles. Rechy (Our Lady of Babylon, 1996, etc.) has apparently set out to recover something of the blithe, libidinal spirit of homosexual life in America at the moment when the gay community was enjoying a new-found and assertive presence—and before some aspects of its identity were altered or erased by the onset of AIDS. He does so by following a variety of figures through a day when the Santa Ana winds are blowing—arousing, as more than one character remarks, an uneasy, restless, persistent yearning for sex. The characters include a troubled couple, struggling to overcome ennui and mistrust to stay together; a bright, staid middle-aged man, both envious—and resentful—of the freedom heedlessly enjoyed by a younger generation never exposed to police raids and public loathing; a bodybuilder who suffers a series of romantic pratfalls; a young man beginning, painfully, to suspect that he's gay; a teenaged hustler scornfully working the boulevards; and a wealthy, worldly man who's fled an act of violence in Manhattan, only to find that a different kind of mortality seeks him out in la-la land. Also wandering about the city is a trio of thugs, uncertain of their own sexual orientation and looking for gays to assault. There's a substory involving the intermittently comic efforts of a drag queen to produce a private stage version of a porn film for a wealthy patron and his cronies. Many of the plot strands culminate in a Los Angeles park at night, when several of the gay characters collide with the thugs. The encounter, however—though heavily foreshadowed—seems more of anafterthought than a climax. The characters are rather sketchily drawn, the plot is thin: the result is a novel that, while vivid and sometimes very droll, is more an X-rated reverie than a sustained narrative.