The Disappearers is a gut-punch and a celebration

“Marlon James’s story of gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica is a maximalist’s banquet — and the Booker Prize winner’s finest book yet… The Disappearers places him near the front of the line, a decade or two from now, for the Nobel Prize.” —The New York Times

I haven’t reacted to a book this way since I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple on its release in 1982.

Marlon James returns to Kingston for the first time since A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the result feels like a writer working at the absolute height of his powers. What makes it extraordinary isn’t just the ambition of the structure; it’s how alive the prose is on the sentence level—Jamaican patois crackling against lyrical, almost operatic passages, dark comedy landing in the same breath as devastation. It’s the kind of book that earns comparisons to “the novel of the decade” without ever feeling like it’s straining for the title. Longlisted for the Booker and an instant bestseller, it’s the rare literary novel that is both formally daring and genuinely, viscerally moving—the kind of book you finish and immediately want to press into someone else’s hands.

Marlon James has spent nearly two decades proving he isn’t interested in writing the same book twice. The Jamaican-born author broke through with The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil before winning the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, a sprawling oral history of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. He then swerved entirely into fantasy with the Dark Star Trilogy—Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Moon Witch, Spider King, and White Wing, Dark Star—an African-mythology-steeped epic that showed he could world-build as ferociously as he could write literary realism. James teaches at Macalester College and has never been shy about drawing on his own life—growing up closeted in Jamaica informs The Disappearers directly, giving the novel’s fury and compassion the weight of something lived, not just imagined.

As both a reader and writer since chilidood I’ve had many influences, but fewer books that have stayed with me like a memory I’ll never be free from. Katherine Dunn’s stunning Geek Love , first published in 1989, is at the top of the list. While I can’t claim to remember all the details this many years later, I often refer to it as one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s a daring story with remarkable characters, and the kind of literary brilliance that makes writers like me want to reach for that star, knowing I’ll never hold it in my hand. I kept asking myself, “How did she do that? How can I forget these  characters and this story?” The answer is, I can’t.

I’ve remained in awe of her artistry, the often shocking originality of her imagination, and the mastery of her craft. If you don’t mind being made uncomfortable by writing of this caliber and what it can do, this is a book that will make you believe in the possibilities of literature.

Prepare yourself

Geek Love quietly dares you to keep reading, and then refuses to let go. Set within a traveling carnival sideshow, the book follows the Binewski family, whose parents deliberately engineer their children’s physical abnormalities in pursuit of fame, legacy, and control. What sounds outrageous on the surface quickly becomes something far more intimate and disturbing.

At its core, Geek Love isn’t about physical difference. It’s about family. Narrated by Olympia (“Oly”) Binewski, an albino hunchback with a sharp, aching voice, the novel explores how love can curdle into possession, how belonging can become a trap, and how children raised as spectacles may never fully escape the stage.

The novel’s most chilling character, Arturo (“Aqua Boy”), grows from charismatic sideshow star into manipulative cult leader, embodying the dangerous line between performance and belief. Through him, Dunn examines charisma as a weapon and idealism as a gateway to cruelty.

Katherine Dunn’s prose is precise and unsentimental. She never asks the reader to pity her characters, nor does she soften the horror. Instead, she forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about empathy, exploitation, and our own role as spectators. The result is a novel that is grotesque on the surface but deeply psychological beneath it.

Geek Love isn’t easy or comforting, but it is unforgettable. Long after the final page, it lingers as a meditation on how love, when warped by ego and fear, can be as damaging as any cruelty inflicted from the outside.