After the Blue Hour

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction
John Rechy’s first novel, City of Night, an international bestseller, is considered a modern classic. Subsequent work asserts his place among America’s most important writers. The author’s most daring work, After the Blue Hour is narrated by a twenty-four-year-old writer named John Rechy. Fleeing a turbulent life in Los Angeles, he accepts an invitation to a private island from an admirer of his work. There, he joins Paul, his imposing host in his late thirties, his beautiful mistress, and his precocious teenage son. Browsing Paul’s library and conversing together on the deck about literature and film during the spell of evening’s “blue hour,” John feels surcease, until, with unabashed candor, Paul shares intimate details of his life. Through cunning seductive charm, he married and divorced an ambassador’s daughter and the heiress to a vast fortune. Avoiding identifying his son’s mother, he reveals an affinity for erotic “dangerous games.” With intimations of past decadence and menace, an abandoned island nearby arouses tense fascination over the group. As “games” veer toward violence, secrets surface in startling twists and turns. Explosive confrontation becomes inevitable.

John Rechy is the author of seventeen books, including City of Night, the New York Times bestseller Numbers, and the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Rushes and The Coming of the Night. He has received several lifetime achievement awards, including from PEN Center USA, William Whitehead Foundation, University of California at Riverside, and the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The author lives in Los Angeles.