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A hard-edged look at the seamy underside of New York City follows the travels of Apollo, a heroin addict hiding out from Casio, a porn theater bouncer, bringing to unforgettable life the world of prostitutes, transvestites, and other denizens of the night.

Benderson's second novel (after Pretending to Say No ) plunges the reader into a wretched, liminal community of transexual hustlers, street people, debased cops and bohemian junkies congregating in and around New York City's Time Square. Careening through the center of Benderson's multilayerd story is Apollo, a wired, hypermasculine prostitute of mixed racial descent who, in a fit of existential rage, nearly kills Casio, the bouncer at a porno theater. Dogged by the police, stalked by Baby Pop, Casio's vengeful son, and possessed by an unrelenting drug habit, Apollo moves through a lurid Baudelairian demimonde of numbed souls orbiting around fly-by-night transvestite clubs and after-hours bars. Benderson's New York is a multicultural city of the damned populated by extraordinary characters: Baby Pop, the gifted son of two junkies who sleeps in an abandoned train in the tunnels underneath Grand Central Station clutching an algebra book and a Steven King novel; Abuela, Casio's superstitious Latino great-grandmother; Apollo's unnamed, "once preppy," HIV-infected friend and patron, who hovers at the seedy margins of the city preparing his "death diary." Benderson's supple and polyglot prose gives voice to a discordant chorus of characters; although the plot is fragmentary and the ending abrupt, he invests their oppressed lives with profound authenticity and horror.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A startling and eerie second novel by Benderson (Pretending to Say No, 1991, etc.) provides an unvarnished glimpse into a netherworld of drug dealers, transvestites, transsexuals, and prostitutes. When Apollo, a male stripper and hustler who has been doing large quantities of drugs, attacks Casio, the ex-con junkie turned bouncer at the porn theater in which Apollo works, it sends out ripples that reverberate throughout the sleazy world of strip joints and rip-off joints that both men inhabit. Pargero, a cop with a more than sentimental attachment to the transvestite strippers of that milieu and a familial tie to Mrs. Huxton, its unseen empress, begins looking for Apollo. Baby Pop, Casio's 14- year-old son, a math genius who lives in the Port Authority bus terminal, vows revenge. Apollo goes in search of a hiding place, ending up with his only real friend, a nameless white middle-class gay man with AIDS. Swirling around the action are a strange cast of hustlers, lowlifes, and no-hopers--crack addicts, sex addicts, transsexual junkies, and would-be beauticians--held together in a sinister dance of sex, money, drugs, and need. Benderson depicts this sphere in a merciless light, without judgment but unflinchingly, in a prose that is hypnotically descriptive and powerfully rhythmic. He moves easily between the voices of his protagonists, from the sullen suspiciousness of Apollo to the wry self-knowledge of the nameless man with AIDS. The result is a book that echoes the universe of Hubert Selby (who is invoked in one passage) and the teeming sexuality of John Rechy. An impressive book, but one that many readers will find relentlessly unpleasant. Benderson has a tremendous talent and a real feel for the night-world of New York; the question is how much readers can take. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.