B O O K S  B Y

J O H N  S T E W A R T  W Y N N E

aka  J O H N  W Y N N E

 

“Have you ever had a message from The Other World?”

THE OTHER WORLD

Stories

Peopled by sociopaths, circus performers, tattooed drifters, a cross-dressing teenager at the Plaza Hotel, and born-again God-fearing families, these stories have a hallucinatory edge that makes the everyday seem like another world.

THE OTHER WORLD
includes the stories:

The Other World
Nameless Thing
Raphael
Lights of Broadway
Halloween Card
Vulture

Haunting and powerful . . . THE OTHER WORLD is one of the best books of the decade.”

The James White Review

“Wynne’s prose is chiseled and precise. And in pages that tremble with beauty, Wynne gracefully reveals the darker side of human possibilities.”

Details

“With so much tepid and sentimental fiction coming out, John Wynne’s stories in THE OTHER WORLD are like a plunge in cold water. With a near-Brechtian intensity of focus and an infallible ear for dialogue, Wynne casts a laser eye on the things we say, so different from what we mean. People on the edge, the margins of love. A book to handle with asbestos gloves, but well worth the walk through fire.”

Paul Monette

Read an excerpt from Raphael

Read an excerpt from
Vulture

A Grand Guignol tour-de-force . . .

CRIME WAVE

A Novel

Pre-Giuliani and pre-Bloomberg, Manhattan is a far different place than it is today.
42nd Street is known as the Deuce, seedy, dangerous, exhilarating.

Jake Adams is a photojournalist who’s directed by his buddy Stewart Reggino,
an ex-cop, to the Hotel Dove, a Times Square brothel patronized by, among others, city cops. Jake senses a big story when he suspects the NYPD are using the hotel as the center for a fencing operation.

There Jake unexpectedly meets and falls for Renee Cloverman, one of the denizens
of the Dove, and they begin an affair. Though obsessed by Renee’s strange, demonic
need to be used and possessed, Jake nonetheless hopes she will change. When he
gets an assignment in Colorado, he sends Renee to stay with his sister Ella’s family in an idyllic Connecticut suburb.

But with Jake away, Renee becomes bored and disconsolate. The family’s adherence to the mores of suburban domesticity is directly challenged by Renee’s presence, and the chaos she unleashes threatens to consume them all . . .

CRIME WAVE is about personal and social sado-masochism. The author’s challenging aim seems to be to show that there is no such thing as ‘mindless violence,’ whether directed towards the self or towards others. Each aggressive act is the result of a long cycle of action and reaction, continued through generations. CRIME WAVE is an ambitious first novel.”

Jenny Uglow OBE, The Times Literary Supplement

CRIME WAVE, John Wynne’s first novel, is a disturbing and well-written book. An impressive work whose genre is Manhattan lumpen Gothic, the book has a compelling and terrible beauty.”

Barbara Trapido, The Spectator


“Because you don’t see things doesn’t mean they don’t go on . . .”

THE SIGHTING

Chapbook

THE SIGHTING’s 1950s Middle West small town teenage setting—full of randy high school adolescents racing their jalopies to drive-ins, whose coarse normality is contrasted with a sensitive youth’s realization that he is attracted to other boys—is gradually invaded by elements from another realm of experience—or, perhaps, another kind of literature. There are sightings of a flying saucer above the town . . . Bela Lugosi in person appears . . . and at the climax these two interventions are counterpointed against a celebration of sensual love between two boys.”

Charles Palliser

“There is nothing else quite like THE SIGHTING, for no other writer has experimented with gay experience in the context of our adolescence in straight America in such a direct, sensual and imaginative manner.”

Gordon Montador

“John Wynne is obviously an exciting talent . . . “

Hubert Selby, Jr.


THE SIGHTING
was selected by Ian Young as one of the seminal works of gay
literature in his The Male Homosexual in Literature: A Bibliography.

This short story was published by Tree Line Books as a chapbook in a limited edition
of 1,000 copies, the first 50 of which are numbered and signed by the author.