Davey Davis’s novel will scare you... but also turn you on?

Few narrative tools are more powerful than a good sex scene. Sex can drive plot, flesh out character, alter pace, give shape to a story’s world and community, and it can also be the apex of the story itself – particularly if it’s the kind of self-concept-shattering sex that distils you down to your rawest, pinkest nerves.

That’s the kind of sex that drives X (2022), Davey Davis’s second novel. The book follows Lee, a cynical, depressed sadist in a near-future Brooklyn under a fascist government. Lee is trying to find X, a mysterious, evasive woman who recently topped Lee so viciously and well that they’ve become obsessed with her. Lee also knows X is likely about to be classed as an undesirable by the state and “exported” (deported, maybe worse). So, Lee talks and fucks their way through the Brooklyn lesbian BDSM scene, searching for X, alongside their other demons.

X is a hot, grim, funny, stylish, discomforting book about queer intimacy and community under conditions of mass persecution; it’ll leave you feeling “wet, hard, and implicated,” to quote Morgan M Page’s blurb. It’s published in the UK by Cipher Press on October 27.

Davis spoke with Dazed about lesbian breakups, neo-noir, banal horror, and titling your book with “the world’s worst search term”.

X feels like it’s nestled at the intersection of detective noir, erotic thriller, and lesbian/trans literature, but also feels very fresh to read – what were your main influences in writing it?

Davey Davis: I got into old Hollywood cinema a few years ago, and I saw this Otto Preminger noir, Laura, this incredible movie, and it got me onto a neo-noir kick. I’ve watched a lot more neo-noir than I’ve read: it’s one of my favourite genres, it’s sexy and campy and ridiculous, and that hardboiled gumshoe-type voice is so recognisable, even if you haven’t had any direct exposure to the genre. We’re so saturated with that cultural sensibility. 

Leash by Jane DeLynn was very seminal for me, and very challenging. And Patrick Califia’s erotica and non-fiction, as well.

So, X is a book about, among other things, hot consensually violent sex, intimate partner violence, and state violence. There seems to be a common desire on platforms like Goodreads to hoover the eroticism out of books with scenes that are uncomfortable, or unsafe, or potentially triggering. What’s your response to that kind of culture of wanting to tie eroticism to safety in fiction?

Davey Davis: There are absolutely situations in X involving coercion and nonconsensual violence, but to me, the preponderance of the erotic in this book is consensual or mostly consensual. A lot of people will say that S/M is abuse because it resembles abuse: if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck… But we don’t apply that metric equally. Nonconsensual hitting of kids in public to ‘correct’ them is more accepted in the US than consensual hitting of other adults in private.

Plus, when we’re looking at a relationship with a 24/7 dynamic between a sadist and a masochist, as is the case with Lee and Petra, I think a lot of people might look at that and go, well, isn’t that confusing, how do you know whether someone is being abused or not? But all those grey areas that seem to be present in S/M relationships are even more present in vanilla and heterosexual relationships. The complicating factor isn’t negotiating consensual romantic violence – what’s actually confusing are abuse dynamics and abusers and relationship structures that are designed to obfuscate and naturalise abuse, which are abundant in straight and vanilla relationships.

Also, a lot of what I wrote about in X is sexy and romantic to me, so when other people just see it as unqualified violence, I’m just like… there’s no accounting for taste, I guess!

I’m interested in the breakup with Petra at the centre of X. How do you think S/M dynamics change or intensify conflict and breakups in intimate relationships? 

Davey Davis: I don’t think the S/M dynamic is as relevant to the intensity of Lee and Petra’s breakup as the fact that they’re lesbians. To draw on another influence, After Delores by Sarah Schulman – a fabulous dyke drama lesbian breakup novel that culminates in obsession and a very messy situation and lots of violence – the lynchpin of that novel is the severing of this dyke relationship. And it’s not just a breakup, it’s the loss of a family member. What’s the RuPaul quote – ‘as gay people we get to choose our families’… but that means that when you have the end of a gay romantic relationship, it can feel like losing a family member. To me, the intensity there is in the betrayal of a filial relationship rather than the betrayal of a relationship where you like to get a little bloody.

I absolutely died at some of the passages in X – the bit where Lee eviscerates Syd, Lee getting thrown out of the play party for drinking blood (again)… What drew you to writing that kind of intra-dyke humour?

Davey Davis: Well, that’s kind of just what I’m up to [laughs]. When I was beginning to write the book I was like, this character is very cynical, very negative, to put it lightly, and so I was exploring ways to bring out that bitterness, and the only way that you can do it and make it even a little bit bearable is through humour, though a lot of people still find Lee unbearable, which I understand… but I also think your typical noir detective guy is always doing little dry jokes. Jack Nicholson’s character in Chinatown is still delivering wisecracks even when a guy’s coming at him with a knife.

“It doesn’t help that X, the porniest letter, also happens to be the world’s worst search term.” Why call the book X?

Davey Davis: Good question, right? Especially since here’s that movie that just came out, there’s other books called X…Besides it being the name of my ‘monster’ character, I was hoping to also bring in that the skeleton of the book is the romantic relationship between Lee and their ex, and I was like, it’s wordplay, it’s clever, but it’s a terrible search term, it’s a terrible title for a book.

But also, search terms are no good today regardless. Research has been completely commodified, there’s no way to find anything you want unless you’re trying to buy something. So I justified it to myself that way.

A thing that really struck me with X is what happens with Flavia, and how getting the details is actually way scarier than if she’d just disappeared without trace – could you speak a bit more to the oscillation between horror-movie tension and banal violence in the book?

Davey Davis: I’ve made the comparison more than once before that X is my femme fatale and she’s also my movie monster, you can’t see her right away, you have to build up to it, and there’s only so much face time you can get with her. She’s not quite a character, but she’s not not one, she’s something else. She’s a source of horror-movie tension. Whereas, like you mentioned, this banal evil you experience under a fascist state, it is more scary in a way to realise that that violence isn’t an oversight. The state sometimes makes it look like that, and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it’s very nakedly deliberately violent. But there’s something about blatant, banal disregard for your survival that can be just as upsetting as an invisible creature under the bed.

X by Davey Davis is published by Cipher Press, and is out on October 27