Summer Club and the Creatures

Summer Club and the Creatures is a novel written by James A. Richards and published in 2007 by California-based GLB Publishers. A special edition with a new cover was published in 2008.
The Concept
James Richards writes in his introduction to Summer Club and the Creatures: Special Edition that he was seeking a direction for his first novel when he read about filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell’s project that would become the film “Shortbus”. It led him to ask “could a novel be written with graphic sex that existed as an integral part of a legitimate narrative with interesting, sympathetic characters? I had found my direction”.
Plot Summary
The novel, whose actual locations are kept vague, “occurs as the sun sets on the sexually liberated 1970s, a time just before the Reagan Era that saw the sexual ambiguity of key parties, Studio 54 and ‘Happy Hustler’ Grant Tracey Saxon. It focuses on adult orphan David Barton, who lives in a dark, lonely life in a dark, lonely unnamed town. He has suffered through years of emotional and physical abuse and so dislikes himself that he avoids mirrors viewing them as evil ‘creatures’.”
“David’s life begins to change when his last remaining relative reaches out to claim him and brings him into a very different world of wealth, power and beautiful people. Here he makes his first real friends, young men and women who are members of an unofficial ‘summer club’ and especially a young man whose outward appearance of confidence and beauty masks his own history of abuse.”
Reception & Honors
In late 2007, Summer Club and the Creatures was nominated in two categories of the annual Lambda Literary Foundation’s awards for best GLBT books.
Also in 2007 the online magazine USABookNews.com named Summer Club and the Creatures as a finalist in its annual program naming the best mainstream and independent books published in the United States.
Links
http://www.james-richards.com

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