Rent Boy

It’s New York City, 1991, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the “downtown” writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the broken plates. Everyone wants to be at the Emerson—except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he’s not on the clock, he’s recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. 

Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip—as gorgeous as he is reckless—Danny is about to learn that there’s more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous—and his best.

“It is literature with the filter off: on the one hand, an account of life as lived outside mainstream acceptance; on the other, a telling entirely unrestrained by political correctness . . . In a short space, Rent Boy is a multi-faceted little gem, a world of ‘Versailles at 78rpm,’ and the sort of funny, sick, weird little book you never forget.”

—John Self, The Critic

“Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus . . . Rent Boy is a frolicsome slip of a book . . . a relentlessly tropey, shamelessly over-the-top potboiler . . . A rude glamor radiates from the book’s prose . . . There’s the instinct to high literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement and anhedonia exquisitely expressed.”

—Bailey Trela, Cleveland Review of Books

“A funny book with a high degree of linguistic sophistication. It also contains all the four-letter words, plus graphic descriptions of sex, kinky perversions, drug abuse and mayhem . . . Danny, the ‘rent boy’ of the title, is . . . a distant, debauched cousin of Holden Caulfield—a youthful truth-teller who sees himself surrounded by phonies.”

—Michael Harris, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Indiana’s views penetrate so far beyond the usual pabulum that it requires a bit of moral courage to read them, and a dark sense of humor would also help . . . a peerless voice, one that describes a falling floor that may never find its bottom.” 

—Lori Soderlind, New York Times Book Review

“[A] literary legend and cultural hellraiser . . . [Rent Boy is] his sleazy-genius book.”

—Chris Kraus, Interview Magazine

“[Indiana’s] novels mark him as the nearest thing we have to an inheritor to the Burroughs strain in American fiction. That’s the strain that breaks or simply ignores middle-class taboos; embraces narcotics and all kinds of sex; takes an interest in the uglier emotions, like disgust, shame, and hatred; applies actual pressure to American myths (the Western, the P.I., the gangster); has recourse to science fiction and narrative fracture; keeps its eye on the varieties of societal control (family, state, corporation, media); and doesn’t shy away from anything that might be mistaken for sin.”

—Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine

“A witty, malicious novel told by a male hustler who gets mixed up in a organ-harvesting ring.”

—Tobi Haslett, N+1

“An inheritor, perhaps, of early Burroughs or John Rechy or Alexander Trocchi, or a ‘fixture,’ as journalists like to say, among the writers and artists who congregated around Manhattan’s East Village in the 1980s . . . Gary Indiana is still there, developing the vivid ire and grit of his early works into a sulfurous dissection of the American character that has few if any rivals.”

—Adrian Nathan West, The Baffler

“Indiana, a playwright, art critic, artist, and novelist with the sensibility of a rogue private investigator, is edgy in two or three ways. He’s hip and unchill, he’s lived on the edges of a lot of things, like fame and Los Angeles.”

—Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum

Gary Indiana is the author of the novels Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Do Everything in the Dark, and the acclaimed “true crime” trilogy Resentment, Three-Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference; as well as the memoir I Can Give You Anything but Love, a collection of art criticism, Vile Days, and Fire Season: Selected Essays. 

Rent Boy • Paperback ISBN: 9781946022523

Jan 10, 2023 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 13

5" x 8.5" • 128 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022530