LAMBDA LITERARY OCTOBER'S MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ LITERATURE

THE GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 30 CANADIAN BOOKS TO READ IN 2023

A novel about Berlin: a city for artists and libertines, a perfect place to find love and madness.

When he tired of Toronto’s insular scene, art critic Martin Heather fled to Berlin, where he tried to sleep his way through the entire population of gay men. And then he met Alexandar, who began to tutor Martin in increasingly violent sex – and in love.

Pervatory is a series of journal entries about Martin and Alexandar’s relationship. But interjections from the present, where Martin has been institutionalized, suggest that the hints we get of his increasing instability and obsession with the idea that his apartment is haunted by an evil spirit may have led to something dire …

RM Vaughan was an astute art critic, a dazzling poet, and an important queer activist. His untimely death in October 2020 was a tremendous loss to the queer and literary communities. This novel is what he left for us.

"Pervatory is RM Vaughan's perverse Valentine to Berlin. It is sexy, funny, often elegant, and a fitting elegiac punctuation mark to his incredible body of work. Given the way he left us, it is as devastating as it is exhilarating." – journalist and Lambda Award–winning author Matthew Hays

"RM Vaughan was a promiscuous pansy, a louche moralist, a lonely heart, but most importantly, he was a writer, an irritating, idiosyncratic, incisive writer. This country, with its mawkish, mediocre literary culture, didn't know what to do with him. Pervatory is his final affront." – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

"Brilliant, funny, propulsive." – Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

RM Vaughan is a Toronto-?based writer and video artist originally from New Brunswick. His books include the poetry collections A Selection of Dazzling Scarves and Invisible to Predators, the novel A Quilted Heart, the play Camera, Woman and the novel Spells (ECW). Vaughan was the 1994-?95 Playwright in Residence at Buddies in Bad Times, and he writes about art and culture for a wide range of publications.

R.M. Vaughan's profile page

"The book is smart and edgy, filled with doubt, wonder, sex, fear, suppressed rage and a passion for living." – Christopher DiRaddo, Xtra

". . . the book is the perfect punctuation mark to [RM Vaughan's] unusual, ambiguous, striking body of work." – Matthew Hays, Literary Hub

"At once a horror story, a fever dream, and a confessional, this haunting novel further cements Vaughan’s legacy." – Sarah O’Connor, Literary Review of Canada

"Pervatory is RM Vaughan’s final word on what many discover the hard way: the only sane response to capitalism is madness, and the only sane response to madness is love and art. Pervatory poses the question: what’s to become of us when neither is possible?" – thom vernon, The Fiddlehead