The Disappearers

Set in Kingston, Jamaica, across nearly two decades of homophobic violence, the novel follows a group of gay men brought together by a play and torn apart by a mob attack, tracing the long aftermath through journal entries, interview transcripts, letters, and interior monologue.

The first section, "The Play," is the journal of Edmond "Eddy" Porteous, a mixed-race eighteen-year-old university student. In May 1988, Eddy answers a casting call and arrives at an old house on Lady Musgrave Road. There he meets the director, Havelock Titus, an aging former Oxford scholar; Jordan Brown, a sharp-tongued expelled student; Matt Chin, a handsome half-Chinese man Eddy is immediately attracted to; Omar Joseph, a wealthy businessman funding the production; Orrin Turner, a flamboyant data systems manager; Rainford Ellis, a quiet man; and Clive Lim, the stage manager. Havelock announces they will perform Fortune and Men's Eyes, a Canadian prison drama about gay male sexuality adapted for Jamaican audiences, and assigns roles: Jordan as Rocky, Matt as Smitty, Eddy as Mona, and Orrin as Queenie.

Eddy's journal interweaves rehearsal accounts with his inner life. He describes years of homophobic bullying that once drove him to Kingston Harbor to contemplate suicide and registers the escalating danger for gay men in Kingston: boys beaten by mobs and police, anti-gay graffiti on campus, the university burning dormitory mattresses to supposedly prevent AIDS. During rehearsals, cast members share their histories of persecution. Clive recounts being sexually exploited and framed by a school bully, leading to his expulsion. Orrin tells of being beaten and buried alive in a cemetery. Matt declines to share his story. As rehearsals intensify, particularly a scene in which Jordan's character rapes Matt's, Matt grows increasingly withdrawn.

Eddy discovers Jordan's connection to Paul Royale, a disgraced former ambassador and sexual predator. He learns that Jordan is homeless, living in his car after years of beatings from his father, who tried to drive out Jordan's homosexuality until Jordan struck back and walked out of the family home.

On May 30, Eddy's parents' marriage collapses violently. Consumed by the family crisis, Eddy misses rehearsal. On June 3, he walks past the Lady Musgrave Road house and sees police crime-scene tape and a blood-soaked sheet. He was not present the night of the attack.

The second section, "The Blackjacks," shifts to a polyphonic chorus of the attackers, who describe their surveillance of the house, aided by a police corporal's reports, and the organized assault. Their motivations range from biblical literalism to rage fueled by dancehall music, particularly the lyrics of the reggae singer Streggeh Don. The mob forces entry during rehearsal. Matt, naked in character, fights back fiercely. Jordan fights even as his teeth are knocked out. Havelock deliberately spits his HIV-infected blood into his attackers' faces. Omar attempts to escape through a window but is caught and stabbed thirteen times. Streggeh Don drags Rainford into a separate room. When Rainford emerges, both his eyes have been gouged out. He walks into walls, repeating his name and address, asking for help.

The third section, "The Disappearers," jumps to 1994 and shifts to Jordan's first-person voice, interspersed with interview transcripts given to Peta-Gaye Burke, an investigative journalist. Jordan has taken over his bedridden father's funeral home. He reveals that two cast members, Matt and Orrin, vanished in the weeks after the attack. Eddy, who visited both in the hospital, was the last of the group to see them.

Eddy's investigation uncovers that Matt lived under multiple names and addresses and worked as an investment portfolio manager rather than in advertising as he had claimed. Informants at a gay club report that Matt appeared weeks after the attack, orchestrated a group sexual encounter, then erupted in fury, accusing participants of rape. The search for Orrin leads to his family home in Waterhouse, a volatile neighborhood, where his sister reveals Orrin left one day saying he was going to buy toothpaste and never returned. As Eddy and Jordan leave, a mob chases them. They escape through a gully, where Eddy saves Jordan by bludgeoning an attacker with a metal pipe. In the gully, they encounter a community of homeless gay and transgender youth living beneath bridges. Deeper in, Jordan finds Roderick Crawford, a once-celebrated ballet dancer dying of AIDS and abandoned by his family, and smothers Crawford with a pillow in what he describes as a mercy killing.

At a gay club, Jordan recognizes one of the 1988 attackers: Gareth Coombes, a closeted man deeply conflicted about his desires. Jordan pursues a volatile sexual relationship with Gareth while carrying out vigilante violence against identifiable attackers. When Paul Royale secretly films Jordan and Gareth and the footage is leaked to a tabloid, Gareth dies by suicide. Jordan begins seeing Gareth's ghost, an apparition behind a standing mirror that refuses to speak. The partnership between Eddy and Jordan fractures as their responses to trauma diverge: Eddy turns to caretaking, Jordan to vengeance.

The fourth section, "The Exile and Return," consists of 1999 letters from Havelock to Mark Armstrong-Parker, his lifelong friend in London who once arranged the HIV treatment that saved Havelock's life. Havelock recounts his time at Oxford as the lover of Lord Everton Caulfield, an aristocrat who alternated between passion and racist cruelty, and his retaliatory act of selling Everton's love letters to the Daily Mail, which precipitated Everton's arrest and commitment to an asylum. Now living alone atop Red Hills in extreme isolation, Havelock describes Jordan's repeated break-ins, during which Jordan confesses his retaliatory violence. Havelock cannot condemn Jordan, admitting he deliberately spat infected blood at his own attackers. In his final letter, he warns that Jordan is building toward a culminating act from which he will never return.

The fifth section, "The New World," is divided into two parts. In the first, set in 2005, Jordan narrates directly, addressing the bound Streggeh Don, whom he has kidnapped and imprisoned in an abandoned branch of the funeral home. Jordan's mental state deteriorates as weeks pass. He argues with Gareth's ghost and oscillates between wanting Streggeh Don dead and wanting him to acknowledge what he did. Havelock arrives and discovers Streggeh Don's corpse on a slab, decomposed for at least a month. Jordan has been talking to, feeding, and arguing with a dead man. Havelock, recognizing the depth of Jordan's psychological break, tells him gently, "Yes, my son, I see him."

The final pages shift to second-person narration, following a man who attends an evangelical church in Kingston and has been living a double life for decades. The narrative reveals him to be Matt, who survived the attack by systematically erasing his former identities and reinventing himself as Rupert Holmes, a devout churchgoer and lawyer. He spent six years in Florida, where he converted to Christianity, then returned to Jamaica. His internal monologue traces a lifelong struggle with identity, shame, and recurring sexual encounters he frames as sin. In Miami, he is nearly strangled during an encounter with a married man and kills his attacker in self-defense, experiencing the violence as a liberation from shame.

Matt walks into Eddy's law office under the name Rupert Holmes. Eddy does not recognize him. Matt quotes Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, the source of the play's title, and identifies himself by the roles they once played in the production: "I'm Smitty. You must be Mona." Eddy, overcome with shock, grabs Matt's shoulder as his knees buckle.