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X, Y
Frankie watched herself in the mirror as she danced in the strip joint--it was the only way to get through the act. But then the fat man came into the club, and the siren screamed, and Frankie's world shattered like a thousand shards of glass.
In the morning, she isn't Frankie any more. She doesn't remember who she is. She knows for certain only one solid truth: that she is a man. As for Terry, her boyfriend, he cannot understand what his little sex object is trying to tell him.
Frankie, trapped and livid, slowly learns to live as a captive in a woman's skin, and learns to rule over her poor lover. She makes him work for her. She makes him wait on her. She uses her stranger's body to torture him with his own desire.
They are an ordinary couple in a private hell. A man and a woman in changed places; a man and a woman exploring all the cruelty and darkness and horror that was once hidden between a woman and a man.
In the morning, she isn't Frankie any more. She doesn't remember who she is. She knows for certain only one solid truth: that she is a man. As for Terry, her boyfriend, he cannot understand what his little sex object is trying to tell him.
Frankie, trapped and livid, slowly learns to live as a captive in a woman's skin, and learns to rule over her poor lover. She makes him work for her. She makes him wait on her. She uses her stranger's body to torture him with his own desire.
They are an ordinary couple in a private hell. A man and a woman in changed places; a man and a woman exploring all the cruelty and darkness and horror that was once hidden between a woman and a man.
340 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 2, 1993
2 people are currently reading
340 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 13, 2018
DNF @ Page 139.
This mixed bag of a story is uncertain in tone, unsure if it wants to be a sci-fi thriller or a horror show — without ever finding a comfortable spot between the two. The conceit — club dancer wakes up one morning, unsure of her former life and convinced she is now a man — is highly gripping and I was sure I would love this novel . . . alas, it was not to be. The characters are highly unsympathetic and the author tries for a grunge aesthetic a’la other titles in the Abyss line without actually pulling it off. Pass.
This mixed bag of a story is uncertain in tone, unsure if it wants to be a sci-fi thriller or a horror show — without ever finding a comfortable spot between the two. The conceit — club dancer wakes up one morning, unsure of her former life and convinced she is now a man — is highly gripping and I was sure I would love this novel . . . alas, it was not to be. The characters are highly unsympathetic and the author tries for a grunge aesthetic a’la other titles in the Abyss line without actually pulling it off. Pass.
November 15, 2016
Is it good? Is it bad? Doesn't really matter when there's nothing else like it in horror. Two people in an apartment learn that gender warping can take them down a Cronenberg-scented corridor into Hell's very own doctor's waiting room. Read more, if you dare.
March 31, 2016
I have certain friends who recommend a book to me and and instantly take that to the bank. Robert Garfat who I met running Dark Horse books in Victoria Canada for example that guy tells me to read something I'll check it out. Nick Cato of Horror Fiction Review I trust, and author Cody Goodfellow. I have discovered several writers by way of Cody's advice. One such author was Michael Blumlein, Cody suggested this author and this title X,Y.
I spent years trying to track down X,Y after reading Blumlein's genius and very surreal science fiction novel "The Healer." I loved the Healer reviewing it here on this blog in 2014 "The Healer is an almost surreal deeply political exploration of healing as an art. It has many moments of beauty, but many more disturbing moments. The world building here is vague. Is this a purely fantasy world, or a far future dystopia I can’t say? Blumlein leaves that a mystery and open to the imagination. Don’t get me wrong it is a well realized world. Set in four different locations ranging from a mine, a Las Vegas like city and a prison. It is all very interesting..."
Out of print I looked at used bookstores, thrift stores as I always do for old Abyss paperbacks. I mean I collect horror-boom paperbacks. I finally found X,Y at a half price books in my hometown for a buck. Sweet.
I was very much looking forward to what I hope would be a lost gem of the 80's (in this case 90's) horror boom. I bumped it up to the top of my to be read pile. I was excited even if it made me uncomfortable reading a book on the bus that says "Psychosexual thriller" on the cover. I had some expectations about the plot that were not exactly correct. I was under the impression that Frankie the man character passes out at a strip club and wakes up another gender. I thought she was full on given gender reassignment, ha-ha. No she just wakes up thinking and believing she is a man.
Blumlein is great writer and certainly I finished this book quickly, curious of where it was going to go. in the end however I didn't like it. This set-up can and should lead to a bizarre mystery that explores the various dynamics of sexual politics. Some of the politic of gender are a bit dated but that is not all. I found the characters and their motivations to be ridiculous. Frankie's suffering boyfriend Terry makes choices that are not only wrong but baffling. He does things that took me straight out of the novel. Shaking my head and rolling my eyes in disbelief. I could not suspend disbelief in the second half of this novel.
I mention Cody's recommendation because he is brilliant reader of horror, and perhaps I missed a great novel. Maybe there is something there I just didn't get. The prose is engaging, and Blumlein kept me turning pages. It was just the story I couldn't get into.
I spent years trying to track down X,Y after reading Blumlein's genius and very surreal science fiction novel "The Healer." I loved the Healer reviewing it here on this blog in 2014 "The Healer is an almost surreal deeply political exploration of healing as an art. It has many moments of beauty, but many more disturbing moments. The world building here is vague. Is this a purely fantasy world, or a far future dystopia I can’t say? Blumlein leaves that a mystery and open to the imagination. Don’t get me wrong it is a well realized world. Set in four different locations ranging from a mine, a Las Vegas like city and a prison. It is all very interesting..."
Out of print I looked at used bookstores, thrift stores as I always do for old Abyss paperbacks. I mean I collect horror-boom paperbacks. I finally found X,Y at a half price books in my hometown for a buck. Sweet.
I was very much looking forward to what I hope would be a lost gem of the 80's (in this case 90's) horror boom. I bumped it up to the top of my to be read pile. I was excited even if it made me uncomfortable reading a book on the bus that says "Psychosexual thriller" on the cover. I had some expectations about the plot that were not exactly correct. I was under the impression that Frankie the man character passes out at a strip club and wakes up another gender. I thought she was full on given gender reassignment, ha-ha. No she just wakes up thinking and believing she is a man.
Blumlein is great writer and certainly I finished this book quickly, curious of where it was going to go. in the end however I didn't like it. This set-up can and should lead to a bizarre mystery that explores the various dynamics of sexual politics. Some of the politic of gender are a bit dated but that is not all. I found the characters and their motivations to be ridiculous. Frankie's suffering boyfriend Terry makes choices that are not only wrong but baffling. He does things that took me straight out of the novel. Shaking my head and rolling my eyes in disbelief. I could not suspend disbelief in the second half of this novel.
I mention Cody's recommendation because he is brilliant reader of horror, and perhaps I missed a great novel. Maybe there is something there I just didn't get. The prose is engaging, and Blumlein kept me turning pages. It was just the story I couldn't get into.
October 10, 2016
Disappointing novel by the author of the excellent collection The Brains of Rats. Frankie de Leon is an exotic dancer who falls in the line of duty during a bizarre audio-visual incident. When she wakes up, she is amnesiac apart from the knowledge that she is male. Her live-in boyfriend, a failed med student named Terry, suspects she is toying with him but humors her, hoping that he can pass her "test."
There some interesting stuff in here, particularly in the first half. Blumlein, a doctor himself, inserts occasional asides drawn from medical texts, including one on how certain types of sound can trigger neurological disorders. Whether this is what has happened to Frankie is never made clear for certain, though considering the supernatural solution to her problem doesn't work, that's my interpretation. The reader knows Frankie isn't fooling, because we see things from her POV, and there are some well-done sections on what it might be like if a man unexpectedly woke up in a female body.
It's in the second half that things fall apart. Frankie finally gets a handle on her physical form and decides to torture Terry both physically and mentally. This felt out of character for either persona to me. And while it's clear all along that Terry has an unhealthy attachment to Frankie, the lengths he is willing to go to satisfy her demands were unbelievable to me. The book veers off into some extreme territory that it doesn't really earn and, in the end, it just didn't work for me. Kathe Koja did this sort of thing better in her novels.
There some interesting stuff in here, particularly in the first half. Blumlein, a doctor himself, inserts occasional asides drawn from medical texts, including one on how certain types of sound can trigger neurological disorders. Whether this is what has happened to Frankie is never made clear for certain, though considering the supernatural solution to her problem doesn't work, that's my interpretation. The reader knows Frankie isn't fooling, because we see things from her POV, and there are some well-done sections on what it might be like if a man unexpectedly woke up in a female body.
It's in the second half that things fall apart. Frankie finally gets a handle on her physical form and decides to torture Terry both physically and mentally. This felt out of character for either persona to me. And while it's clear all along that Terry has an unhealthy attachment to Frankie, the lengths he is willing to go to satisfy her demands were unbelievable to me. The book veers off into some extreme territory that it doesn't really earn and, in the end, it just didn't work for me. Kathe Koja did this sort of thing better in her novels.
June 1, 2024
2024 Book #20:
X, Y (1993) by Michael Blumlein
This book was probably marketed incorrectly as “horror.” Blumlein’s novel is closer to a speculative psychological drama; it doesn’t try to terrify the reader as much as it tries to plumb the consequences of its central conceit: What would happen to a couple’s relationship if, one day, one of them woke up not only as a different personality, but a different gender? Not all that much, at first. The boyfriend gets upset, asks his friend what to do, and then tries to find an explanation, all the while refusing to accept the new reality and remaining convinced that his girlfriend is deceiving him. Everything about this set-up has the potential to be horribly exploitative, maybe even transphobic. Thankfully, it avoids this, perhaps because Blumlein (who was an MD, by the way) is not interested so much in identity per se as he is in the power dynamics of relationships as they relate to gender. All of that could be interesting, so why do I rate this novel so low? The main issue, I think, is that this is a short-story’s worth of content expanded into a 340-page novel. The first two-thirds of X, Y is painfully dull. This isn’t helped by Blumlein’s bland and unimaginative prose, composed principally of short, stark sentences. There’s something dreadfully affectless about the writing, unbecoming of the novel’s subject matter. It’s hard to forgive a book that has no style and very little to say for the first 200 pages. However, if you can make it to the final third, the novel suddenly gets kind of good, becoming more captivating and grotesque (with elements of body horror), as the couple’s relationship dynamic makes a drastic reversal. It’s only in this final third where I feel like the author is really exploring the premise, although he comes to some strange and somewhat unfocused conclusions. Fans of Blumlein never talk about this novel, and apparently his other writings are a lot better. (low 3/5)
X, Y (1993) by Michael Blumlein
This book was probably marketed incorrectly as “horror.” Blumlein’s novel is closer to a speculative psychological drama; it doesn’t try to terrify the reader as much as it tries to plumb the consequences of its central conceit: What would happen to a couple’s relationship if, one day, one of them woke up not only as a different personality, but a different gender? Not all that much, at first. The boyfriend gets upset, asks his friend what to do, and then tries to find an explanation, all the while refusing to accept the new reality and remaining convinced that his girlfriend is deceiving him. Everything about this set-up has the potential to be horribly exploitative, maybe even transphobic. Thankfully, it avoids this, perhaps because Blumlein (who was an MD, by the way) is not interested so much in identity per se as he is in the power dynamics of relationships as they relate to gender. All of that could be interesting, so why do I rate this novel so low? The main issue, I think, is that this is a short-story’s worth of content expanded into a 340-page novel. The first two-thirds of X, Y is painfully dull. This isn’t helped by Blumlein’s bland and unimaginative prose, composed principally of short, stark sentences. There’s something dreadfully affectless about the writing, unbecoming of the novel’s subject matter. It’s hard to forgive a book that has no style and very little to say for the first 200 pages. However, if you can make it to the final third, the novel suddenly gets kind of good, becoming more captivating and grotesque (with elements of body horror), as the couple’s relationship dynamic makes a drastic reversal. It’s only in this final third where I feel like the author is really exploring the premise, although he comes to some strange and somewhat unfocused conclusions. Fans of Blumlein never talk about this novel, and apparently his other writings are a lot better. (low 3/5)
July 8, 2019
When the premise of a horror novel is a woman waking up one day believing she's a man, there's a lot of potential there to talk about issues such as how women are treated by men, what it's like to be a trans individual in society, or what it's like to find yourself suddenly in the minority. For the first half of the novel, this is what Blumlein does (which is surprising, considering this book was published in the 1990s), but then he turns it into some gratuitous fetish fantasy that isn't well supported by the characters. Maybe it's unfair for me to judge a novel by what it could have been, but it showed so much promise to begin with that I wanted it to take a different turn. Instead, it feels like he was trying to channel Kathe Koja with her themes of co-dependence and self-destruction.
June 6, 2019
Interesting story about a woman who's brain turns into that of a man's and the social implications of this event, focusing for the most part on the characters rather than the mystery of how it happened.
Possibly explanations are presented as little in-between pieces of medical- and biological exposition, further underlining that the why isn't what's important here but the fact that these two characters are heading down a path of ruin.
Some might be tempted to call this dark science-fiction but there is horror here, but only of the real-life variety and even then not the most spectacular or crass.
Hard to read at times but compelling you to go on anyway. Three stars! Check it out!
Possibly explanations are presented as little in-between pieces of medical- and biological exposition, further underlining that the why isn't what's important here but the fact that these two characters are heading down a path of ruin.
Some might be tempted to call this dark science-fiction but there is horror here, but only of the real-life variety and even then not the most spectacular or crass.
Hard to read at times but compelling you to go on anyway. Three stars! Check it out!
March 11, 2024
I read this because Grady Hendrix recommended it. That was a mistake. A “psychosexual thriller” that isn’t particularly thrilling or sexy. It doesn’t deliver on the tortured relationship promised in the summary until 200 pages in, then just meanders to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Great for people who love to ask, “Is this going anywhere?”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 28, 2020
Very interesting novel. I love the Dell Abyss books. I like the interesting articles throughout the book. I didn't fully understand the ending though.
May 30, 2021
Oy, what a bunch of crap.
(I don't remember reading this at all but that's what I wrote about it in 2004).
(I don't remember reading this at all but that's what I wrote about it in 2004).
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January 19, 2023Even the two halves of the book seem like different people.
October 28, 2025
a true dell abyss-
enjoyed it a great deal
while thinking it's bad
enjoyed it a great deal
while thinking it's bad
December 29, 2024
This was weird. Didn't care for the ending.
340 pages
340 pages
April 21, 2021
Let’s get this straight (as it were): this is not a book about a man becoming a woman. And, contrary to the blurb, it is certainly not about a woman becoming a man. If, as you read this book, you keep insisting that it is about something that it is not, you will inevitably be disappointed when, at the end, it has not addressed—much less resolved—your questions that were predicated on a fundamentally erroneous expectation.
If, however, you think of this not as a mind-meld story, but rather as a story about a man trapped in a body that is not his own, you’ll find a lot to appreciate. Title notwithstanding, gender is tangential. The constants are confusion and anger, of vulnerability growing into violence—and in this story, they affect men and (nominal) women equally.
Want to read
July 23, 2011Stephen King endorsed the entire Dell Abyss Horror line. Here is his blurb:
"Thank you for introducing me to the remarkable line of novels currently being issued under Dell's Abyss imprint. I have given a great many blurbs over the last twelve years or so, but this one marks two firsts: first unsolicited blurb (I called you) and the first time I have blurbed a whole line of books. In terms of quality, production, and plain old story-telling reliability (that's the bottom line, isn't it), Dell's new line is amazingly satisfying...a rare and wonderful bargain for readers. I hope to be looking into the Abyss for a long time to come."
"Thank you for introducing me to the remarkable line of novels currently being issued under Dell's Abyss imprint. I have given a great many blurbs over the last twelve years or so, but this one marks two firsts: first unsolicited blurb (I called you) and the first time I have blurbed a whole line of books. In terms of quality, production, and plain old story-telling reliability (that's the bottom line, isn't it), Dell's new line is amazingly satisfying...a rare and wonderful bargain for readers. I hope to be looking into the Abyss for a long time to come."
May 8, 2016
What the hell did I just read?
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews