Written in chilly, precise, clinical prose, Michael Blumlein’s X, Y feels like the fruit of a collaboration between J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg. The only thing tying it to the old-school horror market is the fact that its main character is a stripper. After she passes out onstage and wakes up convinced that she’s a man, Blumlein dives into the complicated swamp of gender difference, territory that no other horror novel had broached. Rather than worrying about identity politics or liberation narratives, he boils everything down to biology. And then he keeps on boiling. By the time he’s
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