Lambda Literary Horror Nominee 1994
Visitations by three Dickensian ghosts
LOS ANGELES—October 15, 2019—ReQueered Tales is proud to announce it has formed a new publishing venture to re-publish older LGBTQ fiction—beginning with award-winning titles and acclaimed authors. Our tenth release, available worldwide as a Kindle, Kobo, Nook and iBooks e-book, is “THE UNFINISHED” by Jay B Laws.
Jay B. Laws was a San Francisco playwright and writer. He won the 1986 Actors Alley Repertory grand prize for his play “A Night for Colored Glass”. His first novel, Steam (also available from ReQueered Tales), was nominated as Best Gay Science Fiction, Horror or Fantasy at the 4th Annual Lambda Literary Awards in 1992. His second novel, The Unfinished, was published posthumously.
Jiggs, a hearing-impaired gay man tortured by the recent death of his parents, moves into a long-vacant San Francisco apartment. The apartment is revealed to be haunted by the Unfinished, spirits whose lives ended prematurely through tragedy, violence or betrayal. Jiggs’s initially adversarial relationship with his spectral housemates soon becomes a partnership when both parties see each other as instrumental to ending their own suffering. The stories unfold via visitations by three Dickensian ghosts offering accounts of their deaths. In one story, a man dying from AIDS confronts the limits of his vanity when he realizes the terrible price of his wish to recapture his looks. In another, a car mechanic’s soul is left to ponder how his weakness led to his murder.
Greg Herren, in his foreword to the new edition says: “[The Unfinished] is both terrifying and beautiful; a quieter, softer follow-up to the full-scale horror of Steam, which showed how much promise there was in the future of the writer.
Reviewer Amos Lassen sums up the strengths of this final novel: “Laws writes with devastating beauty … a book from our past that still cries out to be read.”
Kirkus Reviews in 1993 commented: “a good read—and the themes based on gay love and AIDS add an undercurrent of real feeling.”
The Unfinished was a finalist for the 1994 Lambda Literary Award for Horror fiction. This edition includes an introduction by Sasha Alyson, founder of the celebrated LGBT press Alyson Publications, as well as a foreword by Greg Herren, author of the New Orleans based Scotty Bradley series.
Bonus content! Laws’ short story, “Imagined”, is also included in this edition.
THE UNFINISHED e-book:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/2npLvuD
Kobo: https://bit.ly/2o0zn3T
Nook: https://bit.ly/2o0AiBn
Apple: https://apple.co/2o0sEH5
349 pgs • ISBN 978-1-951092-06-1
US$5.95 • CAN$7.95 • UK£4.95 • EU€5.95 • AU$8.95
