X, Y by Michael Blumlein

X, Y Reviews

• 
  Cody | CodysBookshelf

  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.
• 
  David Agranoff

  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.
• 
  Grady Hendrix

  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.
• 
  Scott

  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.
• 
  Thomas

  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.
• 
  Djip Minderman

  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!
• 
  Michael James

  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.
• 
  Gribblet

  Oy, what a bunch of crap.
  
  (I don't remember reading this at all but that's what I wrote about it in 2004).
• 
  Adrienne

  Even the two halves of the book seem like different people.
• 
  J. P. Wiske

  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.
• 
  Debra

  Stephen 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."
  
• 
  Miles Reid-lobatto

  What the hell did I just read?