Dark Continents: A Novel

“Haunting, unnerving, canny and uncanny, Dark Continents is a gripping, genre-swapping mélange of urban myth and recent history.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked DORMANT TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS IN MONKEYS, A SLOW RETROVIRUS PREPARES TO JUMP SPECIES, AND CONTINENTS. A young closeted realtor. An aging imperialist. A child psychiatrist and his bug-eating ward. All of them: tied to a transgender activist who is falling ill with unexplainable symptoms—purple lesions and light sensitivity. All of them, the first players in an outbreak that will span the far reaches of the Congo Basin to the clapboards of Provincetown and New York City at its grittiest. Boldly reimagining Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dark Continents takes readers on a journey to the birthplace of a virus that reshaped all of us, in search of an answer to a question that still plagues us: Where did HIV come from? “Set in the age of AIDS and filled with a gallery of interesting characters, Dark Continents is quite the page-turner and Wilber has done an amazing amount of research—ranging from the scientific tracking of disease to the history of New York to life in Zaïre—which he beautifully incorporates into the text. There’s a huge amount of imagination in this book and an impressive ability to weave an engrossing complicated plot. I must give him a hand and alert your attention to an emerging writer with considerable talent.” —George Hodgman, author of Bettyville “If Bram Stoker had lived in the twentieth century, there’s no question he would have sent Dracula into the dark heart of Africa. Wilber succeeds in infusing a classic with fresh blood: Joseph Conrad meets the wild 1970s and the origins of AIDS. What a great idea—a nuanced horror novel that shows the good old Count in a whole new light.” —Oliver Pötzsch, author of The Hangman's Daughter “A smart, thoughtful, haunting metaphor of the plague years, but also a good old-fashioned page-turning thriller.” —William J. Mann, author of Hello, Gorgeous “Absolutely ravishing. Suspenseful, funny, and at times romantic in all of its painful truth, Dark Continents an exhilarating tour de force, leaving you thirsty for another.” —Mario Alberto Zambrano, author of Lotería

About the Author

Johnathan Wilber is a novelist and graduate of Northwestern University and the Columbia University writing program in fiction. He has received fellowships from Columbia University (2005), the Lambda's Writers' Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices (2011), and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2014), and his writing has appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, the Harrington Gay Men's Literary Quarterly, New York Journal of Books, and the Huffington Post. The author of the novel Out, Beelzebub!, he lives in Brooklyn. www.johnathanwilber.com

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