Introducing Great Black Hope

The July Audacious Book Club selection

BIG BOOK CLUB NEWS!!!! We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month!

In his 2024 short story “Labyrinth,” Rob Franklin’s nameless protagonist is one of three people working weekends at a gay sauna he calls Nowhere. He is responsible for the closing time routine and checking the occupancy of Nowhere’s biggest draw: its “sprawling lightless maze that extends for some time and into which one must wade blindly, guided only by intuition, into rooms and cubbies, gloryholes, sex swings, chains and musk and men.”

Before he gets enticed into a liaison with a handsome man with some strange, even menacing, kinks, he is beset by time, tied to the mundane ritual of his work while the sauna’s clients immerse themselves in orgiastic excess. Franklin’s protagonist is both envious of and disgusted by the sauna’s clientele; as time drags slowly on, his imagination takes him far outside the maze to the city beyond, where he fantasizes about the people whose lives aren’t touched by Nowhere: “all across the city, people loved are splayed out on couches, cooking pesto pasta and watching HBO. They complain of Sunday Scaries, by which they mean the aggregate remorse of their lives, everything ignored or delayed by weekend distractions returning with a crystalline clarity, a brief reprieve in their satiate performance as they gaze into the abyssal maw, then turn away before it takes them. How I envy their restraint.”

Franklin’s debut novel Great Black Hope echoes some of “Labyrinth”’s sense of time and its sense of in-betweenness, although the novel immerses its protagonist—a queer Black Stanford grad named David Smith—in a different brand of excess and a different breed of societal underbelly—the elite young party crowd of New York City. Smith, like the people around him, is young and beautiful and on the rise, but he too is forced to look into an abyssal maw: his best friend and roommate Elle turns up dead, and not long afterwards, he is arrested for cocaine possession.

As Smith navigates the labyrinth of the court system and the social vagaries of the wealthy and well-known, he is also forced to reckon with the expectations of his family and the mystery of what happened to his beloved friend. The result is an elegant novel of manners, at times satirical, and steeped not just in the intricacies and observations of a Black man who is a part of and apart from but also in the existential terror and grief of what it means to love and lose someone, and what it means to be young.

Great Black Hope is an accomplished, delicately brutal novel, one that is constructed on the foundation of irresolvable tensions: between class and race, between success and failure, between the home one claws to hold on to and the home one is struggling to let go. I’m looking forward to discussing this book with you throughout the month of July. We will be in conversation with Rob Franklin on 7/30 at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Register now!

Have you started Great Black Hope? What do you think so far?