About the Author

Gary Indiana (1950-2024) was a critic, actor, artist, and author of some of the most audacious novels of our time, including Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Do Everything in the Dark, and the acclaimed "true crime" trilogy made up of Resentment, Three-Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference. He has also published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love; a collection of art criticism, Vile Days; and Fire Season: Selected Essays.

Reviews

"It is literature with the filter off: on the one hand, an account of life as lived outside mainstream acceptance; on the other, a telling entirely unrestrained by political correctness . . . In a short space, Rent Boy is a multi-faceted little gem, a world of 'Versailles at 78rpm, ' and the sort of funny, sick, weird little book you never forget." --John Self, The Critic
"Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus . . . Rent Boy is a frolicsome slip of a book . . . a relentlessly tropey, shamelessly over-the-top potboiler . . . A rude glamor radiates from the book's prose . . . There's the instinct to high literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement and anhedonia exquisitely expressed." --Bailey Trela, Cleveland Review of Books
"A funny book with a high degree of linguistic sophistication. It also contains all the four-letter words, plus graphic descriptions of sex, kinky perversions, drug abuse and mayhem . . . Danny, the 'rent boy' of the title, is . . . a distant, debauched cousin of Holden Caulfield--a youthful truth-teller who sees himself surrounded by phonies." --Michael Harris, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Indiana's views penetrate so far beyond the usual pabulum that it requires a bit of moral courage to read them, and a dark sense of humor would also help . . . a peerless voice, one that describes a falling floor that may never find its bottom." --Lori Soderlind, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] literary legend and cultural hellraiser . . . [Rent Boy is] his sleazy-genius book." --Chris Kraus, Interview Magazine
"The nearest thing we have to an inheritor to the Burroughs strain in American fiction. That's the strain that breaks or simply ignores middle-class taboos; embraces narcotics and all kinds of sex; takes an interest in the uglier emotions, like disgust, shame, and hatred; applies actual pressure to American myths (the Western, the P.I., the gangster); has recourse to science fiction and narrative fracture; keeps its eye on the varieties of societal control (family, state, corporation, media); and doesn't shy away from anything that might be mistaken for sin." --Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine
"A witty, malicious novel told by a male hustler who gets mixed up in a organ-harvesting ring." --Tobi Haslett, N+1
"An inheritor, perhaps, of early Burroughs or John Rechy or Alexander Trocchi, or a 'fixture, ' as journalists like to say, among the writers and artists who congregated around Manhattan's East Village in the 1980s . . . Gary Indiana is still there, developing the vivid ire and grit of his early works into a sulfurous dissection of the American character that has few if any rivals." --Adrian Nathan West, The Baffler
"Indiana, a playwright, art critic, artist, and novelist with the sensibility of a rogue private investigator, is edgy in two or three ways. He's hip and unchill, he's lived on the edges of a lot of things, like fame and Los Angeles." --Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum