Discharged in disgrace, punished for the very thing done to him, a young veteran returns to his sweltering Massachusetts hometown only to find that his parents won't open the door. They're hiding inside their own house. And August, the boy he's loved since before either of them had words for it, lies in a hospital bed wrapped in gauze, burned nearly to death in the fire that gutted the only queer club in town.
Something is very wrong here. Strangers dissolve to smoke. The men he encounters in blacked-out bars shed their skins to reveal something hungrier beneath. And every thread he pulls, searching for whoever set the fire, leads him closer to the people who raised him. August is a novella that burns at both ends: part elegy, part fever dream. An act of arson against everything that failed to protect him, from family to country. Visceral, hallucinatory, and unflinchingly queer, Jonathan Lee's writing transforms betrayal, desire, and anger into a haunting story of coming home to discover what has been waiting there all along.