Gaywyck Quartet

Sensitive, blond, emerald-eyed Robert Whyte is seventeen, living in a small town where his father is schoolmaster and his mother quite mad. When the local parish Father arranges an introduction to Donough Gaylord, the young, gorgeous, sophisticated (and fabulously wealthy) lord of the manor of Gaywyck, a Long Island estate, a deal is struck: Robert will become the librarian and move into Gaywyck forthwith.Donough's eye-popping New York digs at Gramercy Park, with displays of Van Goghs, Cézannes and Monets, pales in comparison to the riches found at Gaywyck. Donough's part-time mentoring leaves Robert much time to explore the estate, its secrets and physicalities (a waterfall, gardens, beaches, riding trails, a cave of paintings, hidden closets), and the dark past shared by the inhabitants. His coming of age is bombarded by sexual desires, lies, betrayal, journals full of secrets everyone reads, suicide and murders, erotic encounters, and the sea, always the sea, tranquil or agitated ....Robert, smitten from first meeting, yearns for Donough as a lover. The older man, haunted by guilt from childhood secrets, fights his intense, growing passion even as hidden evil rushes to destroy them both.A cherished classic for almost 50 years. This new edition features a foreword by Damon Suede and an afterword by the author."Gaywyck is the very definition of classic. Using gothic romance to explore the love that once "dared not speak its name," Gaywyck proves compelling fiction and love are truly timeless." – Rick R. Reed"A fascinating mixture of Wilde, the gothic, and, above all, the souls laid to rest in New York." – Angus Wilson"A groundbreaking romance classic by a trailblazing author, Gaywyck blew open the doors of romance, proving what Vincent Virga has said for years: Genre has no gender. Merging the lushness of the best gothics with the big emotions of modern historicals, this is a story that transforms the way you think of the romance novel." – Sarah MacLean"An extraordinary tour de force that merits special praise." – The Advocate"As of 2024, Mr. Virga is one of the only surviving members of a pantheon of gay novelists who changed the way queer stories got told, forever. Suckled on pulps, they wrote books that escaped the camp gulag by sheer force of will via humor and hubris, poesy and porn … entire subgenres of pop-culture redefined by brilliant queers writing against the grain." – Damon Suede

Set in the milieu of New York's Gilded Age aristocracy, Vadriel Vail vividly explores excesses and arrogance from the heights of glittering society to the depths of poverty in unimaginably horrific immigrant slums. Romance, secrets, and high stakes action, exceptional women and extraordinary men are swept into a whirlwind of love and forbidden desire. Armand de Guise, dangerous scion of a New York financial empire, is both handsome and loathsome. Wrought with guilt over an egregious encounter, he turns his lust, then love, toward young, brilliant, and ethereally handsome Vadriel Vail, Newport, RI's lavender-eyed golden boy of wealth and privilege. But Vadriel is soon in the arms of Placidia Van Leer, a perfect social match. As Vadriel crucifies himself on duty and doubt, appetite and anxiety, Armand looms, menacing and melodramatic. Placidia, her prized Vadriel in her bed, grows terrified that someone, something else will steal him away. Can redemption and true love become one? With hyperbolic exuberance, classic in form and relentlessly entertaining, Vadriel Vail is an historical gay romance of the highest order, a stunning follow-up to Gaywyck. "Vincent Virga understands that the Gothic is always about the secret, vexed attraction of virtue for vice and vice for virtue, the first unsure of whether it wants to ennoble or be degraded, the second of whether it wants to degrade or be ennobled. That engine pulses through this wild, magnificently excessive novel, which teems with the social and sexual life of queer Gilded-Age New York." – Peter Trachtenberg, The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York"As melodramatic, mysterious and menacing a gay gothic romance as one might desire on the heels of the classic Gaywyck." – Layla McCay, The Queer Bookshelf: a reader's guide"Prepare to have all of your senses fully engaged. Vadriel Vail is literature as it is meant to be; luminous and beguiling, a profound mosaic of allusion and desire. Virga's novel returns to the American literary scene just in time: we need and deserve transformative love – this epic torch that is Vadriel Vail lights the way." – Tom Cardamone, Momentary Aberrations"With Gaywick, Vincent Virga devised a genre – the Gay Gothic with a Happy Ending – which he exuberantly revisits in Vadriel Vail. This is a novel of multiform delights, in which the protagonist must reconcile spirituality, sexuality and social conscience to become fully himself. Here Bildungsroman meets Bodice Ripper. Once again, Vincent Virga has brilliantly teased apart the conventions of romance fiction to arrive at love's predicate. It's all in there: Vadriel Vail contains multitudes." – Matthew Fink, The Tattered Canopy of the Velodrome