Discharged in disgrace and punished for the very thing done to him, a young veteran returns to his sweltering Massachusetts hometown, under siege by a heatwave, to find his parents won't open the door. They've left him a check and a note. They're hiding in their own house. And August, the boy he's loved since before either of them had words for it, is in a hospital bed wrapped in gauze, severely burned nearly to nothing in a fire that gutted the a gay club in town.
Something is wrong with the light here. Strangers dissolve into smoke at the edges of his vision. The men he finds in blacked-out bars shed their skin for something older and hungrier underneath. And every thread he pulls on, trying to find who set the fire, leads back to the people who raised him. August is a novella that burns at both ends-part elegy, part fever dream, part act of arson an inflammatory rant against everything that failed to protect him: family, country, God. Visceral, hallucinatory, and unflinchingly queer.
