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Riot Son
In an unnamed American city during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, two people meet in a cloud of tear gas, and experience love in the time of COVID-19.
Devon Amis is a thirty-something Texan and journalist dealing with the emotional fallout of a recent breakup and previous war correspondence. Garrett Robertson is a homeless genderqueer teen and freelance reporter newly emancipated from a cult religious upbringing. They and their fellow freedom fighters (lawyers, medics, and activists) experience right-wing violence, police brutality, autonomous zones, federal crackdowns, and murderous vehicular attacks — all of which combust in one life-altering conflagration on the Fourth of July.
Riot Son weaves real-life news events from one turbulent summer with a romance for the ages.
Devon Amis is a thirty-something Texan and journalist dealing with the emotional fallout of a recent breakup and previous war correspondence. Garrett Robertson is a homeless genderqueer teen and freelance reporter newly emancipated from a cult religious upbringing. They and their fellow freedom fighters (lawyers, medics, and activists) experience right-wing violence, police brutality, autonomous zones, federal crackdowns, and murderous vehicular attacks — all of which combust in one life-altering conflagration on the Fourth of July.
Riot Son weaves real-life news events from one turbulent summer with a romance for the ages.
225 pages, Paperback
First published July 4, 2023
11 people want to read
About the author
L.A. Fields
32 books25 followersCat person, MFA, author of The Disorder Series (Rebel Satori Press), the Lambda Literary Award finalists My Dear Watson and Homo Superiors (Lethe Press), as well as works of scholarship, short fiction, and erotica.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 5, 2023
Set in a nameless Texas city against the wasteland of 2020, L.A. Field’s newest novel Riot Son emerges an interplay between the instructional and the lyric, a feverish plunge into the limbo between love and politics. Through the ephemera of a single summer, Devon and Garret fall in love as they try to survive a mist of tear gas, rubber bullets, and police violence, a risk that may shatter their hearts–and threaten their very lives.
Riot Son encapsulates the warlike atmosphere of both the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and the high anxiety, high stakes of fragile, young love. From the beginning, it is clear that Devon and Garrett’s love is futile and cannot survive the violence of Summer 2020. The question of what will destroy it haunts the book from the moment the characters meet to their relationship’s ultimate end.
The story, paced between a catalog of informational writings, succeeds as a literary and cultural critique. Field’s gift of constructing likable, but deeply flawed characters gives Riot Son a true human element that is authentically reflective of humanity and its paternalistic impulses, its surrender to racism, homophobia, transphobia, and its ability to preserve while living in that pit of violence.
Whether it’s love or resistance, in the world of Fields’ Riot Son, the only choice is to take the risk, to try and survive: “Yes, only tonight, do it or die without having done it at all.”
Riot Son encapsulates the warlike atmosphere of both the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and the high anxiety, high stakes of fragile, young love. From the beginning, it is clear that Devon and Garrett’s love is futile and cannot survive the violence of Summer 2020. The question of what will destroy it haunts the book from the moment the characters meet to their relationship’s ultimate end.
The story, paced between a catalog of informational writings, succeeds as a literary and cultural critique. Field’s gift of constructing likable, but deeply flawed characters gives Riot Son a true human element that is authentically reflective of humanity and its paternalistic impulses, its surrender to racism, homophobia, transphobia, and its ability to preserve while living in that pit of violence.
Whether it’s love or resistance, in the world of Fields’ Riot Son, the only choice is to take the risk, to try and survive: “Yes, only tonight, do it or die without having done it at all.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review