“Wm. Stage writes with a naturalness that is enviable. I believe in his sentences and characters. I believe what they say and do. In Creatures, Wm. brings this apparently effortless style to the wild and woolly world of epidemiology in St. Louis of the sexually experimental – and transmittable – 1980s. It’s a winning mixture of wide-open style and very weird reality.” 
— Chris King, The St. Louis American

SAINT LOUIS, 1981. Epidemiologist Shaun Malloy is overworked and under-appreciated. Chasing STD cases day in and day out, Malloy and his fellow investigators in the clinic are not  prepared when a fatal wasting disease appears that seems to hone in on the city’s gay community. As they strive to understand this new threat, matters are made worse by Trey Vonderhaar, who runs a lucrative private men’s club that caters to the appetites of  a privileged class. Despite warnings from health officials, Vonderhaar is determined to benefit from his enterprise without regard to the dangers the luxury sex hotel presents. Perhaps too dedicated to his job, Malloy is just as intent on shutting Vonderhaar down, and, along with best friend and bondsman Teri Kincaid, isn’t above resorting to extreme measures to do it. 

Written in the style of a crime novel, Creatures On Display is a comic noir look at the dogged efforts of an in-the-trenches band of investigators trying to get a handle on this mysterious malady, just the newest plague of many that have tormented mankind from its beginnings.       

“… readers will appreciate this stripe of intrigue …” 
— Kirkus Reviews 

“Creatures On Display is a fascinating, briskly-written glimpse back at a pivotal, opaque and terrifying moment in American sexual, political and cultural history. Essential reading.”
—Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest, Cottonwood 

2015
Designed by Michael Kilfoy, Studio X
ISBN:978-0692-34807-9
343 pages

Price: $11.95

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