Finalist, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers

I have just heard for the first time the expression “to make soup”: it means to mix the bottom-of-the-pocket drugs of everyone huddled in the club toilet stall, opened MD, ketamine, old dry speed, crushed e pills, to make big lines that will let us forget the past forty-eight hours that have been so difficult.

In Instagram-style vignettes that span Montreal, New York, and Berlin, our narrator — a doctoral student in medieval studies — leads us through the bathrooms and back rooms of clubs and raves as he explores the sex, drugs, and music that define queer nightlife.

Accompanied by Jacob Pyne’s full-colour illustrations, which perfectly punctuate the narrator’s occasional self-destructive melancholy, Scenes from the Underground delivers the fully uninhibited field notes of the club scene.

GABRIEL CHOLETTE (@gab.cho) scours the New York, Berlin, and Montreal underground scenes for literary material, which he writes on using the codes of Instagram. He is also finishing a thesis on the commercial imagination in medieval French literature.

Gabriel Cholette's profile page

Montreal artist JACOB PYNE (@cumpug) explores themes of sexual identity, relationships, and anonymous sex from a queer perspective. His intimate and erotically charged scenes are inspired by his personal experiences and desires.

Jacob Pyne's profile page

E. S. TAILLON is a queer, neurodiverse writer and the former managing editor at PRISM international magazine. They hold a master’s degree in French literature from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. They have published prose in Déraciné and filling Station, and poetry in CV2, The /tƐmz/ Review, and Augur Magazine. Their first literary translation, Scenes from the Underground, was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.

E.S. Taillon's profile page

• Short-listed, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers

Pyne’s erotic illustrations, depicting unabashed nudity, add to the book’s appeal and help center us further into the narrative that Cholette is telling. … The stories in Scenes from the Underground give off a sense of endless exploration. … These blissful moments morph into faceless blurs and snippets of recollection. Affection is so fleeting, and Cholette finds this out the hard way. There is a looming quietness in the juxtaposition to all the chaos.

White Wall Review

The intimacy of being granted nearly full access to someone else’s life, during perhaps some of their most private moments, is captivating and engrossing, and makes Scenes from the Underground difficult to put down.

Montreal Review of Books

An ode to queer nightlife … Within the evocative prose, there is no shame or fear of judgment … Cholette succeeds in reflecting the facets of queer nightlife through a pensive lens, allowing readers to dissect its subjects and figures on their own terms.

INTO more

Terse and vivid.

Boston Arts Fuse