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.