From Amazon
I Am Kasper Klotz is a bizarre, unsettling, and resoundingly politically incorrect treatment of the AIDS epidemic. Few writers would be able to find a publisher for it, but Sky Gilbert's long career as a writer, filmmaker, impresario, columnist, and political activist has given him the cultural clout required to get a novel like this into print. The eponymous anti-hero of
I Am Kasper Klotz is a particularly insidious serial killer: an HIV-positive gay man who infects his victims with the AIDS virus. Eventually, Klotz infects a particularly beautiful young lad from Wyoming, infuriating the boy's formerly liberal parents. Klotz soon finds himself in a prison cell, awaiting trial for murder. While in prison, he begins to exchange letters with Cindy Lou Williams, an ugly, puritanical, Ayn Rand-reading middle-aged virgin.
As Gilbert draws his novel to a close, he turns his story on its head by having Klotz develop a new theory to explain the AIDS epidemic, one that attributes the spread of HIV to a psychology of doom within the gay community, a kind of mass death wish that sees being HIV positive as something desirable and chic. It goes without saying that this thesis will make many readers extremely uncomfortable, and Gilbert's use of Klotz as an anti-hero and mouthpiece makes his own stance on these ideas rather difficult to discern. I Am Kaspar Klotz is no masterpiece, but it is a smart and difficult novel, raising fascinating and disturbing questions about the AIDS epidemic that will provoke even the most liberal of readers. --Jack Illingworth
Book Description
Exploring the culture of AIDS, this novel examines the minds of those whose lives revolve around the virus—the gay men who are running scared, barebacking, taking toxic drugs, and raising funds for others similarly afflicted. When Kasper Klotz makes the mistake of infecting a beautiful young Midwesterner, he’s accused, like a handful of other HIV-positive men in North America, of assault and attempted murder. A woman obsessed with Ayn Rand soon makes the incarcerated Kasper her mission. A hilarious, politically incorrect rant, this medical-scientific mystery is a thriller about what makes the AIDS virus tick.
