India, Oct. 29 -- Marlon James's latest novel, The Disappearers, explores the aftermath of a brutal homophobic attack on the cast and crew adapting John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967). The play that takes its title from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 deals with violence, closetedness, and homosexuality in a prison. The novel, set in Kingston Jamaica in 1988, has Havelock Titus directing the play that's, eventually, never staged. This is peculiarly metaphoric because, at the time, the AIDS epidemic was erasing queer people in "one long set of disappearing acts". In the novel, the "Blackjacks", a group of 13 attackers that includes three policemen and Streggeh Don, a reggae singer whose Batty Is Not Pussy ruled the imagination of every ho...