This a strong book. It is dark, the darkest I’ve ever read from this author. Reed has written about AIDS before, but somewhat more offhandedly – stories about people who happen to have AIDS, but mostly – at least not in the ones I’ve read – not actually about AIDS itself.

Caregiver is about AIDS, no use beating about the bush, and about people who have it. Well, about one particular person, anyway, although all of the characters in this book are infected, in one sense or another, by the virus – by the idea of the virus, by the fear of getting it, or the travails of coping with it. Adam happens to be the only one with lesions on his skin. For the others, the spots are less visible but no less toxic.

Adam is a free spirit, and decidedly bigger than life. When the narrator, Dan, first comes to meet him -an assignment from Tampa AIDS Alliance Buddy program- he is surprised by the person who greets him at the door, wearing the classic little black dress and a string of pearls. Despite his terminal illness, Adam displays a winning insouciance that both astonishes and delights Dan (and the reader as well), and they quickly graduate from caregiver and client to friends.

Both Adam and Dan have recently moved to Florida from Chicago with their partners (all of them with ulterior motives, as it turns out), and both the relationships are troubled. Adam and his partner, Sullivan, clearly love one another, but Adam’s condition frightens Sullivan and their sex life has become nearly non-existent. It is apparent at their first meeting that Dan and Sullivan find one another attractive.

Dan’s relationship, too, is an unhappy one. His partner, Mark, is on a downward spiral of drink, drugs and partying–and, just maybe, Dan worries, HIV infection.

Those are the elements from which the author constructs his story, and I can’t go much further into the plot convolutions – and it is convoluted – without spoiling things. I’ve said already that the story is dark and it gets steadily darker before the characters and the reader get to see any light.

Overall, it works. Reed has a fine command of words that sometimes approaches the magical, and I think few readers will come away from reading this emotionally untouched. Even struggling with my personal aversion to AIDS novels, I could not stop reading until I had finished, and I don’t know how you can pay a writer any better compliment than that. And I’m not so great a fool that I didn’t know from the first page or so that this is a terrific work, insightful and bold, by a very talented writer who is likely to get better.

I can recommend Caregiver heartily, but have a hankie close at hand. Or, maybe instead of a hankie, a good stiff drink.
Or possibly a stiff something else. Reed does indeed know how to dial the temperature up.