Surrender Your Sons

Surrender Your Sons © 2020 by Adam Sass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition
First Printing, 2020

Book design by Jake Nordby
Cover and jacket design by Jake Nordby
Cover and jacket images by aarrows/Shutterstock, Yuliya Shora/Shutterstock, xpixel/Shutterstock, Brusheezy.com

Flux, an imprint of North Star Editions, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (pending)
978-1-63583-061-3

Flux
North Star Editions, Inc.
2297 Waters Drive
Mendota Heights, MN 55120
www.fluxnow.com

Printed in Canada

To my husband:
you never stopped believing in me.

To my parents:
my coming out only made us stronger.

To the surrendered:
find each other, and survive together.

Author’s Note
with Content Warnings

This book is a thriller. But just like with any thrill ride or roller coaster, there are some safety precautions we need to go over before we can all have a good scream. First, I want to acknowledge that you’ll find queer pain in this book. However, it’s not about queer pain. It’s about what queers do with pain. Queer pain is something we’ve seen either too much of in the media or bungled in some way. Pain is something queers deal with regularly, even if it’s just occasional feelings of isolation and otherness. In my experience, queer people process pain in many ways, but a big one is through humor. In Surrender Your Sons, you’ll find queer kids put through bad experiences, and then sometimes, they’ll make a joke about it.

Yet there’s no universal queer experience. That’s why I wrote a variety of different kids into this book. Being part of the queer community is like the ultimate group project in school. Don’t be the one who lets the others do all the work! No one likes that person!

One last thing to acknowledge is the “S” word. Feelings of self-harm can be upsetting to even hear about. As badly as I wanted to make Surrender Your Sons a suicide-discussion free zone, I was committed to showing the consequences of conversion therapy and I couldn’t fully tell that story without bringing up suicide. It’s not the whole book, but it does come up.

I promise you, the reader: in the pages of Surrender Your Sons, there’s light in the dark.

You’ll find scary things in this book, but just like in life, when the trouble hits, you’ll also find humor, good friends, and courage you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams.