Triads — Poppy Z. Brite

In 1997, Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust's novella “Triads” was published in the groundbreaking anthology Revelations. Here, they pick up where the novella left off and follow their characters through further adventure, love, and heartbreak.

In 1937, two young boys escape their cruel Peking Opera training and hit the streets of Hong Kong. Rescued by a foppish half-breed aesthete, they travel to prewar Shanghai to run a mysterious errand for a shadow criminal organization…but then the Japanese bomb China, and everything goes terribly wrong.

In 1945, Nan Blake is a hardboiled Hollywood writer with a secret…she isn't the man her beautiful starlet girlfriend believes her to be. Who is the mysterious Chinese stuntman hiding in the background, and why does he want to help her?

In modern-day Los Angeles, Jake Ryan is poised at the brink of a promising action-movie career…but what if his studio finds out he's gay, and why does he keep seeing that strange, ghostly Chinese man?

Brite and Faust weave together these disparate threads like strands in an exquisite piece of Chinese silk. By turns exotic and thrilling, violent and tender, Triads is a roman noir of a different color.