ROMEO & SEAHORSE

By Nikolaj Tang Lange

Published 19 September 2024

9781917008044 / Paperback / £10.99

A frantic love letter to love itself, Romeo & Seahorse is a sexy, frightening, tender, and visceral rush through Berlin’s chemsex scene.

Romeo has Hepatitis again. It’s no surprise, and anyway, there’s the promise of more drugs, more sex. Leaving his boyfriend at home he heads out for hookups, getting abjectly high and pushing his body to grotesque extremes in an urgent but dissociated quest for romance. What follows is a delirious trip through squalid rooms, hospital wards, and nighttime parks, broken by memories of first loves, European travels, and meditations on what it means to be a Romeo.

With chaotic chemsex escapades and musings on romantic love, art and belonging, Romeo & Seahorse takes us to places not often explored in fiction. Written in a relentless, frenzied first-person narrative with moments of mind-bending wisdom and poignancy, this is a one-of-a-kind novel about addiction, desire, belonging, and want that’s destined to become a queer classic.

“Graphic, lovelorn and unsparing, Romeo & Seahorse bears witness to a writer striving towards actualisation, placing his hand on the hot plate and holding it there. A fantastic voyage through unspeakable territories, it eschews self-pity and revels its own abject magic.”

- Lauren John-Joseph, author of At Certain Points We Touch  

"A brutal and necessary excavation of queer desire, sculpted especially for the end times we're currently living and bleeding through."

-Travis Jeppesen, author of Settlers Landing

“Romeo & Seahorse punctures the mythology of love with the tyranny of desire until everything bleeds out onto the carpet of domesticity left outside to rot in the musty weather. Yes, this is a book about addiction that actually hurts—spinning between tragedy and a happy ending, between absolute delusion and cynical collapse, between fire and emptiness, honesty and meltdown. So matter-of-fact that it becomes dissociated, so dissociated that it flails with embodiment, Romeo & Seahorse is a novel that crushes the novel form and hands it to you to smoke in a glass pipe that shatters with your complicity.”

- Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

Nikolaj Tange Lange is a Berlin-based writer, musician and adult performer. He's the author of four novels in Danish, most of which deal with Berlin subcultures; from ketamine-fuelled techno romance in 'Livet er en fest og så dør man' (Life Is a Party and Then You Die) to nazi accusations on the left in 'Antityskland' ('Anti-Germany'). Originally from Denmark, Tange Lange started his artistic career in the noughties in the Copenhagen trash drag collective 'dunst'. He continued as singer and songwriter in his NSFW electro-punk project Nuclear Family. As a porn performer, he has made films with directors like Courtney Trouble, Pigboy, and Axel Abysse. His latest novel Romeo & Seahorse is an exploration of romantic love, chemsex, and what the two have in common. The translation is done by Tange Lange himself, and it is his English language debut.