Sunstruck is the debut novel by William Rayfet Hunter about a queer, mixed-raced aspiring musician who becomes entangled with the grotesquely rich Blake family. Though fiction, it is a story based on the writer’s lived experience: in particular, how the intersections within their identity have shaped, in Hunter’s own words, their “fascination with difference and what it brings into people’s lives.”
Aware of the novel’s emphasis on its characters’ domestic milieu – the protagonist’s cramped upbringing jars with the opulence of the world he enters – I instinctively pictured the author’s flat filled with clues about their writing process. When I arrive, the door is already unlocked (which I am told is policy), and I’m welcomed inside. We perch by the open bay window as they light a cigarette; people smile as they walk past. Almost instantly, I get the impression that Hunter is not the type of author who craves quiet isolation. They want to invite the world warmly in, and Sunstruck reads like an attempt to have us all glimpse the parts of their psyche that, at one point, might have felt too private or painful to share.
In the novel, the unnamed narrator – nicknamed WhiteBoy for his ignorance about Black pop culture – never quite belongs, but convinces himself he can find a home in Felix, the charming and mysterious son of the Blakes. His obsession develops the moment he joins the family on holiday at their chateau in the French countryside. It’s easy to see how Hunter’s early years informed this plot: “I grew up in a mixed-race family in a very white part of Cheshire, and so a lot of my life was spent observing and interacting with people who weren’t really like me.”
In certain moments, WhiteBoy is a character defined entirely by his observations; he reads more like a lens on the world than agent within it (“I feel very much like an afterthought … They [the Blakes] seem so relaxed while I feel so displaced”). His lack of confidence and tendency to lurk in the background mean he allows his notion of self to be shaped by others, especially Felix. “I feel a little shift inside me”, muses the narrator when they first meet, “like something important has been discovered.” As their romantic relationship evolves, it remains unclear if WhiteBoy has any genuine feelings toward him, or if he is trying to maintain his proximity to extravagant displays of wealth.
“ WhiteBoy doesn’t provide much analysis in real time,” Hunter explains. “He sees his current life through the lens of the past, through recurring flashbacks that shape his worldview.” The narrator’s accounts of childhood trauma are extremely vivid, moving and tragic. He recalls the day his estranged father appeared at his door; his sick mother rushed to hospital. Moments like these invite the reader into WhiteBoy’s complex interiority, while providing essential context to some of the decisions he makes in his adulthood. “My hope throughout the novel was to illustrate how the narrator is trying to heal from the past, but also how, in reinventing himself, he’s trying to find love.”
My friends are a constant source of joy, challenge and affirmation. They question why I act in a certain way and pull me up on my decisions
Hunter’s prose is consistently sharp and insightful, but one flashback in particular swept me away – the first time WhiteBoy has sex. “I could feel the surge of the sea in my chest […] He broke over me and it was done,” he reflects. I couldn’t help but see the influence of some of the coming-of-age greats in those lines – Sylvia Plath, JD Salinger – a testament perhaps to Hunter’s ability to contribute convincingly to the genre, while adding a unique, contemporary, queer perspective. “I think it’s important context that WhiteBoy is 21 years old,” Hunter says. “He’s freshly graduated from university, so his past still feels quite recent. This is the first time he’s seriously reckoning with deep emotional wounds”.
Another key theme of the novel is friendship and its role in our lives. WhiteBoy’s intoxication with Felix and the wider Blake family creates a chasm between his closest friends, especially Jasmine, who has no desire to assimilate. Rather, she views her Blackness as a source of “pride” and “righteous fury”. This tension between the two characters is intensified when the narrative transitions to London in the novel’s second half. A riot erupts at Notting Hill Carnival and Jasmine’s Black friend is beaten up by the police, stirring a political rage in the characters that simultaneously threaten WhiteBoy’s relationship with Felix and deepen Jasmine’s feelings about the entire upper class.
For Hunter, their dynamic feels as personal as it does political: “My friends are a constant source of joy, challenge and affirmation,” Hunter says. “They question why I act in a certain way and pull me up on my decisions. I think Jasmine acts, to some degree, as WhiteBoy’s moral conscience. She knows what his life could be like if he weren’t trying to twist himself into becoming something he is not”.
But as certain events unfold, it becomes clear that WhiteBoy cannot break away from the Blakes, no matter how hard his friends try to intervene or how aware he becomes of the danger he is in: “The intoxicating sense of belonging, of moving through a space I didn’t even know existed […] this is something I cannot give up.” As the novel steers toward its climax, tension simmering between characters, it’s words like these that remind us that WhiteBoy is at war with himself more than anyone else – something Hunter describes as the “collision of our multiple selves.” WhiteBoy’s greatest challenge is believing he has become the reinvented person he so desperately wants others to see. “There are sections later on in the book that make the reader question his version of events, but also how he is choosing to present to the world,” elaborates Hunter. “But I don’t think WhiteBoy is unique in this. We are who we pretend to be.”
I appreciate Hunter’s willingness to question the notion of authenticity, not just because queer scholars have spent decades trying to complicate the very idea, but because, as the interview draws to a close, the author asks if I want a straight – Vogues – and I instantly say “yes” because I want to come across as chic even though I don’t even smoke. Yet, I realise while taking multiple, performative drags that I feel completely myself around Hunter, in that rare way we tend to tell stories about years later. Perhaps it’s their unflinching honesty about the things we do to fit in, whether subtle or extreme, that makes us feel so at home.
