A Review of: Double Serpent by Sam Max

Review by Candice L. Daquin.

UDP’s Emergency Playscripts series / Ugly Duckling Presse
ISBN: 978-1-946604-52-1 / 2026

As part of UDP’s Emergency Playscripts series, Sam Max was commissioned to write his play Double Serpent. There’s an electric revulsion, excitement, bridled horror and compassion for the discordant, genre-bending way by which playwright Sam Max evokes the underbelly of childhood sexual abuse from a gay man’s perspective. Max describes his dialogue as being a: “triple helix structure in which facts are dispersed slowly, like an IV drip.” Although there’s a multitude of essences here, as Max says in the interview at the plays end; “these characters are all simply parts of me who are in dialogue with each other, so they do share collective thought.”

Avante-garde surrealist works aren’t easily deeply understood but they are felt. It becomes a treasure hunt to discover beyond what’s being said beneath the layers. When you add to this, the machinations and games between homosexual men and boys, the author permits readers an insight into a very personal evocation of this staged universe. By stage I mean, the book is a play, the protagonists simultaneously known and invisible and the dialogue must furnish our entire understanding. From this, we glean a lot and nothing. How many of us admit to the baby-talk we have in our most intimate relationships? How many of us will disclose exactly what we do with others sexually? It is up to us to see beyond into the fog that is intimacy and sexual desire between men, to an even greater message in Double Serpent, that of the legacy of abuse:

Connor You’re in my mouth now
Eric 1 It’th warm in here. And thoft.
Connor Do you want to go down?
Eric 1 Make me go all the way down
Connor You sure?
Eric 1 Yeth big brother

It could be argued that this is unnecessarily gratuitous but it’s exactly the raw display that evidences a specific intimacy within same-sex relationships, something ignored and repulsed by mainstream publishing. Granted, like books on incest, rape and BDSM, there will be a limited audience. But many of those stories became our queer legacy and built a canon of understanding our own histories and experiences. In Double Serpent this is also adding to canon of survivorship and childhood abuse.

The kaleidoscope surrealism between Connor and Eric 1 is interesting because whilst it’s partially alluding to sex, it’s set in the game of childhood, and the literal but figurative description of cutting one out of another, speaks to so many facets of gay intimacy as well as the obvious allusion to organ-harvesting which is one of the cruxes of the overarching storyline. The canon of gay-sex and intimacy is relatively spartan compared to heterosexual and often falls foul of being stereotypical, so anything carving a deeper message, is necessarily highly valuable. We come to find out Eric 1 is Connor’s invisible friend, maybe the first awakening of his homosexuality, and Fake Dad doesn’t understand because of the physical harm Connor inflicted on himself in this game. So many questions aren’t asked, in the dialogue, they’re asked in the inference (Fake Dad? Cutting?) Which is brilliantly done. We feel intensely the pain of young Connor, whereby his burgeoning youth is stark contrast to the adults, as a means of touching on subjects that are far more complex than the apparent discussion itself:

Connor All the boys. They’re all very little. I don’t want them to get hurt.
Fake Dad They’re all much older than you, son.
Connor Sometimeth they theem like me to me.

Connor’s role is multifaceted, as he later says; “I’m available for purchase,” He is able to see abuses potentiality as a child, in preview of his own abuse, when Fake Father talks of what he does at the Safe House, where young men go because they’ve been kicked out for being gay. His father’s oppressive worldview blinding him to the bad ethics of his organ-harvesting from exploited live subjects. When Connor talks of gay boys’ experiences, Fake Dad shuts him down, like so many have historically, with the words “you imagined that.” The reader witnesses the atrocity through Connor’s innocence, even as he doesn’t yet know what is fully occurring:

Connor Will I play Double $erpent?
Fake Dad You can play Double Serpent
Connor While you and your friendth are upthtairs?

After an odd exchange, Connor’s nose is bleeding. Is he being abused? And doesn’t understand it fully? Is the point not to be sure because a child isn’t sure? We’re taken in as much by what we don’t know, as what we think we do and that uncertainty is potent. This uncertainty continues as we shift timelines and eras, going to an adult Connor talking to a lover, Felix:

Felix Of course it’s not true. Connor
Connor What?
Felix Look at me
Connor He was seventeen
Felix He turned eighteen while we were—

The power imbalance, the echoes of Connor’s childhood and the domination of men calling lovers “Kiddo,” who deny abusing boys. Portrays a boy trapped by circumstance like so many young gay men become without a circle of support. Those who know queer history may be aware, but outside gay circles it’s not common knowledge. It would be easy for an outsider to say, why do young boys hook up with older men, don’t they know what’s going to happen? What’s so brilliant here, is how it’s shown why this occurs, how choice is not really involved and what steps lead to outcomes, instead of just blanketing outcomes by blaming the victims. When Felix says:

Felix We were together a long time. Memory is. You
know... Kiddo, why are you shaking?

This is piercingly horrifying, describing abuses subtleties and it’s outcome(s) in this stark format of a play has a shocking result of not being able to look away:

Felix You want to play dead?
Connor Yeah
Felix Okay
Connor I want to be dead for a little

If those things were described in detail, you would lose some of the horror. It’s more horrifying and shocking to not furnish any details, to leave the reader to comprehend slowly as they read, and putting the pieces together understand the whole. As Max says in the interview: “Two or three words, when spoken by an actor, can carry an amount of meaning that’s disproportionate to what you’re literally seeing on the page.” He also identifies the power of not being overtly violent in action, “the element of violence is only carried in the language.” Which is perhaps best achieved in the writing of a play.

This unraveling is exactly how a child comes to understand abuse, and it’s disturbingly naturalistic for that reason. It’s the small things that are big things, like: “Fake Dad produces a pillowcase” and Connor saying to Fake Dad, “I know you’re not my dad.”

Shifting back and forth in time, the jarring, disjointed dialogue stitches together a story through disparate parts that are both shocking and realistic when you think of how memory really unfolds. The greatest value in this dialogue is its insights into power imbalances, male relationships and the legacy of abuse couched in gay men’s terminology, such as the understanding that asking for a kiss means sex, and locating one’s agency in being able to say no. When Connor says to Felix; “there’s no subtext” it speaks to a wider concept that everything is subtext in this book. Then there are more spelt-out scenes, such as Connor relating to Felix his conversation with Omar who says Felix hurt him:

He said can I ask you
something? I said sure. He goes: has he hurt you? I
said, what do you mean? He said I feel so crazy. I
said Felix doesn’t hurt me, okay? He said I feel like
I imagined everything, but I know it happened, I
know it did. I said you know what happened? He
said listen, I have the scars to prove it.

The forbidden, what everyone at the table isn’t saying, is sliced open and laid bare. At the same time nothing is fully explained yet, because Connor talks of Omar being sliced open by Felix, and Felix denies everything but then asks to put his head in Connor’s lap like Fake Dad and Eric 1 had. As a psychotherapist who works with sexual abuse survivors, this is a highly realistic way of evidencing how people process childhood sexual trauma, how it splits into parts, into people, throughout history, and comes together in shards. The final question in that sequence, where Connor asks; “why do you want that?” (putting head in lap) speaks powerfully to the determining question about abuse that any child would ask: Why? Why do you want to do that?

When Connor talks to Eric 1, he’s slipping between the video game Double Serpent, which is also possibly an abusive sex act Connor was forced to do as a child by Fake Dad and others, and Max writes outcomes with deliberate paucity:

Connor is silent for some time.
the sound of Connor playing a video game
somewhere else.

Describing how Connor is having a conversation with Eric 1 but also not, and also not present and also present, split, splitting. When the Double Serpent eats the ‘blinking foods’ he grows longer, possibly also a metaphor for erections and sexual abuse, using; ‘going down’ and ‘growing longer’. Splitting means Connor is talking to Eric 1 and is also the boy upstairs who may be him or may be a victim of organ-harvesting or both;

Connor there’th a boy upthtairth
Eric 1 What do you mean
Connor there’th a boy upthtairth. He had a pillow cathe on hith head

The lisp, the varied tenses of time and place, the icons of missing boys with pillows on their heads, are complex but deftly handled totems of abuse, whereby Connor is in the past, with Fake Dad, in the present with Eric 1 and in the future with Felix, and also the abused boy upstairs, at the Safe House and as the serpent. When Eric 1 asks:

Connor I jutht play the therpent until it’th over
Eric 1 Until what’th over?
Connor doesn’t respond

This is therapy, this is abuse, this is trauma, this is splitting and multiple angles of horror and undoing and Eric 1, while a figment of Connor’s interior life is also a piece of him in time. Speaking of his abuse, part of it, simultaneously witness and victim. Just as when Fake Dad and Felix are talking, we discover Felix is getting live doners organs illegally via Fake Dad’s network, and he is famous and in the film Connor likes as a child. We see the similarities between Fake Dad and Felix. The merging of trauma and abusers so visceral and horrifying, it bends reality and works without needing to shout it out:

Felix Want to know something crazier?
Fake Dad What?
Felix My boyfriend? He got cast as the new me

What’s real versus part of the trauma train, almost doesn’t matter, because the core messages are real, the experience of trauma is real:

Connor begins taking off his clothes.
Eric watches.
Connor What’s your name again?
Eric 2 Eric
Connor Oh
Eric makes a move toward Connor
Eric 2 You have scars man

It begins to come together, the concept of “Connor He’s into blood” Where we understand Connor’s boyfriend is enacting Connor’s abuse history: “Eric 2 Oh. What kind?” “Connor Kidnapping stuff. Brothers. Size. Doctor, patient.” When Connor says in answer to “do you like it?’ that it’s “familiar.” this speaks to the deepest livid scar of childhood sexual trauma, where children are inculcated into things they should never experience, they may have Stockholm Syndrome, where they empathize with the tormentor, even feel they love them, because everything has been warped and twisted and the tormentors control reduces them to compliance, even believing they are willing. But the distinction is, it’s not willingness, it’s a form of survival. Yet those abused will feel incredible guilt for responding sexually or initiating anything, because they’re shamed into feeling complicit and do not see that this is conditioning, not choice. In this, the victim loses their identity just as Connor has:

Connor Will you describe me to myself?
Eric 2 What?
Connor Just tell me who I am. Describe it to me.

At the close of the novel, we’re given the truth of everything we’ve suspected, it tumbles out through a cineplay of contrasts, Connor’s fractured life told by invisible friends:

Eric 2 He came from nothing. He had nothing, so America
assigned him a Fake Dad. He loved Fake Dad
for a while, like he was Real.

As Connor lies on the floor wanting to be told things; “as if he were dead.” When people write about abuse, they can do it wrong, or they’re so on the mark it’s painful to read, impossible even. This is that kind of story, but it’s necessary that we read it, because this is what actually happens, to thousands of young boys and men throughout the world, all the time:

Fake Dad takes you down to the basement.
He’ll come back for the new boy later. He guides
you to the room where you wait. You know the way
by now. You’ve done this so many times before.

Being prostituted; experiencing non-consensual sex as a child, not understanding your own homosexuality, under the ladle of shame, all still as a child, trying to understand what’s impossible to understand at any age:

You want to know
what happens in the world of adults, so you press
your ear against the perimeter of the box, but in
doing so, you break a rule.

It becomes at times, poetry, staccato, trauma-speak,

wound, you’re reaching for it.
You’re reaching for the wound
wound, you’re reaching for it
wound, you’re reaching for it

It becomes less about who is who, or what is what, as the wound, the result of the abuse, the intrinsic wound from abuse. Then the question all survivors dread, in this case about Omar’s accusations of abuse to Felix: “Connor How do you know it never happened?” and Eric 2’s answer: “Because the forensics people, they can’t find evidence on Omar’s body.” That’s when we realize, Felix received living organs, but some of this is also the metaphor of what abuse does to a person: Removes their organs, their life, their sanity, gives them to someone else. Speaking to all the organ harvesting, insalubrious people who take children and literally or figuratively steal their lives, their organs, their bodies, their freedom:

Connor The one we picked up. He died. I touched it
Felix Touched what?
Connor The wound that wouldn’t heal
Felix Wait. What are you saying?

The interview at the end with Sam Max & Derek McCormack is essential in wrapping this together. Double Serpent is a devastatingly intelligent treatise that whilst not easy to experience, mirrors the horrors of childhood sexual abuse and its legacy upon men, specifically gay men. The sophistication of its unfolding is prescient and insightful in a way few writers are ever capable of attaining.