<DIV>Like his legendary Hogg, The Mad Man, and the million-seller Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany's major new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders?explicit, poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking?propels readers into a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations?with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men.<br><BR>In 2007, days before his seventeenth birthday, Eric Jeffers' stepfather brings him to live with his mother, who works as a waitress in the foundering tourist town of Diamond Harbor on the Georgia coast. In the local truck stop restroom, on his first day, Eric meets nineteen-year-old Morgan Haskell, as well as half a dozen other gay men who live and work in the area. The boys become a couple, and for the next twenty years labor as garbage men along the coast, sharing their lives and their lovers, learning to negotiate a committed open relationship. For a decade they manage a rural movie theater that shows pornographic films and encourages gay activity among the audience. Finally, they become handymen for a burgeoning lesbian art colony on nearby Gillead Island, as America moves twenty years, forty years, sixty years into a future fascinating, glorious, and?sometimes?terrifying. <br></DIV>