Is "Such Times" one of the great AIDS novels?

While preparing to lead last night's lively discussion of Christopher Coe's 1993 novel, Such Times, I first looked online for biographical background. I found remarkably few references to the author or his two novels, which should not have surprised me given the fact that his Wikipedia page is a stub.

Fortunately, Coe's New York Times obituary is a bit more informative. Note that he died 25 years ago last month, just before the paperback edition of Such Times appeared.

Next, I sought reviews and commentaries, but found few even though it appears the book has remained in print the whole period. Most of the critiques I did find were laudatory, but few went into much depth beyond calling it one of the great AIDS novels. Just how great is a question few of the writers attempted to answer, but I would certainly put Such Times at or near the top of the heap.

One happy exception to the scant discussion of the genre is "New York Stories," a 2014 essay by Jameson Currier in Chelsea Station that not only discusses Coe, but lists about a dozen other books centered on HIV/AIDS. (N.B. In my original version of this posting, I lazily used the term "AIDS novel," but only about half the titles are fiction.)

Caveat lector: Conveniently, several of the novels on the list happen to be by Mr. Currier himself.

We've already read several of them, but here are a few that strike me as candidates for our future reading lists:

Eighty-Sixed by David B. Feinberg (1986)

Ground Zero by Andrew Holleran (1988; reissued and updated in 2008 as Chronicle of a Plague Revisited)

The Body and Its Dangers by Allen Barnett (1991)

Hard by Wayne Hoffman (2006)