Set in New York, this story follows a gay couple's personal struggles with serious illness and coming out issues, all set against a contemporary version of the medieval English story, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

"Ren is a New York off-off-off-Broadway director putting on a play derived from a medieval legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the legend, the knight breaks into King Arthur's court and makes an absurd challenge: the knight will cut off Gawain's head — but Gawain can return the blow in a year and a day; Gawain takes the dare. Ren, in his production, adds various contemporary touches, including a radical shift in ending. Meanwhile, Ren sometimes fantasizes that his lover Jack's father, boorish Malcolm Firste, is the green skinned monster-knight (they're not out to him). The tension turns critical when Jack undergoes radical stem-cell replacement for cancer at the moment when Ren's play turns into a hit: Ren is invited to Italy and wants to take Jack with him to convalesce, but Malcolm won't hear of it. Ren, however, discovers things about Malcolm's own love life that offer possibility of blackmail. What would be the knightly thing to do? It's a rather odd question, and readers, unfortunately, aren't given much reason to care; the closet thing just doesn't work. And while Ren's stagecraft and Jack's treatment are nicely described, Webster never gets the legend, the production and Ren and Jack's relationship compellingly aligned." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In this novel set in New York and Rome, Flamboyant New York theatre director Ren is passionately in love with Jack, a younger man who is still under the thumb of his conservative CEO father, Malcolm. Tensions mount when Jack becomes critically ill with lymphoma and has to undergo a bone marrow transplant which will either cure him or kill him. While Ren is tending to Jack in the hospital, he is busy staging his version of ?Gawain and the Green Knight.? Sandra Gilbert writes of The Beheading Game: ?Webster's new novel takes us on a tour of the labyrinths of desire and dread in which the games of love are played out. Her daring juxtaposition of the medieval romance of ?Gawain and the Green Knight? with throughly contemporary dramas of gender bending gives her tale special, mythic resonance.?