THE DISAPPEARERS, by Marlon James, arrives as a maximalist’s banquet amid a market of short novels and irony. At 600-plus pages, the Jamaican writer takes 90 pages to say hello, 70 before the story settles, and 150 before the reader comprehends his loping authority. The novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in 1980s and ’90s Jamaica demands to be talked about alongside Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” James hammers his themes relentlessly from oblique angles, advancing his attack each time.

This is another way of saying “The Disappearers” was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it.

A bonus is that James is casually funny, and his novel has Nirvana, Soundgarden, Duran Duran and Prince cassettes locked into its boom box. It occurred to me around Page 350 that James is near the front of the line, a decade or two from now, for the Nobel Prize. James lives in Brooklyn.

He’s in his mid-50s and is the author of five previous novels. The unmissable one is “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a multi-timbral novel about an attempt on the life of Bob Marley. It won the Booker Prize in 2015.

Its excellence is little disputed, but “The Disappearers” both resembles and transcends it.