From Publishers Weekly
The editors' third anthology of original gay and lesbian fiction (following 1998's Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction) is more of a mixed bag than its predecessors, "horror" being a convenient label for mainly ironic stories preoccupied with romance and extreme behavior. The tale perhaps most closely fitting the traditional horror mold is Simon Sheppard's Poe-esque "What Are You Afraid Of?," an intense inner narrative filled with film allusions and some sardonic reflections on S&M. In Barbara Hambly's "'Til Death," an amusing variant on Sartre's No Exit, an airport becomes a metaphor for hell as two women continually miss their flights while one shops and the other hunts a blonde. Fantasy is really the book's strong suit, as shown in L. Timmel Duchamp's "Explanations Are Clear," in which a visit to a tolerant Cajun family by two female lovers leads to tragedy in a Louisiana swamp. Two stories amount to SF: Holly Wade Matter's "Memorabilia," a sad soliloquy on the impossibility of relationships in a ruined world, and Mark W. Tiedemann's "Passing," an unsettling police procedural set in a violently antigay world where secretly gay police must persecute homosexuals. The overall high quality of these stories, whatever their label, should please the obvious target audience, as well as those horror buffs who aren't put off by explicit gay sex. (Apr. 26)it's actually the third; White Wolf published the initial volume, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997).
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
After a fight with your girlfriend, followed by way too much booze at a stranger's house party, you wake up naked in the bed of an unknown man, equally naked. Hard to believe for a straight-as-a-stick guy like you. Your whole arm is pinned beneath him, and you don't dare risk waking and confronting him, the situation, or yourself. So what can a supermacho, army-airborne-ranger-special-forces real man like you do, other than chew off your trapped arm and zip up your pants one-handed on your way to the hospital? Such is the poser posed by the first story in the second in an award-winning series of gay and lesbian horror story anthologies. There are 17 more newly published pieces in the book, including work by talented newcomers as well as established genre authors, running the gamut from Kraig Blackwelder's bit of flesh-and-blood goriness to Ellen Klages' chilling dreamscapes of a guilty mind.
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
