From Booklist
"Streetcar Dreams" is the World Fantasy Award-winning kernel of Bowes' exceptional dark fantasy novel of addiction and recovery, Minions of the Moon (1999). It's a helluva story, about how a gay man went all the way to the bottom when young, faithfully and destructively attended by his doppelganger, but then walked away from addiction and the double, and now, in middle age, hears that his shadow wants to see him again. Its five volume mates have similar settings, periods, plot and character details, themes, structures, and atmosphere, making Bowes seem rather a one-trick pony. But so do William S. Burroughs and John Rechy, two writers Bowes mentions in the semiautobiographical "My Life in Speculative Fiction," which suggests that he knows the Boston, New York, gay hustling, and drugs he writes about all too personally. And the purely fictional pieces have their well-realized distinctions, such as a compelling female protagonist in "Someday I Shall Rise and Go" and a plunge into ghastly horror in "Transfigured Night." Very exciting, somber stuff. Ray Olson
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Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
