BENDING THE LANDSCAPE: Horror
, BENDING THE LANDSCAPE: Horror Edited by
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)
FYI: While Overlook is billing this as the second in the series, it's actually the third; White Wolf published the initial volume,
Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997).
closeDetailsReviewed on: 03/05/2001
Genre: Fiction
The editors' third anthology of original gay and lesbian fiction (following 1998's
Reviewed on: 03/05/2001
Genre: Fiction
