Ten Commandments

Wakefield ( Lot's Wife ) assembled nine other gay writers from Great Britain, the U.S., South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and asked them to write stories inspired by the decalogue. The result is a consistently entertaining anthology, ranging in tone from the dark ironies of Michael Carson's take on the prohibition against graven images, in which a sexually harassed Filipina housemaid prays to St. Therese of Lisieux, to the wildly funny bitchiness of David Feinberg, who uses gay phone-sex customers to ``dis'' the ban on adultery, and the sweet wistfulness of Wakefield's story of a gay man's relationship with his loving elderly father (perhaps the best story in the volume). The stories may not take a conventional view of the Ten Commandments, but they are intensely moral and hopeful, and leavened with a sense of humor that keeps the book from getting preachy or schematic. The only exception is Francis King's ``thou shalt not kill'' tale, which is leaden in comparison with the other nine. Several of the stories are formally inventive as well, such as Feinberg's, in which the adulterers both manipulate point of view cunningly. (Apr.)