Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings from the Golden State

A walk on the wild side, these stories about everything from terminally ill S&M performers to seedy Hollywood types and gangland murders vary from well-written narrative to amateurish sensationalism. In one of the best and lighter tales, Allison Ander's wonderful ""I Fall Apart on Planes,"" the narrator recollects her mother's Great Gatsby-esque love affairs and heartaches. Two other strong stories look sensitively at transvestism. Bursting with anger, love, humor and confusion, ""Just Another River in Egypt"" by Jill St. Jacques conveys how hard it is for a kid to escape a hatefully repressive and cruel father. The author finds a gorgeous connection between cross-genders and tornadoes, ""Anthropomorphic funnel shapes, hysterical transsexuals of the wind and clouds, they leave grooves in the ground, spit out barns like cornflakes."" Bernard Cooper's equally compelling ""Burl's"" tenderly traces a boy's self-discovery and the literal and figurative trouble he has filling his father's shoes: ""I'd try on his wing-tips and clomp around, slipping out of them with every step."" Also fine is Jerry Stahl's taut and very funny ""The Age of Love,"" which catapults a 14-year-old into the mile-high club when he loses his virginity with a much older woman on an airplane. Unnatural Disasters has many duds as well, stories that mistake baseness for depth. Jim Kalin's dreadfully boring ""First"" reminds readers that alternative doesn't necessarily mean interesting. Ivan the protagonist goes to a wedding but spends most of the time wrapped up in dreary self-preoccupation. At the end, he and his indistinguishable friends perform a spit-on-penis ritual in the bathroom. However transgressive this is supposed to be, it is simply a grubby scene that does nothing to remedy the story's lack of invention or credible characters. (Sept.)