Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror

The 16 horror shorts in this brutal and audacious anthology explore the relationship between queerness, gender, and death. The authors approach queerness from a variety of angles and tones, and big names—including Gretchen Felker-Martin and Cassandra Khaw—appear alongside relative unknowns. M.V. Pine’s “Your Honor, I’d Like to Put You in the Shoes of One of Dr. Moorhouse’s Thirty Proven Clients” follows a transgender Vietnam War veteran who travels to Mexico to undergo experimental gender reassignment surgery and learns that bloodshed is hardly the sole purview of the military. In “Curdled Song of the Broken Earth” by Jonathan Louis Duckworth, a queer WWI soldier and a pompous, overbearing commanding officer who trades sexual favors for professorial knowledge find themselves transported from the battlefield to a purgatorial wasteland. In LC von Hessen’s “American Gothic,” a serial killer’s latest victim won’t stay dead, and the longer he sticks around rotting, the more his killer falls in love with him. “Lost and Found” by Charlene Adhiambo concerns a queer runaway who finds an unlikely friend in a mummified corpse with the power of telepathy. The cumulative impact of these tales is devastating, thought-provoking, and delightful. It’s a landmark in short horror fiction. (Mar.)