Wilde Stories 2015

This installment of Berman's annual reprint collection of gay speculative fiction leans toward the dark, intense, and extremely intimate, offering dystopian glimpses of worlds disintegrating around personal obsessions and failures. Though some of the 13 stories are essentially dark romance tales, complicated by vampirism, lycanthropy, or the supernatural, Katharine E.K. Duckett's "The Mortuaries" and Maggie Clark's "A Gift In Time" deal with themes of loss in the world at large. Berman includes several stories with inventive formats, such as the regal and increasingly disturbing letters of Tom Cardamone's "The Love of the Emperor Is Divine," the faux anthropology of Craig Laurance Gidney's "Conjuring Shadows," and the annotated and increasingly disturbed journals of Paul Tremblay's "Notes for %E2%80%98The Barn in the Wild.'%E2%80%8A" Berman's own "Passion, like a Voice%E2%80%94That Buds" is especially affecting, a beautiful Lovecraftian lens on a slice-of-life experience of disease. Every story is at the very least interesting, a good representation of the gay-themed creativity across genre journals and small presses right now. (July)