Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened

Niedzviecki, author of the timely and scathing non-fiction book, The Peep Diaries, once again chooses voyeurism as a central theme in his latest short story collection. In "The Sexographer," a married man snaps pictures of randomly chosen women in the act of having sex with him for his art project. In "Real Estate," Mr. Zikowitz wants a child prostitute, even though his wife is ready to have a baby, and in "Sometime Next Sunrise," a grown son wants only to sneak away from the family vacation to have sex with his girlfriend, while his depressed father tries endlessly to take him to a theme bar called "Tequila Mockingbird." Most of these stories deliver the small, narrowly focused point-of-view of men, but the most successful, "Prenatal," is a brief portrait of a high-school girl named Charlie whose growing fetus connives to get himself aborted. For all the oddities and sexual deviance in these stories, most fail to circumvent expectation, ending abruptly and without clear resolution. Since many of these tales fall flat in both premises and characterization, perhaps voyeurism's inherent passivity is the author's biggest hurdle. (Apr.)