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Review

Wilde Stories 2011: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by The Snake, is a superior 14 story anthology, several of them being of the fantastical variety. There is a smattering of sci-fi as well (How to Make Friends in Seventh Grade), and a few all out horror tales, including the novella-length Mysterium Tremendum that owes a considerable debt to the fevered imagination of shockmeister H. P. Lovecraft. The vampire tale Lifeblood is poignant rather than horrifying, and the zombie story The Noise is amusingly ambiguous. The final vampire story, Hothouse Flowers: or The Discreet Boys of Doctor Barnabas, is a successful pastiche written in the style of the 19th century. In Love Will Tear Us Apart a man with a rare brain disorder is driven to do terrible things. The Map of Seventeen relates a young girl’s discovery of a fantastic secret concerning her brother’s lover. Mortis Persona, set in ancient Rome, is an imaginative tale about actors and the true meaning of the masks they wore. Another entry, the somewhat opaque but lyrical Oneirica, appears to be set in many time periods and in several geographic locations. In Blazon a man not only feels inner flames when contemplating sex, but apparently his passions can cause actual fires as well. The more conventional but well-told All the Shadows concerns a man who can sense impending deaths. Among the more clever entries is Beach Blanket Spaceship in which the captain of a Neptune-bound ship discovers that eternity is not dissimilar to a 1950s beach musical.

 -- Roy Liebman