Why?

So, another one of the raffle books I won was Shadows of the Night: Queer Tales of the Uncanny and Unusual edited by Greg Herren. Given my reserves at the library just came in and I can't get there, I'm more or less wasting time until I can get there. (We had inventory this week. I've been busy.)

Anyway, the intro makes it sound like GAY HORROR! and indeed name drops sever queer fictions that meet that criteria. This one struggles to meet bad Doctor Who fan fiction levels of awful.

I mean, of the 14 stories within, most of them are not at all memorable, and the ones that are aren't memorable for good reasons. And while a few of them have horror themes, NONE of the remotely fall into the Horror or even thriller/suspense genre.

How bad is it? "Sic Gloria Transit" by Marshal Moore starts off sounding like a "Monkey's Paw" rip off and ends up being Airplane II. "The Abdominable Snowman" by Lawrence Schimel involves a Sasquatch that wants to work out to Richard Simmons. Even the final story, "Fever"by Victoria A Brownworth, which gets lavished with praise on the back cover makes lesbian succubus sex boring. And let's not forget M. Christian's trite morality tale "Bitch" where in the course of 5 pages a bitter man coming out of a relationship complains online about the twinks partying next door, only to wind up encouraging someone to go kill them.

Frankly, about the only reason to pick this up is to get a bibliography of other, better works of queer horror/thriller/suspense books as listed in the introduction.