Short Story Anthologies, Gay & Lesbian Fiction, Horror

Bending the Landscape: Horror

Name: Bending the Landscape: Horror
Author: Nicola Griffith
ISBN: 9781585671168

by Nicola Griffith (Editor), Stephen Pagel

Write a review

Overview

Bending the Landscape: Horror brings together a tantalizing slew of truly horrifying tales guaranteed to provoke, entertain, and inspire fear in even the most seasoned horror aficionado. World-renowned fantasy author Nicola Griffith and fantasy publisher Stephen Pagel have compiled an exciting array of never-before-published stories, both from talented newcomers and award-winning genre veterans.

These stories, written by writers both gay and straight, incite fear and spur thought, transporting the reader into realms of shock and dread.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

The editors' third anthology of original gay and lesbian fiction (following 1998's Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction) is more of a mixed bag than its predecessors, "horror" being a convenient label for mainly ironic stories preoccupied with romance and extreme behavior. The tale perhaps most closely fitting the traditional horror mold is Simon Sheppard's Poe-esque "What Are You Afraid Of?," an intense inner narrative filled with film allusions and some sardonic reflections on S&M. In Barbara Hambly's "'Til Death," an amusing variant on Sartre's No Exit, an airport becomes a metaphor for hell as two women continually miss their flights while one shops and the other hunts a blonde. Fantasy is really the book's strong suit, as shown in L. Timmel Duchamp's "Explanations Are Clear," in which a visit to a tolerant Cajun family by two female lovers leads to tragedy in a Louisiana swamp. Two stories amount to SF: Holly Wade Matter's "Memorabilia," a sad soliloquy on the impossibility of relationships in a ruined world, and Mark W. Tiedemann's "Passing," an unsettling police procedural set in a violently antigay world where secretly gay police must persecute homosexuals. The overall high quality of these stories, whatever their label, should please the obvious target audience, as well as those horror buffs who aren't put off by explicit gay sex. (Apr. 26) FYI: While Overlook is billing this as the second in the series, it's actually the third; White Wolf published the initial volume, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

About the Author, Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith is a world-renowned speculative fiction author. Her novels Ammonite and Slow River won the Nebula Award. Her most recent novel is Stay.

Stephen Pagel is an award-winning editor, president and co-owner of Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc., and a former national buyer for Science Fiction and Fantasy for Barnes & Noble.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Griffith and Pagel carry on their gay and lesbian series (Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, 1998) with 18 original horror tales. Horror is a narrower vein than fantasy or science fiction, and adding a gay/lesbian imperative narrows it even more, although none of these stories can be described as erotic. Among the stronger entries is the opening tale, "Coyote Love," by Kraig Blackwelder, which reminds us that trapped coyotes will sometimes gnaw off a leg to escape. A strapping Army Ranger, who knows many ways to kill by hand, has an argument with his girlfriend, gets drunk, and wakes up in bed with a man, his arm numb under the sleeper's body. Goaded by thoughts of his father, who lost an arm in the war, the ranger decides to follow the coyote's lead rather than wake his bedmate. In Simon Shepard's "What Are You Afraid of?" (another solid effort), the narrator dreams again and again of being trapped in a rambling old dark house. He will never escape that house: it's his own body, as if a putrescent Dorian Gray or Norman Bates dressed up as his mother. "The Man Who Picks the Chamomile," by Mark McLaughlin, portrays a gay couple of 13 years, one of whom has a mystical belief in the chamomile he picks and eats daily, and chronicles the dire consequences when the other (who's also the narrator) stops eating and drinking it. In Leslie What's "The WereSlut of Avenue A," young Helen's much older lover, Agatha, "goes animal" when "on her moon" and must be bound in leather and shackled to the bedpost. As a whole the anthology really registers. Whether gay, lesbian, or straight, readers may get the haunted feeling that they are reviewing their own lives.