EMBRACING THE DARK

Anthology of 11 horror fantasies featuring gay werewolves and lesbian vampires, among other sex wonders. These are certainly a special taste, in more ways than one. Most are smoothly written and richly decorative, as if printed on lambskin, and share a leaning toward subjective whisperings rather than the hard ring of a plot. It's not easy to single out a winner in the nosegay, but perhaps Jess Well's ""The Succubus"" is the most compressed and intense--though it is apparently a piece of a novel in progress. In it a woman finds herself being invisibly felt up and licked by a succubus while at work in her office, riding the bus, and then at home being granted the physical satisfaction of her most outrageous erotic fantasy: making love to her mother--a graphic climax. In Adrian Nikolas Phoenix's ""Sacrament,"" a 15-year-old AIDS victim plans to cut his wrists as he hurls himself from a bridge--but he is saved by a vampire, who gives him long life and a lecture on how Christ--a superhero like The Silver Surfer--was the biggest vampire of them all and died only two centuries ago. In D.T. Steiner's ""Moon Time,"" a girl with a fear of wolves is seduced by a lesbian werewolf and made one of the beasts of the moon cycle--a story with a strong grasp of the psychic and physical shifts of being a werewolf. ""Blood Relations"" is Jeffrey N. McMahan's background piece on the family of Andrew the gay vampire, hero of McMahan's novel Vampires Anonymous (p. 203). In ""Imagined,"" J.B. Law's gay writer is visited nightly in the clark by a beastly lover whom he at last traps in a lampflash, only to discover.... Read at your own risk.