Entertaining tales of the macabre, sure to cause shivers and indigestion.
Creepy things happen—and are frequently eaten—in these tasty gay horror stories.
Berman’s characters seethe with illicit desire and, often, ingest inappropriate substances. Among the narratives: A few survivors of an African apocalypse lie in wait for refugees to arrive at their desert lair and provide a source of food; a gay man in 19th-century Baltimore takes in a waif who has been bitten by Edgar Allan Poe—and starts turning into the lugubrious writer; a teenager at a wrestling camp struggles to suppress his appetite and his gay impulses amid a crowd of boys who are feeding strange presences within them; a photographer imprisoned for pedophilia gets out and falls in with an innocent-seeming rustic; a school nurse meets an old lesbian flame who says she can stay young forever—if she dines on children; and a Tulane fraternity pledge wins friends and influences people with a magic flask that holds unlimited quantities of whatever liquid a drinker wants most. Berman’s fables are skillful, well-turned genre pieces, full of moody atmospherics—“black is fashionable, black is everywhere,” he writes of a cabaret in Berlin; “black is the only option other than pale skin and shirts and the atmosphere of gray smoke that hides the ceiling”—and punchy prose in many registers, from Kafkaesque ambiguity to macho adventure. (“She wore a skimpy number that would have given the happiest of married fellahs nervous ideas. Those lips, red and plump, savored rather than breathed the air.”) The horror is initially psychological, building through allusion and rumination to sudden eruptions—“fireworks of blood stipple the window, silhouette his head as he begins what I first think is trying to eat the pane, but soon realize by the way he’s licking and nipping the window, is him trying to kiss his reflection”—and quieter, queasier tableaux. (“The kid is staring down at a dead squirrel on the asphalt, and starts to poke it…then the boy pries apart a piece of the carcass and shoves it into his mouth. When he starts chewing with his mouth open, a bit of tongue slips out to wipe at his cracked lips.”) The result is a satisfyingly weird and icky read with serious literary chops.
Entertaining tales of the macabre, sure to cause shivers and indigestion.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59-021225-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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