Trysts

Trysts: A Triskaidecollection of Queer and Weird Stories
by Steve Berman
Lethe Press
ISBN: 1-59021-00-X

Steve Berman's 13-story collection, Trysts, is a collection of queer dark fantasy, but like all of the best queer literature, it's the parts that transcend sexual orientation and speak to all readers that make it memorable. Each story involves a tryst, a rendezvous with passion – all too often, dangerous passion. Trysts is, overall, a strong debut collection.

Trysts' only problem is that its strongest stories have been placed at the end of the collection, and its weakest starts it up. Thus, the reader must have faith that the book improves, saving its best four stories for the end, like a dessert of surrealism and strangeness.

The first story, "Beach 2," is a mundane and relatively uninteresting piece about a man who, with a nudge from a Ouija board, chooses another man over his own girlfriend. The weirdness quotient is low in this one, and its theme of choosing a same-sex partner over an opposite-sex partner has been done with more spice in numerous Nifty.org stories.

From there, though, the pace picks up. Two stories, "Stormed and Taken in Prague" and "Cries Beneath the Plaster" combine rough, if not deadly, sex with a fascination about statues; "His Paper Doll" is a low-key first-meeting story with a voodoo element; "Vespers" and "Left Alone" deal in very different ways with obsession and "unholy" pacts; "Path of Corruption" is queer Lovecraft, and "Finn's Night" is literary slash. "The Resurrectionist" is, perhaps, the hardest to pigeonhole, a period piece about incest, hatred, family responsibility and graverobbing. The stories show breadth of interest and style and reveal the steps Berman has taken since 1997 toward finding his authorial voice.

The final four stories were, to me, the strongest. "Resemblances," "Tea Time with Corn Dolly," "The Anthvoke" and "Hair Like Fire, Blood Like Silk" are linked by their common placement in a nameless "Fallen" city – what Fallen means is never quite explained, but it seems to imply some fall from mundane rationality into urban magic – and the recurring character of Caleb, a man whose power is to open what is closed, from doors to minds. The four stories are quietly surreal and invite comparison to Tor Books' Borderland stories and novels, but without the latters' boring reliance on Faerie. Berman's dark "Fallen" stories invoke a strangely fantastic cityscape without cliches and, best of all, without elves. With luck, Berman will eventually parley the "Fallen Area" setting into a novel or, at least, a collection of its own.

Trysts is, overall, a compelling collection of short stories that puts Steve Berman's name on my "writers to watch" list. I recommend it, and I'll be on the lookout for more of Berman's work.

The Harrow's Copyright Information and Disclaimer.