Product Description

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, from both talented newcomers and award-winning genre veterans.

In Kraig Blackwelder’s "Coyote Love," a man wakes up in a stranger’s bed, not knowing how he got there, after a drunken night out. Terror ensues as the reader is shown just how far a person is willing to go to deny reality. In "The WereSlut of Avenue A," Leslie What shows us that change is not always a good thing, as we witness what may or not be a transformation into something inhuman. These stories, written by writers both gay and straight, incite fear and spur thought, transporting the reader into realms of shock and dread.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1756688 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04
• Released on: 2003-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

From 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)it's actually the third; White Wolf published the initial volume, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997).

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
After a fight with your girlfriend, followed by way too much booze at a stranger's house party, you wake up naked in the bed of an unknown man, equally naked. Hard to believe for a straight-as-a-stick guy like you. Your whole arm is pinned beneath him, and you don't dare risk waking and confronting him, the situation, or yourself. So what can a supermacho, army-airborne-ranger-special-forces real man like you do, other than chew off your trapped arm and zip up your pants one-handed on your way to the hospital? Such is the poser posed by the first story in the second in an award-winning series of gay and lesbian horror story anthologies. There are 17 more newly published pieces in the book, including work by talented newcomers as well as established genre authors, running the gamut from Kraig Blackwelder's bit of flesh-and-blood goriness to Ellen Klages' chilling dreamscapes of a guilty mind. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A winner from start to finish. It will delight fans with its solid foundation in genre conventions and its gay characters. For readers less familiar with science fiction it offers an opportunity to explore the genre with the comfort of gay characters to help them find their way." -- Rob Gates, The Washington Blade

"[Griffith and Pagel] ought to be commended for selecting such a diverse group of writers and the writers themselves praised for creating stories that bring the science fiction genre to a non-science-fiction public." -- J.E. Robinson, Lambda Book Report

Customer Reviews

Not up to par
Having read the Science Fiction volume of this series, I was pleased when this book was selected by my local book group and I approaching reading it with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, like everybody else in the book group, I was pretty disappointed. The stories in this collection are not satisfying as horror (e.g. they're not scary, creepy, don't cause feeling os paranoia), nor are many of them satisfying as gay stories (e.g. almost all the relationships in the book are negative and some stories barely have gay content at all). Many of the stories provoked what we in our book discussion called an "eh?" reaction -- too slow, lacking horror element, lacking element of a "story" with start, middle & end. There were a few stand-out stories (my favorites were "Broken Canes," "Memorabilia," and "Blood Requium") but the problem is that even the good stories failed as horror. I would say the collection is "OK" but if you don't read it, it's not a big miss.

Bending the Landscape: Horror
Some of the stories here are excellent, the best in my opinion being "Coyote Love". Mark McLaughlin, Barbara Hambly and Mark Tiedemann also contribute strong stories. Generally, the level is professional, although there are a few clunkers.

These stories mostly go beyond "minority literature" and should appeal to readers of speculative fiction and short stories in general.