This ground-breaking X-rated collection of 21 short stories, edited by Michael Rowe, attempts to fill a vacancy in the genre of “gay horror,” a lonely literary realm that has thus far hosted only two notable occupants – Poppy Z. Brite and Michael Marano. Every story in Queer Fear features a gay male protagonist, something unheard of in contemporary horror fiction.

On a symbolic level, horror narratives, with their emphasis on monsters and misfits excluded from society, have always functioned as powerful gay allegories of outsiderness. Many of the stories in the book are, not surprisingly, written from the point of view of the damned or undead. In Michael Marano’s “The Siege,” two gay soul mates called the Second Born return from the dead to seek revenge on the parents who murdered them when they were children. Other stories explore “the monster within.” Particularly disturbing in this category is Thomas S. Roche’s “The Sound of Weeping,” a tale about a mild-mannered mortician who is surprised when the beautiful male punk corpse he is molesting suddenly returns his affections.

Only a few of the stories stay within the realm of the conventional horror structure. Douglas Clegg’s “Piercing Men” concerns two homosexual murderers masquerading as happily married men in suburbia. T.L. Bryers’ brilliant “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” concerns a young vampire wannabe who falls in love with a vampire and finds only pain, torture, and death as opposed to the promised eternal life.

It is unclear at times whether this collection wants to play with the gay reader’s worst fears or most secret fetishes. The eroticism that is the subtext of so much conventional horror is elevated to brutal lust in this collection which, in the end, can be described as a delightful potpourri of such uncommon perversions as neo-Nazi love, animism, pedophelia, necrophilia, and that queer favourite – the handsome high school homophobe who is secretly homosexual. In fact, if there is one thing this collection reveal it is that one person’s nightmare is somebody else’s wet dream.