Bending the Landscape: Horror »

Nicola Griffith is a world-renowned speculative fiction author. Her novels Ammonite and Slow River won the Nebula Award. Her most recent novel is Stay.

Stephen Pagel is an award-winning editor, president and co-owner of Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc., and a former national buyer for Science Fiction and Fantasy for Barnes & Noble.

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

These stories, written by writers both gay and straight, incite fear and spur thought, transporting the reader into realms of shock and dread.

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) FYI: While Overlook is billing this as the second in the series, it's actually the third; White Wolf published the initial volume, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.