FIT FOR CONSUMPTION

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.