Book Review: Boys, Beasts, & Men

Image: The cover of the book is red with monochrome black illustrations of several dogs. There are 4 heads in total shown in a range from the neck forward to only showing half of their face. The dog in the center faces left and has a long, pointed, curvy tongue. Other dogs have several extra eyes on their head or embedded in their bodies. There are also eyes peeking out of the red background and splotches of black all over. Curving in and out of the illustration is the title of the book in large, capital yellow letters, one word on each line. Across the bottom in white is Sam J Miller's name. Below that in small black letters is "author of Blackfish and The Art of Starving."

I was actually introduced to Sam J. Miller via an excellent short story of his that I read in an anthology long ago. Thus, I was excited to learn that his new short story collection, "Boys, Beasts, & Men," was due out this year. Like most collections of stories, I found this to be a bit of a mixed bag. This makes it hard to rate. Overall, though, there are some great stories in here. 

As usual, Miller exhibits a ton of creativity. There are elements of horror and fantasy woven throughout the book in different ways. There are multiple stories where he takes real and major historical events (often from gay history such as the stonewall uprising and the HIV/AIDS plague) and adds supernatural elements to them. There are multiple stories where life is given to nonliving, inanimate objects in bizarre ways. As I hoped, there was regular exploration of gay mens lives and psyches in a variety of ways from the throes of love to the despair of self hatred and fear. There is a story set in the King Kong universe, told from a different perspective than I have ever seen. There is a soviet era story I enjoyed and wondered, as a USAmerican, what Russian readers would think of it. I thought "Calved" was probably the best story, though I have mixed feelings about the ending. "Angel Monster Man," is a very creative way of exploring gay culture, art, and propaganda with a horror element I have never seen before. 

Between each story is a snippet of a larger story tying things together. This was my first experience with this narrative tool. This spooky gay cruising journey was an interesting connecting thread with unexpected turns. I also loved the graphic design of this book. The fantastic illustrations that move beyond the front cover and throughout the pages really added to my reading experience. The end of the book tells us more about how old some of the stories are and even includes notes from Miller on each story, why and how he came up with the ideas, and so on. He also confirmed my nagging suspicion that some of the characters were familiar to me- there were a couple of Easter Egg cameos with characters from Blackfish City and The Blade Between.

The places that I think Miller could have done better were the way he wrote Black characters and his use of the r-slur. He needs to work on the whole show-don't-tell thing regarding Black characters. Any time we met one, it was as if his writing skill went downhill, relying on telling you someone was Black for you to know, but still never making me believe it. I did not have this experience with other characters of his. I also object to his use of the r-slur in multiple stories. I understand that sometimes, ugly words are written to show someone's character or what a disabled character has gone through. But, I found the prevalence of it to be unnecessary and felt that there were other ways he could have gone about it.

I did enjoy this collection overall. Even when I hit a spot in Miller's writing where I didn't exactly love the story, there was always a depth of creative risk-taking that makes me happy that he went for it. It's this sort of thing that brings new and visionary fiction into being.

This was also posted to my goodreads.