Slash Ficlets

Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller is a 2022 speculative fiction short story collection themed around male coming-of-age and queer male sexuality*.

* Okay, can I still use an asterisk if I'm just going to immediately elaborate on that?

The thing is, I went through this book twice under two different apprehensions. When I read it the first time, I assumed this was written as a collection. It has a framing device that does a lot of heavy lifting to create thematic meaning and an overt narrative through line. So, while my initial disappointment was that all these stories with different protagonists from different time periods and walks of life felt so similar, I thought: "All right, that's deliberate. It's not really working for me, but I can appreciate the idea of all of these stories belonging metaphorically to one person who's been boy, beast, and man. The 'man' part is a bit of a letdown, since that's almost entirely external straight counterpoints to a queerness that is perpetually young and modern for its day. But 'YA with a higher rating' aside, I can dig what it's trying to do."

Then I realized all the stories were written separately for different publications, and I went back through with that in mind. The knowledge made me a little less forgiving of the samey-ness (and the awkwardness of the few times we did get other voices), but it also made me much more forgiving of the fact that the stories don't actually come together into something coherent beyond their basic shared worldview.

This was a "less than the sum of its parts" collection for me, where the individual entries didn't rise to the framing device, and even the framing device felt more...sanitized and self-conscious than I was expecting. It's the type of dark queer speculative fic that feels like it kept walking me up to the edge of an interesting premise and then carefully staying behind a guardrail that showed me the sights but didn't let me take the plunge. To the point that in aggregate some of those steps back and framing of mundane horror added up to something more conservative than I think was intended, and wasn't what I was hoping for from a collection with this title and a framing device about an anonymous hookup.

There are plenty of good ideas, executed very competently (albeit with a share of clumsiness around handling the diversity it's aiming for). Stories include a boy reckoning with his mother's fallibility through an encounter with a dinosaur on exhibition, a teenager developing mind control powers that he turns against his bullies, a father failing to meet his son in the time and place the son inhabits, and an oral history of events around the Stonewall riots. But none of them really grabbed me, or at least none of them kept their teeth sunk in. I think I felt primed for something a little more visceral, messy, and transgressive in a way I definitely wouldn't have been if I'd just encountered these stories separately in different magazines.

That said, there is a specificity to the viewpoints and language, so I think this is a situation where if you like Miller's use of language, his message, and his ways of conveying that message, you'll probably get a lot of enjoyment out of the collection. I'm aware that this is one of those situations where I'm much harder on a book that starts running in the direction I want but is ultimately heading somewhere else than I am on something that starts and stays miles off. I feel like the book overall expresses what the author is looking to express with a high level of technical ability on most fronts, but it just wasn't for me.

In lieu of an excerpt, here's the entirety of one of the stories up on Lightspeed Magazine's website: "We Are the Cloud" by Sam J. Miller