Fit for Consumption

by Steve Berman

Overview

In Berman's latest short story collection, the phrase "you are what you eat" is taken to heart; these are stories of men facing strange appetites within their own physicality, within a lover or, perhaps, a stranger's hungers. A young athlete attends an exclusive wrestling camp, but some of the campers are more focused on the unwelcome boys they claim lurk inside their bellies. A fixit man on a mission to retrieve a runaway finds himself forced into impersonating a pulp hero by her captor. Life as a pledge at a New Orleans fraternity is made all the worse when a magical--perhaps cursed?--flask that fills with whatever the bearer desires, yet also causes the drinker to desire the pledge. With stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ramsey Campbell, the menu has thirteen tales that range from the weird to the humour noir to the monstrous. No digestif is necessary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590212257
Publisher:	Lethe Press
Publication date:	10/03/2021
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Steve Berman has been writing queer and weird fiction for more than three decades. His young adult novel, Vintage, was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award. His editorial accomplishments include over thirty anthologies and winning the Lambda Literary Award. He resides in Western Massachusetts and owns a good deal of spooky artwork.

Editorial Reviews

08/02/2021

These 13 stories from Berman (Vintage) are equal parts tantalizing and terrifying, centering queer male protagonists plagued by horrors both quotidian and otherworldly. Parasites invade postapocalyptic refugees and teenage campers in “The Balm of Sperrgebiet Is the Krokodil” and “Unwelcome Boys,” respectively, while subtler horror creeps in at the edges of “The Letter That Doomed Nosferatu” and “Passion, Like a Voice—That Buds.” Berman takes the works of classic authors into new realms of possibilities in “Poetaster” and “The Unsolved ‘Case of the Club Tarrare’ ” and manages to capture many experiences of the queer community, from unique peer dynamics in “In Summer Broken,” to growing old without finding a partner in “D Is for Delicious.” Readers will be gratified that even among these macabre tales there are some happy endings for the LGBTQ protagonists. These tales offer a vast variety of narrators—modern-day teens, ill shut-ins, and multiple men from generations past—but Berman’s dense, poetic style is suited to some voices and time periods better than others. Still, readers seeking to explore the dark underbellies of the queer community will fall for these lush tales and forgive them their sometimes too-intricate trappings. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

08/27/2021

Appetite is everything in Berman's (Lambda Literary Award winner for His Seed) lush collection of dark queer tales that map the territory between a body that craves and the one it hungers for. It's a wide-ranging offering of stories, from flamboyant tales that bring to mind Poe and Lovecraft, to quieter, introspective ones that feel piercingly autobiographical. In each, desire is the engine that propels Berman's protagonists into shadowy corners of their worlds and themselves. Berman doesn't shy away from centering queer sexuality, and that is to the collection's credit. It's great to see queer characters unashamedly seeking pleasure and living wholly in their bodies. In the collection's standout stories ("His Mouth Will Taste of Chernobyl" and "Unwelcome Boys" foremost), queer desire is also an ache, and there's a sadness that comes with wanting. It's in these stories that Berman finds a warmth in the weirdness, and it makes this collection a satisfying entrée. VERDICT Readers hungry for something dark and queer will find much to chew on in Berman's bold collection. —Cody Daigle-Orians, Hartford, CT

Library Journal

★ 2021-07-01
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.

Kirkus Reviews