How Animals Mate: Short Stories (Sewanee Writers' Series)

If you like the kind of fringe element who regularly populate the fiction of Katherine Dunn or Mike McCormack, then Daniel Mueller's How Animals Mate is the book for you. Each of these eight short stories focuses on characters who range from the tragically outcast to the downright grotesque. The protagonist in "Ice Breaking," for example, is a gay man whose AIDS-infected lover has just committed suicide by mixing it up with a train. Having collected his boyfriend's remains into a sack, Sy Johnson then proceeds to drag the dismembered corpse out onto a frozen lake where he also intends to take his own life in a way that is gruesome and effective in equal measure. Things aren't much better for the gay hero of "Zero," whose business is being driven into the ground by his sick lover's spiraling medical bills. And then there's Amanda, the lesbian erotic dancer in "Birds," whose life is turned upside down in a heartbeat when she runs afoul of a deranged customer. The title "Torturing Creatures at Night" pretty much says it all, and then goes on to elaborate even more in this story of a grossly overweight teenage boy who revenges himself on the neighborhood by roaming through backyards at night armed with a remote control, changing people's television stations as he goes. Readers with a strong stomach and a penchant for the bizarre will find these dark, well-written tales compelling. --Margaret Prior