Embracing The Dark

From Kirkus Reviews Anthology of 11 horror fantasies featuring gay werewolves and lesbian vampires, among other sex wonders. These are certainly a special taste, in more ways than one. Most are smoothly written and richly decorative, as if printed on lambskin, and share a leaning toward subjective whisperings rather than the hard ring of a plot. It's not easy to single out a winner in the nosegay, but perhaps Jess Well's ``The Succubus'' is the most compressed and intense-- though it is apparently a piece of a novel in progress. In it a woman finds herself being invisibly felt up and licked by a succubus while at work in her office, riding the bus, and then at home being granted the physical satisfaction of her most outrageous erotic fantasy: making love to her mother--a graphic climax. In Adrian Nikolas Phoenix's ``Sacrament,'' a 15- year-old AIDS victim plans to cut his wrists as he hurls himself from a bridge--but he is saved by a vampire, who gives him long life and a lecture on how Christ--a superhero like The Silver Surfer--was the biggest vampire of them all and died only two centuries ago. In D.T. Steiner's ``Moon Time,'' a girl with a fear of wolves is seduced by a lesbian werewolf and made one of the beasts of the moon cycle--a story with a strong grasp of the psychic and physical shifts of being a werewolf. ``Blood Relations'' is Jeffrey N. McMahan's background piece on the family of Andrew the gay vampire, hero of McMahan's novel Vampires Anonymous (p. 203). In ``Imagined,'' J.B. Law's gay writer is visited nightly in the dark by a beastly lover whom he at last traps in a lampflash, only to discover.... Read at your own risk. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.