$13.00
ISBN 159021000X

Reviewed by William Dean
(07/07/04)

A tryst is usually understood to be a secret meeting of lovers, particularly when they are forbidden to unite by the conventions and surface moralities of their society. In this new collection of thirteen tales, Steve Berman guides us through such meetings with a sensual flair and, one supposes, a dark smile.

Steve Berman used to be a professional book buyer. His personal library must be an eclectic collection of strangeness and the darker secrets and confessions of many and varied writers. We can know this from the fact that this first collection contains stories that have appeared in Strange Horizons, Queer Horror, Goth.Net, Oasis, and Black Elf's Dark Desires. We know this because this is haunting and haunted writing; "Queer and Weird Stories."

There is in Trysts sometimes the desperation of longing and the curious lethargy that follows passionate outbursts. Obsession and the scuttling away in fear of obsession are difficult things to be good at in fiction. You're reminded of Lovecraft, of Clive Barker, and Graham Masterton; reminded of darkness and the odd vortex of desire for the utterly different.

I slid his boxers down, exposing his erection. Around the base was a sparse arrangement of silver hair that curved down to his scrotum. I leaned in closer to marvel at the dichotomy: it was both the softest skin and yet felt so hard like an icicle. I let myself rub along the length now and then gliding down to cup his sack in my palm.

Down in a dark, musty, and rare basement in New Orleans a man finds a hustler of a quite different kind than he imagined could exist...and succumbs. In an edgy artist's studio, the models take a bizarre revenge. In the Fallen Area, desire blooms among the Afflicted when a newbie arrives to take tea.

Meanwhile, in an imagined city called Prague...

And then he took what he wanted, pushing me against the wall, cold against my naked front, my ass kneaded by his hands. I felt no breath against my neck even though he was so close, so close that my skin itched from where he touched me.

A moment later I felt something heated and harsh impale me...

The barriers between what is physically written on the page and the mind of the reader are melded in Steve Berman's thirteen trysts. After reading these tales, you may wonder just what happened back there, somewhere in the labyrinth of darkness and mist.

Perhaps the word is macabre, reminding the reader of that crazed jig of Medieval times when mortality seemed so near and Endtime hovered in every hourglass; whether the denizens of Trysts are human, demons, angels, or merely lovers of another kind -- that will remain in the mind of the reader, I think.

This is a new kind of erotica. The best kind, perhaps, because it leaves you with a lingering hunger for more. Trysts is the perfect title.

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