Bending The Landscape by Nicola Griffith; Stephen Pagel

Bending the Landscape will be a series of anthologies focused on homosexual issues in genre fiction, but this one isn't so neatly pigeonholed as all that. Gayness, or someone's discovery of his or her gayness, is indeed a common motif to all the stories, but in some it is central; in others, it's just a quality a character has--they happen to be having or have had a relationship with someone of the same sex. It's generous in size, 22 stories, and generous in its embrace, ranging in tone from sitcom-like light entertainment ('In Mysterious Ways,' by Tanya Huff, and 'Magicked Tricks' by K. L Berac), to realism ('Gestures Too Late on a Gravel Road' by Mark W. Tiedemann, and 'Full Moon and Empty Arms' by M. W. Keiper), to realistic horror ('The House of the Man in the Moon' by Richard Bowes). Mythic fantasy, fairy tales, and ghost stories are all here too, so this is more like reading a survey than a tightly thematic anthology. The variety is appropriate. Neither fantasy nor sex comes in just one flavor. If you're at all interested in anything besides vanilla, sample this.