Unfinished

This chilling work uses standard horror fiction situations to illuminate the dread of living and dying with AIDS. The stories center on Jiggs, a hearing-impaired gay man tortured by the recent death of his parents. Seeking escape, he moves into a long-vacant San Francisco apartment. Following several supernatural occurrences, the apartment is revealed to be haunted by the Unfinished, spirits whose lives ended prematurely through tragedy, violence or betrayal. Jiggs's initially adversarial relationship with his spectral housemates soon becomes a partnership when both parties see each other as instrumental to ending their own suffering. The stories unfold via visitations by three Dickensian ghosts offering accounts of their deaths. In one story, a man dying from AIDS confronts the limits of his vanity when he realizes the terrible price of his wish to recapture his looks. In another, a car mechanic's soul is left to ponder how his weakness led to his murder. Laws ( Steam ), who wrote this while dying from AIDS, uses the horror genre as a vehicle to search for closure at life's end. In doing so, he also successfully imparts to readers what it means to be gay in the age of AIDS. (June)