Close Contact: Tales of Erotica

Boy meets boy. Boy wants boy. Boy satisfies boy. Almost all of the 28 erotic stories in Wolfe's steamy collection rocket along that predictable sexual track. The author works plausible settings and varied characters into the sex, but despite occasionally flashy prose and the odd sparkle of humor, every story's climax is all about the climax. In the first tale, ""Badland's Bad Boy,"" a 27-year-old naif from a small Texas town (all the ""boys"" in story titles are, in fact, young men) finds, in a sex-soaked Castro Street bar, the man of color he's long had a hankering for; in the last tale, ""Next Stop... Paradise,"" a college kid from Wichita, Kans., on his first visit to San Francisco, finds on the Market Street underground MUNI line the sexual passion he's long dreamed of. The settings in between vary-a frat house, a bathhouse, a city park, a wedding party, a rodeo-but the getting-it-on, getting-off riffs wear thin quickly. This latest collection of graphic gay erotica (after Michael Thomas Ford's more nuanced and graceful Tangled Sheets) is a serviceable departure for Kensington, which is better known for its light gay romances and gay mysteries, as well as a handful of more literary coming-out, coming-of-age debut novels.