The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times

Costello’s dark debut presents a wide spectrum of grisly queer supernatural shorts. Many of these 11 tales inhabit horror tropes, including “I Am the Other One,” in which a young boy’s ability to map his intentions onto animals has terrifying consequences. “Jill” is a bleak story of perverse desire involving vampirism and cannibalism. The ghost of a blocked horror writer’s late son possesses his father in “Emergent,” while “The Thing with Chains” finds a former child star desperate for a new role in 1980 Hollywood learning viscerally the consequences of only half-listening to a handsome stranger’s offer. The strongest entry, “The Hole of Dark Kill Hollow,” features a chasm in a small town’s woods that grants wishes but exacts unexpected costs. Less successful contributions eschew fantastical elements entirely. In the weakly comic title story, a woman’s scheme to seduce her recently out gay ex-boyfriend is complicated by a marauding escaped bear, while “Only Castles Burning” follows lifelong friends, a recently engaged man and a Cornell undergraduate with an unrequited crush on him, as they spend the night driving to a massive fire sparked by fracking. The eclectic mix makes it hard to imagine a reader who will resonate with every story. Still, the standouts make sifting through the also-rans worth it. Agent: Marie Lamba, Jennifer De Chiara Literary. (Mar.)