What Burns

September 9, 2019
Peck (Night Soil) writes beautifully about desire in his first story collection. Some stories border on the absurd in a comical way, especially the two that open the book, “Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore,” about a wise-before-his-time five-year-old who is obsessed with his babysitter’s teenage son, and “Bliss,” about one man’s experience attending a support group for those affected by murder who befriend their loved ones’ murderers. The bulk of the stories are more sinister or violently shocking. In “Dues,” for example, a man becomes obsessed with how everyone is condemned to repeat certain histories after a stranger attacks him. And in “Summer Beam,” a novella split in two that ends the book—which is perhaps the strongest in the collection—a woman retreats to her family’s vacation home to escape her dissolving marriage, only to find more pain waiting for her. While some stories veer a bit too much into the didactic, especially about the state of the world, Peck is best when writing confidently about the uncomfortable reality humans live in. This is an evocative collection.

October 15, 2019
A collection of inventive stories about queer life that is often too edgy for its own good. Peck (Night Soil, 2018, etc.) returns with his first story collection, with tales that circle around questions of belonging, entrapment, violence, and the frustrated desire for intimacy. Most often Peck trains his attention on relationships between queer men, most of which are laced with melancholy if not outright misanthropy. In "The Law of Diminishing Returns," an American writer who's decamped to London struggles to attain intimacy when all he seems to attract are men who don't want to be in relationships with him. "I was one of those things that can be used only once," he worries. "People like Derek, I thought...they were able to have boyfriends and still find the time for trysts...whereas it was all I could manage to be someone's someone else." In the hilarious "Sky Writing," a man boards a flight and tells a college student sitting next to him the story of his doomed relationship with a wealthy capitalist, whose love requires him to travel around the world interminably; meanwhile, he pursues potential romance with a flight attendant. "Bliss" finds a young man sheltering the thug who murdered his mother, for reasons that no one--not even the man himself--can make sense of. Stories like these find Peck in fine, counterintuitive form, spinning fiction from the most unlikely and captivating premises, writing in a mode that rides the line between horror and erotica. When he allows himself to step out of his self-fashioned quirkiness the stories attain a level of emotional honesty that stuns. However, Peck too often falls prey to his own impulses toward provocation, resulting in stories that nauseate without much intellectual payoff. In "Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore," a 5-year-old fixates on a teen boy in terms that are explicitly sexualized. Peck handles the subject more for laughs than thought, and the result is a story that plays into dangerous stereotypes about gay men. The collection's final two stories, "Summer Beam" parts one and two, end in a disgusting incident of misogynist violence that haunts, but only because it feels willfully mean-spirited and poorly plotted. A fresh collection marred by its author's insistence on provocation.

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October 15, 2019
This collection of stories authored over 25 years by Lambda Literary Award winner Peck (Night Soil, 2018) can be an uncomfortable read by design. The lead story features a five-year-old boy hitting on the teenage son of his babysitter and includes raunchy advice for how to keep a man. Another story tells of a murdered mother's son building a friendship with her killer, in part because he finds prison stories of a similar vein to be fascinating. Suicide, murder, deviation from norms, and language that captures these crossed boundaries are common threads to these stories. Peck is a brave, bold writer who disallows a safe, predictable reading experience. The final line of a story often cracks it open in unanticipated ways. His writing style is a combination of readable, experimental, clear, and challenging, and he shows great range over his career. Not every reader will connect with these stories, each with desire burning at its core, but those with a tolerance for what lies outside the margins will find reality and humanity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)