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Title: Second Thoughts

Subtitle: More Queer and Weird Stories

Author: Steve Berman

Narrator: Mark William Lindberg

Format: Unabridged

Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-20-13

Publisher: Lethe Press

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies

Publisher's Summary:

In acclaimed author Steve Berman's second collection of 13 stories and essays, he again guides listeners through the darker pathways of his imagination. These are stories of regret: the scent of loneliness enticing odd children to eat away a fussy caretaker's historic house; a depressed accountant turns to monster hunting; and a young lover's temptation by handsome nursery rhyme. After each tale Berman provides a tangential author note that offers insight into his past trysts as well as his fears and dreams.

Members Reviews:

No Second Thoughts Here

I've been a fan of Steve Berman's fiction since reading his short novel VINTAGE, a love story involving living and ghostly gay teens. I read his collection TRYSTS a few years back. I somehow lost this collection in the shuffle of releases from Lethe Press in general and all of the multi-author anthologies Berman has edited in recent years and so placed it on my "TBR Challenge" List for 2013. I read it a few months ago, but then fell behind on writing my reviews, so here it finally is.

Unsurprisingly, I loved most of this collection. The stories are all speculative fiction of some kind (horror, fantasy, even a bit of SF). Almost all feature gay protagonists and antagonists, but the emotions they touch on and the life-moments they elicit are universal. Several take familiar stories and riff uniquely on them (for instance, "Bittersweet," which riffs on the story of the gingerbread man, and "Secrets of the Gwangi," which gives us a secret history of that great claymation dinosaur western "Valley of the Gwangi"). Only one, "Tearjerker," takes place in Berman's SF world The Fallen Area (visited previously in four of the stories in TRYSTS), a world I wish Berman would return to and develop more. "Tearjerker" is one of my favorite stories in the collection, alongside "Bittersweet," the disturbing "Well Wishing," which puts a different spin on the old trope of the lonely traveler who spends the night at a rural residence and is warned not to touch the farmer's daughter "or else," the longing-filled "Kinder," in which German brats infest a historical house and bedevil the live-in docent, and the playful-yet-dark "The High Cost for Tamarind," which takes place in an alternate London where the Fey thrive unseen among normal people.

There are thirteen stories listed in the TOC, but the book actually contains fourteen stories. Each piece of fiction is followed by an Author's Note, but even here Berman cannot resist tweaking the trope: the author's notes taken together tell a story with as solid a thru-line and building tension as any of the book's stories, adding a nice depth to an already full single-author collection.

inspired and highly original

Second Thoughts is a collection of extremely imaginative, often paranormal short stories along with a group of affecting and very personal author notes which weave more of a connected, largely non-fictional account. There are some instances where the notes noticeably stray from the truth, and at least one moment may give the reader a shock while he or she tries to decide whether the author is retelling an actual event.

Some of the stories take place in well-described and exotic locations such as Tampico, Mongolia or Japan.