Not Your Typical Anthology of Genre Fiction A Review of Death Comes Easy: The Gay Times Book of Murder Stories, Peter Burton, editor

By June Pulliam

01/17/2005

Burton, Peter, ed.  Death Comes Easy: The Gay Times Book of Murder Stories. London: Gay Men's Press, 2003.  459 p.

Fans of horror might have noticed that in the past couple of years, it's difficult to find new reading material without the help of Necropsy, The Locus Index, Fiona's Fear and Loathing, or other zines, for fewer and fewer bookstores have horror sections which would allow patrons to browse the latest titles.  Much to my chagrin, Baton Rouge's local Barnes and Nobles bookstores have collapsed their horror sections into the general fiction. According to one of the managers, this was because authors and their publishers objected to having their wares put on the shelves with genre fiction, as they felt the association with books by Dean Koontz and V. C. Andrews would lessen their own literary merit.

Sadly, searches for horror titles in sources such as Books in Print and amazon.com also fail to unearth a great deal of what could be described as horror fiction.  This in part due to the stigma an author might endure when being classified as a horror writer, and also due to the quality of contemporary horror, which challenges and transcends the often narrow parameters of the genre, and thus, cannot be easily put into any one category anyway. The latter is certainly the case with Peter Burton's Death Comes Easy. While the subtitle alone gives some clue to the book's content, it doesn't make any clear statement about genre, nor could it, as the stories in this collection don't fit into any such easy classifications. Nevertheless, fans of horror will be pleased with the 29 stories in Death Comes Easy, which contemplate the various motivators and participants involved in homicide.

Tim Ashley's "Best Eaten Cold" and Scott Brown's "The Collection Box" are both portraits of serial killers, but each is very different from those sorts of characters represented in maniac novels and slasher films. Ashley's story follows the career of a failed actress whose only success has been in the shadows of others.  She comes into her own as a killer after discovering that her new husband, a successful stage actor, has wooed and wed her so she can serve as his beard.  While she later punishes other men who resemble her faithless spouse in their sexuality, it cannot be said that her experience with her husband transformed her into a serial killer. Ashley does in a small space what many a novelist fails to do in a much bigger one--he creates vignettes that develop a complex character. This particular one has always had the potential for mayhem, and on some level, attracted to herself a spouse who would use her in just this way. Brown's "The Collection Box" is about a serial killing man of the cloth.  Reverend O'Leary, the protagonist, is a beloved and openly gay pastor with a huge following of gays and lesbians who have been rejected by other, more traditional churches.  The good reverend has a particular gift for getting his parishioners to transfer this love into the weekly collection box, which means that he must deny himself no worldly pleasure, save one. As a priest, Reverend O'Leary must remain celibate. But it's not church rules that compel him to keep this vow; rather he has a more pressing need to keep up appearances as a holy man, which keeps him from "getting his ashes hauled" too close to home.  Thus, when fate throws a beautiful young man into Reverend O'Leary's bed, he's completely unable to restrain his passion, which quickly crosses the line into murder.  But perhaps more chilling that Reverend O'Leary's homicidal impulses is the vast institutional conspiracy involved in covering up his crimes.

However, these stories aren't typical of the breadth of this collection. Others examine homicide on a smaller scale, some from the victim's point of view. Nicholas and Jack in "Strangers on a Plane" have a chance encounter. Nicholas intrigues Jack when he asks him if he "ever wondered what it would be like to kill someone." Eventually, Jack is given the chance to explore further an idea that until this meeting, he had never given more than a passing thought, as he sees himself as a man guided by logic over impulse.  Nicholas goads Jack into fulfilling his own darkest longings, eternally transforming the lives of both.  Similarly, Ellen in "The Excursion" explores the limits of her own dark side when she is lured from a relatively tolerant if tepid church to worship services with a charismatic Christian congregation who so strongly believe in the inherent sinfulness of homosexuals that they deny their very humanity. Ellen ultimately decides that the people in this new congregation aren't really her co-religionists when they gleefully show her videos of homosexuals being executed in the Middle East.

Nigel Fair's "Direst Cruelty" and Sebastian Beaumont's "Pisspants" analyze killers who simply snap. The protagonist of "Pisspants" acts out of a sort of self defense against school bullies, while a once promising actor who has now taken to performing at children's birthday parties in "Direst Cruelty" has had a belly full of being poked by brats and taken advantage of by their parents. Michael Hootman's "Britain's Fattest Killer Tells All" is a memorable tale of obsession and desire told from the point of view of someone who will never be among the genetic elite able to find willing partners seemingly without effort.

This impressive collection by well-known gay writers has something for all lovers of horror, mystery, crime stories.