Bend Sinister: The Gay Times Book of Disturbing Stories

For the most part, the stories here collected left me with a feeling of “sad” rather than “disturbed,” featuring, as they do, many lonely, lost, middle-aged gay men wandering the world in pursuit of what they never can or will have. The sadness was heightened by a strong tendency to “kill your gays,” but one can hardly hope for happy joy in a book with such a title. But one story was, in its perverse way, really quite beautiful to me, and another, “Touching Darkness” was the most disturbing thing I have ever read and was, on its own, worth the effort of reading the whole sometimes depressing collection.