Locus Award Winner – Best Collection World Fantasy Award Nominee
“Sam Miller is my hero: a fearless visionary whose stories are at once vivid, electrifying, brutal, and full of heart. Oh, the heat of them.”
—Sarah Pinsker, author of Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
Queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and satisfying revenge seamlessly intertwine in Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving)’s long-awaited debut short story collection. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the beings in Miller’s gorgeously-crafted worlds can destroy you—yet leave you longing for them even more.
ISBN: Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-3729; Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-373-6
Published: June 2022
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital
In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection, featuring an introduction by Amal El-Mohtar, queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the beings in Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy readers, yet leave them wanting more.
“Miller’s sheer talent shines through in abundance . . . Boys, Beasts & Men is an outrageous journey which skillfully blends genres and will haunt you with its original, poetic voices as much as its victims, villains, and treasure trove of leading actors.” —Grimdark Magazine
[STARRED REVIEW]“Longing, heartbreak, and the deep desire for, but great difficulty of, love. . . . Highly recommended for any reader interested in speculative fiction that concerns itself with queer themes.” —Booklist
Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death.
Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving) shows his savage wit, unrelenting candor, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer.
***
Contents
Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar
Allosaurus Burgers
57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides
We Are the Cloud
Conspicuous Plumage
Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart
Shucked
The Beasts We Want to Be
Calved
When Your Child Strays from God
Things With Beards
Ghosts of Home
The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History
Angel, Monster, Man
Sun in an Empty Room
2022 LocusAward Winner 2022 World Fantasy Award Nominee
BookPage Most Anticipated Sci-Fi & Fantasy of 2022 Literary Hub May’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Buzzfeed Amazing New Science Fiction And Fantasy Beach Reads 2022 Reads Rainbow Award, Shortlist Gizmodo New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books for Your Summer Reading Pleasure Tor.com Reviewer’s Choice: The Best Books of 2022
[STARRED REVIEW] “Boys, Beasts & Men is the first short story collection from Sam J. Miller, whose previous novels have included the grim speculative world of Blackfish City and the horror-noir of The Blade Between. This collection showcases his incredible versatility and imagination in stories that often put a fantastical twist on finding queer love or belonging.
—Shelf Awareness
[STARRED REVIEW] “Miller’s (The Blade Between, 2020) debut story collection gathers together a large selection of his short fiction. Most stories use various fantastical devices to reflect on gay men, their families, or their lovers. Some stories are sf, like ‘We Are the Cloud,’ where a young gay Black man deals with the insecurity of newfound love as well as the dataport in his neck, or Miller’s rewriting of John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing as a story of AIDS and the closet in ‘Things With Beards.’ Others are more fantastical or gothic such as ‘The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History,’ where the rage of the Stonewall Riots results in literal pyrokinesis or the fictional famous gay artist created by three men with AIDS (an echo of Miller’s last novel) in ‘Angel, Monster, Man.’ Even the stories that don’t feature gay relationships directly, such as the internal monologue of a Salvation Army chair in ‘Sun in an Empty Room,’ feature Miller’s frequent concerns of longing, heartbreak, and the deep desire for, but great difficulty of, love. Highly recommended for any reader interested in speculative fiction that concerns itself with queer themes, particularly messy or emotional ones.”
—Booklist
[STARRED REVIEW] “Finding danger and humanity in their characters, the short stories of Boys, Beasts & Men marry emotional epiphanies with violence, resulting in imaginative, stirring meditations on LGBTQ+ struggles and acceptance.”
—Foreword
“Miller’s sheer talent shines through in abundance . . . Boys, Beasts & Men is an outrageous journey which skillfully blends genres and will haunt you with its original, poetic voices as much as its victims, villains, and treasure trove of leading actors.”
—Grimdark Magazine
“The stories in this collection offer a nuanced and beautiful exploration of masculinity and the many faces of love, touching on romance, desire, family, and friendship, all presented through the lens of the fantastic—with literally mind-altering drugs, resurrected dinosaurs, near-future worlds in post environmental collapse, and of course, monsters.”
—A. C. Wise, The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories
“Sam Miller is my hero: a fearless visionary whose stories are at once vivid, electrifying, brutal, and full of heart. Oh, the heat of them.”
—Sarah Pinsker, author of A Song For A New Day and Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
“Miller’s fantasy and science fiction short stories have won and been nominated for numerous awards, though this is his debut short story collection. The collection opens with an allosaurus making a sudden appearance in a small town and a child learning to see his mother differently in its wake. “Ghosts of Home” occurs during the 2008 housing crisis, when spirits that haunt houses grow lonely after the owners leave. Many stories embrace queerness, such as “The Heat of Us: Notes Towards an Oral History,” an alternative history of the Stonewall Riots where the supernatural threads its way through the queer people who fight back against police brutality. All 14 of these brilliant, character-driven short stories are perfectly crafted, subtly altering reality using SFF elements while managing to fully explore the repercussions of doing so with the conciseness a short story requires.”
—Buzzfeed
“Miller’s debut short fiction collection looks to appeal to both fans of his speculative and dystopian novels Blackfish City and The Blade Between, as well as those new to his body of work. . . . Queerness pulses through these fourteen stories.”
—Literary Hub
“This is the collection you are looking for. Explosive, careening, shape-shifting tales . . . haunting and defiantly tender.”
—Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
“Sure to please fans of cli-fi, weird sea creatures, queer SFF and pretty much everyone who wants to read something brilliant, strange and new.” —BookPage
“Even in the darkest of these perfectly crafted stories, Sam Miller’s tragic boys yearn to be good instead of bad, strong instead of weak, whole instead of broken. May your heart ache with love for every doomed one of them; I know mine did.”
—Andy Davidson, author of The Boatman’s Daughter
“A collection of short stories that are each so atmospheric and unique, it really just blends together to form a sort of queer, magic, horror, science fiction and amazing storytelling picture. Each story is so fascinating and creates about a mood that just captures you.”
—Ash and Books
“Loneliness, manhood, and ferocious queer joy . . . thick with both the tenderness and ugliness of imperfect relationships.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In these stories Sam J. Miller writes about people on the margins and in transition, both capturing a sense of uncertainty and horror while immersing us in these worlds with sensitivity and care.”
—Carrie Vaughn, author of The Immortal Conquistador
“As for books, my favorite short story collection of 2022 has to be Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller. The stories in Boys, Beasts, and Men show off Miller’s ability to harness the speculative to talk about the real world.” —Strange Horizons
“Occasional encounters with Sam J. Miller’s novels (The Art of Starving, Blackfish City) and short stories certainly impress, but only an assemblage like this can truly display his talent, versatility, imagination, and flat-out uniqueness . . . Unabashedly queer, he frequently explores the relationships between parents and children, friends and lovers, and siblings, but those connections often act as an arc for an overall meaning: together we can, collectively, do something about the monsters.”
—Locus
“Throughout the collection, Miller’s incredible ability to combine heightened emotional stakes with current social issues is on keen display.”
—Strange Horizons
“Boys, Beasts & Men is the fruit of substantial creative autonomy, a glorious nightmare wrapped around a daydream.”
—Delphic Reviews
“This collection is full of heart, and I can’t recommend it enough . . . a great introduction to Sam J. Miller’s catalog of short stories as well as a timely body of work that looks at the sense of isolation and yearning for connection many of us are feeling in these turbulent times.”
—Signal Horizon
“A strong collection of stories with themes I’m really into, dark and interesting. . .”
—Small Time Reads
“The very best horror in all its ghoulish, glorious humanity.”
—Deborah Miller, two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award (and also Sam’s mom)
“Sam J. Miller’s stories collected in Boys, Beasts, & Men are fire in about the same way a blast furnace is. They are full of evolving, disintegrating, and re-assembling identities, a funhouse hall of molten mirrors. These stories burn away façades to reveal true histories full of fierce magic. Histories queer as all hell’s furies unleashed. Histories often uncontrollable by those who bend the course of the story.”
—Ancillary Review of Books
“Every story is wildly imaginative, each one twists and bends its form to stun and titillate that much more.”
—Coffee Time Reviews
“As the title suggests, Boys Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller is a short fiction collection with all of those three things and so much more. Queer identity fuses with science fiction and horror to beautifully capture snapshots of life. . . . The entire anthology is mesmerising. Miller’s writing is witty and hard-hitting, drawing out stories from angles that most people don’t tend to see.”
—Just Geeking By
“The stories in this collection run the gamut from scary to angry to sad to kind but they all have a raw humanity that I loved. I recommend this book highly and hope to read more from Mr. Miller in the future.”
—Disciples of Boltax
“Ultimately, the collected stories of Boys, Beasts & Men overflow with a relentless queer presence. I resonate with the book’s artistic sincerity, as well as its openness to desire, to horny risk and ferocious joy, to the “everything all at once” mess of gay life.”
—Tor.com
“A superb roundup of a prolific author’s short stories: tales that deal with complicated, messy lives of people trying to make their way through life, faced with uncertain and dangerous worlds.”
—Monsters and Masculinity
“If you’re not reading Sam J. Miller, you’re seriously missing out.”
—Nathan Ballingrud, author of Wounds and North American Lake Monsters
“A superb roundup of a prolific author’s short stories: tales that deal with complicated, messy lives of people trying to make their way through life, faced with uncertain and dangerous worlds.”
—Transfer Orbit
“Vibrant and wide-ranging. . . . I simply loved this collection. While dark at times, it’s never completely bleak, presenting moments of hope and, as I have said, resistance and weaving a seductive web around the reader.”
—Blue Book Balloon
Photo by Kalyaní-Aindrí Sánchez
Sam J. Miller is a Nebula-Award-winning author. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was an NPR Best of the Year, and his second novel, BlackfishCity, was a Best Book of the Year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more, as well as a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. The last in a long line of butchers, he lives in New York City and at samjmiller.com.
Praise for Sam J. Miller
“A rising star of science fiction in the US – and now worldwide.”
—Le Soir
“Sam J. Miller has proven himself a force to be reckoned with . . .”
—Barnes & Noble
“Sam J. Miller has cemented his status as one of the most visionary fiction writers of his generation. ”
—Kass Morgan, New York Times bestselling author of The 100
“[Miller] will tear your heart in two and then gently place the pieces back inside your chest—while reminding you to have a sandwich and love yourself.”
—NPR
Introduction
Amal El-Mohtar
The first time I met Sam J. Miller he was cosplaying Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender—dressed in orange and yellow, a wide blue arrow painted on his forehead. He appeared before me like a vision, an intrusion of fantasy into reality in the already surreal space of a midwestern science-fiction convention.
The second time I met Sam J. Miller he was dressed in a silver lamé jumpsuit—at the same convention—with fuchsia-coloured hair: a study in contrasts, smiling at the intersection of glamour and gleam.
Until it came time to write this introduction, I had mashed these two meetings together in my memory, blended the shimmering silver outfit and the Airbender’s arrow. Only browsing back through snapshots from those events did I find that they’d occurred a year apart, that I was mixing my impressions of Sam and his work into my recollections of our encounters, weaving them into a story that better suited my overall sense of him. No single traditional element can embody that sense: instead, when I think of Sam I think of water mixing with fire, deep wells of compassion lit by a hungry, brilliant spark. I think of his fiction and imagine him wielding a shining, liquid silver between his hands, an infinitely shapable fluid force.
In order to talk about Sam’s writing in this collection I find I also want to talk about his photography—another kind of blending of water and fire, liquid and light. His photos are always instantly recognizable to me in the chaotic torrents of social media timelines. Sam’s gaze turns a subject inside out, perceives it like a chisel perceives stone, breaks it open into startling, devastating beauty. A rusted pipe on a mountainside, its ceiling eaten away into sky, looms up like the ribs of an impossible whale; a railway trestle over the Hudson forms a delicate, skeletal backdrop to the foregrounding of two great circular metal slabs, dislocated from origin and function, their stamped surfaces frosted over with verdigris into hieroglyphic fragments. Meanwhile a peony bud, tight as a fist and dropleted in rain, suggests the sleek, tender eroticism of human skin. His subjects always feel arrested in motion, tense and dynamic, straining, in sharp lines and fulsome colours, against the static of a frame.
In 2014, Sam launched an art series titled “Intrusions,” in which he’d sketch manga-influenced drawings over original photography in order to “highlight and comment on the way visual narratives like comics and cartoons help us make sense of the real world in all its ugliness, beauty, and banality.” Shirtless men ride dinosaurs near trestle bridges, or twist their limbs against the webby tangles of yellow Transit Authority tape; a young woman joyfully brandishes a katana as she leaps over a broken chain-link fence, folded over itself like a dog-eared page.
These intrusions, more than anything else, evoke for me the experience of reading Sam’s fiction. Sam writes alternate presents and shadow futures, turning our world inside out, breaking its ugliness into beauty, its banality into wonder. Whether set in revolutionary Russia or small-town America, these are profoundly queer stories: stories about men loving and being loved, the difficult bonds between parents and children, the gifts and burdens of inheritance. They are stories less about coming out than of coming in: stories of parents and siblings struggling towards understanding the extraordinary secret selves of their children and brothers, reckoning with the effects of that newfound knowledge on their own lives.
In what follows, you’ll find reality and fantasy dancing together like light and silver, illuminating and exposing each other in the darkroom of Sam’s mind—and in your own. As you thumb your way through imprisoned megafauna, pyrokinetics, and the heart-broken souls of empty homes, you’ll find another presence surrounding the stories, introducing them to each other with more tenderness and danger than I could hope to achieve here. If you’ve encountered these stories in magazines or on the shortlists of awards, you’ll find them transformed by their proximity to each other, bound together by left-handed stitches of text in a sly voice that intrudes and unites like a needle.
On the internet Sam often goes by the name “sentencebender,” which—appropriately—bends several meanings into itself. A sentence can be a complete textual unit, a tool with which to communicate—and it can be a punishment, a consequence. When I think of Sam as a bender of sentences I think of his fiction, but I also think of his activism, his organizing, his devotion to collective action as the means to confronting vast and vicious systems. I think of how assumptions and prejudices are types of sentences, their grammars muddy and opaque, and how he bends light into them through unexpected angles of perspective and inquiry. I think of how both water and fire have nourishing and destructive aspects, like love. It’s been an honour and a privilege to watch him develop his art over the years—to see him steep his stories in that heady suspension of hope and memory that makes new worlds bloom in the dark.
Boys, Beasts & Men
Sam J. Miller
Locus Award Winner – Best Collection
World Fantasy Award Nominee
“Sam Miller is my hero: a fearless visionary whose stories are at once vivid, electrifying, brutal, and full of heart. Oh, the heat of them.”
—Sarah Pinsker, author of Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
Queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and satisfying revenge seamlessly intertwine in Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving)’s long-awaited debut short story collection. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the beings in Miller’s gorgeously-crafted worlds can destroy you—yet leave you longing for them even more.
Boys, Beasts & Men
by Sam J. Miller
ISBN: Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-3729; Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-373-6
Published: June 2022
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital
In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection, featuring an introduction by Amal El-Mohtar, queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the beings in Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy readers, yet leave them wanting more.
“Miller’s sheer talent shines through in abundance . . . Boys, Beasts & Men is an outrageous journey which skillfully blends genres and will haunt you with its original, poetic voices as much as its victims, villains, and treasure trove of leading actors.” —Grimdark Magazine
[STARRED REVIEW] “Longing, heartbreak, and the deep desire for, but great difficulty of, love. . . . Highly recommended for any reader interested in speculative fiction that concerns itself with queer themes.” —Booklist
Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death.
Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving) shows his savage wit, unrelenting candor, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer.
***
Contents
Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar
Allosaurus Burgers
57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides
We Are the Cloud
Conspicuous Plumage
Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart
Shucked
The Beasts We Want to Be
Calved
When Your Child Strays from God
Things With Beards
Ghosts of Home
The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History
Angel, Monster, Man
Sun in an Empty Room
2022 Locus Award Winner
2022 World Fantasy Award Nominee
BookPage Most Anticipated Sci-Fi & Fantasy of 2022
Literary Hub May’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
Buzzfeed Amazing New Science Fiction And Fantasy Beach Reads
2022 Reads Rainbow Award, Shortlist
Gizmodo New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books for Your Summer Reading Pleasure
Tor.com Reviewer’s Choice: The Best Books of 2022
[STARRED REVIEW] “Boys, Beasts & Men is the first short story collection from Sam J. Miller, whose previous novels have included the grim speculative world of Blackfish City and the horror-noir of The Blade Between. This collection showcases his incredible versatility and imagination in stories that often put a fantastical twist on finding queer love or belonging.
—Shelf Awareness
[STARRED REVIEW] “Miller’s (The Blade Between, 2020) debut story collection gathers together a large selection of his short fiction. Most stories use various fantastical devices to reflect on gay men, their families, or their lovers. Some stories are sf, like ‘We Are the Cloud,’ where a young gay Black man deals with the insecurity of newfound love as well as the dataport in his neck, or Miller’s rewriting of John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing as a story of AIDS and the closet in ‘Things With Beards.’ Others are more fantastical or gothic such as ‘The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History,’ where the rage of the Stonewall Riots results in literal pyrokinesis or the fictional famous gay artist created by three men with AIDS (an echo of Miller’s last novel) in ‘Angel, Monster, Man.’ Even the stories that don’t feature gay relationships directly, such as the internal monologue of a Salvation Army chair in ‘Sun in an Empty Room,’ feature Miller’s frequent concerns of longing, heartbreak, and the deep desire for, but great difficulty of, love. Highly recommended for any reader interested in speculative fiction that concerns itself with queer themes, particularly messy or emotional ones.”
—Booklist
[STARRED REVIEW] “Finding danger and humanity in their characters, the short stories of Boys, Beasts & Men marry emotional epiphanies with violence, resulting in imaginative, stirring meditations on LGBTQ+ struggles and acceptance.”
—Foreword
“Miller’s sheer talent shines through in abundance . . . Boys, Beasts & Men is an outrageous journey which skillfully blends genres and will haunt you with its original, poetic voices as much as its victims, villains, and treasure trove of leading actors.”
—Grimdark Magazine
“The stories in this collection offer a nuanced and beautiful exploration of masculinity and the many faces of love, touching on romance, desire, family, and friendship, all presented through the lens of the fantastic—with literally mind-altering drugs, resurrected dinosaurs, near-future worlds in post environmental collapse, and of course, monsters.”
—A. C. Wise, The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories
“Sam Miller is my hero: a fearless visionary whose stories are at once vivid, electrifying, brutal, and full of heart. Oh, the heat of them.”
—Sarah Pinsker, author of A Song For A New Day and Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
“Miller’s fantasy and science fiction short stories have won and been nominated for numerous awards, though this is his debut short story collection. The collection opens with an allosaurus making a sudden appearance in a small town and a child learning to see his mother differently in its wake. “Ghosts of Home” occurs during the 2008 housing crisis, when spirits that haunt houses grow lonely after the owners leave. Many stories embrace queerness, such as “The Heat of Us: Notes Towards an Oral History,” an alternative history of the Stonewall Riots where the supernatural threads its way through the queer people who fight back against police brutality. All 14 of these brilliant, character-driven short stories are perfectly crafted, subtly altering reality using SFF elements while managing to fully explore the repercussions of doing so with the conciseness a short story requires.”
—Buzzfeed
“Miller’s debut short fiction collection looks to appeal to both fans of his speculative and dystopian novels Blackfish City and The Blade Between, as well as those new to his body of work. . . . Queerness pulses through these fourteen stories.”
—Literary Hub
“This is the collection you are looking for. Explosive, careening, shape-shifting tales . . . haunting and defiantly tender.”
—Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
“Sure to please fans of cli-fi, weird sea creatures, queer SFF and pretty much everyone who wants to read something brilliant, strange and new.”
—BookPage
“Even in the darkest of these perfectly crafted stories, Sam Miller’s tragic boys yearn to be good instead of bad, strong instead of weak, whole instead of broken. May your heart ache with love for every doomed one of them; I know mine did.”
—Andy Davidson, author of The Boatman’s Daughter
“A collection of short stories that are each so atmospheric and unique, it really just blends together to form a sort of queer, magic, horror, science fiction and amazing storytelling picture. Each story is so fascinating and creates about a mood that just captures you.”
—Ash and Books
“Loneliness, manhood, and ferocious queer joy . . . thick with both the tenderness and ugliness of imperfect relationships.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In these stories Sam J. Miller writes about people on the margins and in transition, both capturing a sense of uncertainty and horror while immersing us in these worlds with sensitivity and care.”
—Carrie Vaughn, author of The Immortal Conquistador
“As for books, my favorite short story collection of 2022 has to be Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller. The stories in Boys, Beasts, and Men show off Miller’s ability to harness the speculative to talk about the real world.”
—Strange Horizons
“Occasional encounters with Sam J. Miller’s novels (The Art of Starving, Blackfish City) and short stories certainly impress, but only an assemblage like this can truly display his talent, versatility, imagination, and flat-out uniqueness . . . Unabashedly queer, he frequently explores the relationships between parents and children, friends and lovers, and siblings, but those connections often act as an arc for an overall meaning: together we can, collectively, do something about the monsters.”
—Locus
“Throughout the collection, Miller’s incredible ability to combine heightened emotional stakes with current social issues is on keen display.”
—Strange Horizons
“Boys, Beasts & Men is the fruit of substantial creative autonomy, a glorious nightmare wrapped around a daydream.”
—Delphic Reviews
“This collection is full of heart, and I can’t recommend it enough . . . a great introduction to Sam J. Miller’s catalog of short stories as well as a timely body of work that looks at the sense of isolation and yearning for connection many of us are feeling in these turbulent times.”
—Signal Horizon
“A strong collection of stories with themes I’m really into, dark and interesting. . .”
—Small Time Reads
“The very best horror in all its ghoulish, glorious humanity.”
—Deborah Miller, two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award (and also Sam’s mom)
“Sam J. Miller’s stories collected in Boys, Beasts, & Men are fire in about the same way a blast furnace is. They are full of evolving, disintegrating, and re-assembling identities, a funhouse hall of molten mirrors. These stories burn away façades to reveal true histories full of fierce magic. Histories queer as all hell’s furies unleashed. Histories often uncontrollable by those who bend the course of the story.”
—Ancillary Review of Books
“Every story is wildly imaginative, each one twists and bends its form to stun and titillate that much more.”
—Coffee Time Reviews
“As the title suggests, Boys Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller is a short fiction collection with all of those three things and so much more. Queer identity fuses with science fiction and horror to beautifully capture snapshots of life. . . . The entire anthology is mesmerising. Miller’s writing is witty and hard-hitting, drawing out stories from angles that most people don’t tend to see.”
—Just Geeking By
“The stories in this collection run the gamut from scary to angry to sad to kind but they all have a raw humanity that I loved. I recommend this book highly and hope to read more from Mr. Miller in the future.”
—Disciples of Boltax
“Ultimately, the collected stories of Boys, Beasts & Men overflow with a relentless queer presence. I resonate with the book’s artistic sincerity, as well as its openness to desire, to horny risk and ferocious joy, to the “everything all at once” mess of gay life.”
—Tor.com
“A superb roundup of a prolific author’s short stories: tales that deal with complicated, messy lives of people trying to make their way through life, faced with uncertain and dangerous worlds.”
—Monsters and Masculinity
“If you’re not reading Sam J. Miller, you’re seriously missing out.”
—Nathan Ballingrud, author of Wounds and North American Lake Monsters
“A superb roundup of a prolific author’s short stories: tales that deal with complicated, messy lives of people trying to make their way through life, faced with uncertain and dangerous worlds.”
—Transfer Orbit
“Vibrant and wide-ranging. . . . I simply loved this collection. While dark at times, it’s never completely bleak, presenting moments of hope and, as I have said, resistance and weaving a seductive web around the reader.”
—Blue Book Balloon
Sam J. Miller is a Nebula-Award-winning author. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was an NPR Best of the Year, and his second novel, Blackfish City, was a Best Book of the Year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more, as well as a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. The last in a long line of butchers, he lives in New York City and at samjmiller.com.
Praise for Sam J. Miller
“A rising star of science fiction in the US – and now worldwide.”
—Le Soir
“Sam J. Miller has proven himself a force to be reckoned with . . .”
—Barnes & Noble
“Sam J. Miller has cemented his status as one of the most visionary fiction writers of his generation. ”
—Kass Morgan, New York Times bestselling author of The 100
“[Miller] will tear your heart in two and then gently place the pieces back inside your chest—while reminding you to have a sandwich and love yourself.”
—NPR
Introduction
Amal El-Mohtar
The first time I met Sam J. Miller he was cosplaying Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender—dressed in orange and yellow, a wide blue arrow painted on his forehead. He appeared before me like a vision, an intrusion of fantasy into reality in the already surreal space of a midwestern science-fiction convention.
The second time I met Sam J. Miller he was dressed in a silver lamé jumpsuit—at the same convention—with fuchsia-coloured hair: a study in contrasts, smiling at the intersection of glamour and gleam.
Until it came time to write this introduction, I had mashed these two meetings together in my memory, blended the shimmering silver outfit and the Airbender’s arrow. Only browsing back through snapshots from those events did I find that they’d occurred a year apart, that I was mixing my impressions of Sam and his work into my recollections of our encounters, weaving them into a story that better suited my overall sense of him. No single traditional element can embody that sense: instead, when I think of Sam I think of water mixing with fire, deep wells of compassion lit by a hungry, brilliant spark. I think of his fiction and imagine him wielding a shining, liquid silver between his hands, an infinitely shapable fluid force.
In order to talk about Sam’s writing in this collection I find I also want to talk about his photography—another kind of blending of water and fire, liquid and light. His photos are always instantly recognizable to me in the chaotic torrents of social media timelines. Sam’s gaze turns a subject inside out, perceives it like a chisel perceives stone, breaks it open into startling, devastating beauty. A rusted pipe on a mountainside, its ceiling eaten away into sky, looms up like the ribs of an impossible whale; a railway trestle over the Hudson forms a delicate, skeletal backdrop to the foregrounding of two great circular metal slabs, dislocated from origin and function, their stamped surfaces frosted over with verdigris into hieroglyphic fragments. Meanwhile a peony bud, tight as a fist and dropleted in rain, suggests the sleek, tender eroticism of human skin. His subjects always feel arrested in motion, tense and dynamic, straining, in sharp lines and fulsome colours, against the static of a frame.
In 2014, Sam launched an art series titled “Intrusions,” in which he’d sketch manga-influenced drawings over original photography in order to “highlight and comment on the way visual narratives like comics and cartoons help us make sense of the real world in all its ugliness, beauty, and banality.” Shirtless men ride dinosaurs near trestle bridges, or twist their limbs against the webby tangles of yellow Transit Authority tape; a young woman joyfully brandishes a katana as she leaps over a broken chain-link fence, folded over itself like a dog-eared page.
These intrusions, more than anything else, evoke for me the experience of reading Sam’s fiction. Sam writes alternate presents and shadow futures, turning our world inside out, breaking its ugliness into beauty, its banality into wonder. Whether set in revolutionary Russia or small-town America, these are profoundly queer stories: stories about men loving and being loved, the difficult bonds between parents and children, the gifts and burdens of inheritance. They are stories less about coming out than of coming in: stories of parents and siblings struggling towards understanding the extraordinary secret selves of their children and brothers, reckoning with the effects of that newfound knowledge on their own lives.
In what follows, you’ll find reality and fantasy dancing together like light and silver, illuminating and exposing each other in the darkroom of Sam’s mind—and in your own. As you thumb your way through imprisoned megafauna, pyrokinetics, and the heart-broken souls of empty homes, you’ll find another presence surrounding the stories, introducing them to each other with more tenderness and danger than I could hope to achieve here. If you’ve encountered these stories in magazines or on the shortlists of awards, you’ll find them transformed by their proximity to each other, bound together by left-handed stitches of text in a sly voice that intrudes and unites like a needle.
On the internet Sam often goes by the name “sentencebender,” which—appropriately—bends several meanings into itself. A sentence can be a complete textual unit, a tool with which to communicate—and it can be a punishment, a consequence. When I think of Sam as a bender of sentences I think of his fiction, but I also think of his activism, his organizing, his devotion to collective action as the means to confronting vast and vicious systems. I think of how assumptions and prejudices are types of sentences, their grammars muddy and opaque, and how he bends light into them through unexpected angles of perspective and inquiry. I think of how both water and fire have nourishing and destructive aspects, like love. It’s been an honour and a privilege to watch him develop his art over the years—to see him steep his stories in that heady suspension of hope and memory that makes new worlds bloom in the dark.