Boys Beasts & Men Read online

  Praise for Boys, Beasts & Men

  “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

  “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

  “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

  “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 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)

  “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

  “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

  Praise for Sam J. Miller

  “[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

  “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

  “Like Clive Barker, Miller has a great talent for creating interesting characters and building up quiet dread.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Praise for The Art of Starving

  ★ “Matt toes the line between expiration and enlightenment, sparing no detail of his twisted, antagonistic relationship with his body. [His] sarcastic, biting wit keeps readers rooting for him and hoping for his recovery. A dark and lovely tale of supernatural vengeance and self-destruction.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ★ “Matt is an admirably strong character who is out and proud, brilliant, creative, and determined to survive . . . Miller’s creative portrait of a complex and sympathetic individual will provide a welcome mirror for kindred spirits.”

  —Booklist

  ★ “Matt is a master at suppressing his urges, but there is nothing romantic about debut novelist Miller’s portrayal of anorexia . . . discussion of Matt’s future is brutally honest. As Matt’s body deteriorates and his ‘powers’ reach new levels, readers must decide for themselves what is and isn’t real.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Funny, haunting, beautiful, relentless and powerful, The Art of Starving is a classic in the making.”

  —Book Riot

  “As gritty with salted wounds as are all great fairytales, The Art of Starving is The Outsiders with superpowers. It should be shelved alongside the classic stories of unexpected salvation.”

  —Maria Dahvana Headley, bestselling author of Magonia

  Also by Sam J. Miller

  Novels

  The Art of Starving (2017)

  Blackfish City (2018)

  Destroy All Monsters (2019)

  The Blade Between (2020)

  A Note from the Publisher About Piracy

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for purchasing this digital copy. We hope you enjoy it.

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  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  [email protected]

  Boys, Beasts, & Men

  © 2022 by Sam J. Miller

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.

  Cover art by Jennifer O’Toole

  Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Author photo by Kalyaní-Andrí Sánchez

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project editor: Jaymee Goh

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-372-9

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-373-6

  Printed in the United States by Versa Press Inc.

  First Edition: 2022

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “Allosaurus Burgers.” © 2014. First appeared in Shimmer Magazine #20, July 2014.

  “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides.” © 2013. First appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Issue 15, December 2013.

  “We Are the Cloud.” © 2014. First appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 52, September 2014.

  “Conspicuous Plumage.” © 2018. First appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 100, September 2018.

  “Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart.” © 2019. First appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 154, July 2019.

  “Shucked.” © 2019. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #746 November/December 2019.

  “The Beasts We Want to Be.” © 2013. First appeared in Electric Velocipede #27, Winter 2013.

  “Calved.” © 2015. First appeared in Asimov’s, September 2015.

  “When Your Child Strays from God.” © 2015. First appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 106, July 2015.

  “Things With Beards.” © 2016. First appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 117, June 2016.

  “Ghosts of Home.” © 2015. First appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 63, August 2015.

  “The Heat of Us: Notes T
oward an Oral History.” © 2015. First appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 2, January/February 2015.

  “Angel, Monster, Man.” © 2016. First appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Issue 40, January 2016.

  “Sun in an Empty Room.” © 2022. Original to this collection.

  for Walead Esmail Rath

  and Deborah Miller

  my first short-story heroes

  Table of 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”

  Afterword

  Story Notes

  Introduction

  by 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.

  i.

  Eye contact; flash of animal panic.

  He locks his gaze to mine, this man three bar stools down, and even though it’s what I came here hunting for I can feel my insides quiver with the existential terror of any prey animal.

  Worse: he grins. His smile holds so many scenarios: sex, murder, a back room or a dark alley or decades of marital bliss. Stories inside of stories.

  “Hey, boy,” he says.

  Allosaurus Burgers

  Our teacher Mrs. Strunt said the allosaurus coming to Hudson Falls was the best thing that ever happened to Hudson Falls, but the worst thing that ever happened to the allosaurus. She herded us onto the bus looking mad about it, trying to keep us from seeing she was just as excited as we were. The bus was freezing and we had all the windows fogged up in five minutes. Other boys drew curse words. I wrote F-U-C and then flinched, imagining my mother finding out, so I wiped it away and drew an allosaurus.

  “The poor thing,” Mrs. Strunt said. “Wherever it came from, it’s got to feel terribly lonely and lost and scared.”

  The roads were all madness on the way to the farm. Barely a day since Mr. Blecher made his big announcement, and everyone in the world was coming to Hudson Falls. Scientists and men with giant cameras, and lots of soldiers with lots of guns, but not the mean soldiers and scientists from movies. Everyone I saw had a smile so big it could have been their birthday. Everyone is coming to Hudson Falls, I thought.

  And then: a treacherous, wicked, horrible thought.

  Maybe my dad will come.

  Where had it come from—dad—that foul, forbidden word? I sucked in my cheeks like making a fish face and closed my teeth on as much flesh as I could, and bit down hard. And then harder. Punishing myself. Until I felt the same hot smothering rage that rises up in my mother every time I say that word.

  I thought my mother was God, then. Six-foot-something, all flesh and freckles, she towered over our neighbors in church and at the super
market. She came home from the slaughterhouse smelling like blood. I was nine then, and she could still pick me up, hoist me into the air. Not even the fathers of the other boys my age could do that. She wasn’t afraid of anything.

  At breakfast that morning my mother had said, “Day after tomorrow, the army’s going to take it away, and I personally think it can’t happen soon enough.”

  I finished my milk and Mom poured me more, which I did not want, which I drank. Mom is certain that the government wants to take our stuff. Mostly our guns. She has a lot of guns and a lot of stickers on her car about them and her cold dead hands. So now I wondered why she wanted them to take the allosaurus.

  “Woulda taken it right away, only it’ll take ’em forty-eight hours to scrounge up the right equipment.”

  I nodded. Mom drank from the jug and put it back in the fridge.

  “Blecher’s going to make out okay, though. Heard he’s got a million in TV deals lined up.” She likes Mr. Blecher because he’s an old, old man, but he can still get over on her once in a while in arm wrestling. “And he’s hidden away some of its droppings to sell to the companies.”

  “What kind of companies?”

  Mom frowned. “How the hell would I know something like that?”

  I wondered what they would do with dinosaur poop. Could you clone something from its poop? Could something so gone forever come back so easily? And if poop worked, what else would? I thought of my father’s baseball cap, the one Mom didn’t know I had, the one that still smelled of his sweat when I crawled to the back of my closet late at night and in total darkness buried my nose in it.