Special thanks to Tachyon Publications, which provided me with a copy for review.

Sam J. Miller's Boys, Beasts & Men is a haunting collection of short science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The collection is exquisite, from the stories to the sequence, and it's one of my all-time favorite collections.

Most of the stories are focused on LGBTQ+ characters, specifically gay men, or characters adjacent to them. It sets real-world issues and themes up against the supernatural, from mysterious powers to cosmic parasitic entities and more. There are stories involved that take aim at other socio-economic issues, but the collection is LGBTQ+ at its core.

Each story is framed by a few lines which tell the story of a man and a stranger he meets. This framing story is fine, but I'm not sure they were completely necessary. Honestly, it took me over half the book to realize a pretty key component about the framing story, although that was a fun reveal.

The stories themselves are top-notch.

Allosaurus Burgers is all about a kid realizing his parent is just a person, but it also has an allosaurus. This was a pretty neutral story, and it was a good one to start the collection with.

57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides plays with the short story format, giving us a numbered list of paragraphs, explaining events that went down at the Slate Quarry. Even though it had an experimental format, the story was pretty straightforward. It did remind me a lot of Stephen King's Carrie, though, which is name-dropped in the story.

We Are the Cloud was a gripping cyberpunk story about a kid who just wanted to feel like someone cared about him when it's clear society doesn't.

Conspicuous Plumage is a story set in a world where everyone gets a special power when they hit a certain age -- well, almost everyone. Our protagonist seems to lack, but their brother didn't. At least, until he was murdered. The story is really about coming to terms with that grief, and it's a moving one.

Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart uses Kong -- yes, that one -- to examine the monstrous nature of humans. Even though I honestly am not the biggest fan of the concept, the sheer brilliance in execution in this story really landed for me.

Shucked is the most literary of the stories in this collection. A recent couple, young folks who really aren't what you'd call financially sound, are in a destination location when an older man offers some cash for some time with our POV character's boyfriend. Then the question becomes whether the same boyfriend comes back down the stairs. It's literary in tone, and it brushes up more against paranoia than SFF, but the genre influences are still there.

The Beasts We Want to Be struck a deeper chord with me than I'd expected. Miller ends up getting us to a place of sympathy for Stalinist enforcers. There's behavior modification at the core of this story, alongside the beauty of humanity, and it flows well together. This probably was the weakest story in the collection for me, but that's not to say it wouldn't be amongst the stronger in some of the other collections I've read.

Calved is a cli-fi story set on a super-advanced floating base of a sort that protects humanity from the worsened weather conditions, but it's about the age-old story of a son growing up and outgrowing his father. This time, the father does something to try and get the son to realize he doesn't have to outgrow his father, but that something really doesn't turn out as expected. I really liked this story. I felt the twist coming rather early, but that didn't make it any less heart-wrenching when it was all spelled out.

When Your Child Strays from God is framed as a rough draft of a church website blogpost, penned by the wife of a pastor whose son is "out of control". Of course, "out of control" in an overly controlling, restrictive conservative household means something very different than being out of control, in reality. Ultimately, this is the story of a mother finding her son and, in the process, finding herself. I loved it. I loved the tone, the framing; it really felt like it was written by a semi-bitter housewife who is overshadowed and defined by her husband's public persona. This might have been the story I enjoyed the most throughout.

Things With Beards is Miller's cosmic horror story. He does an excellent job of tying it into the fight for police reform and anti-racism, which I always enjoy in a cosmic horror story. That being said, it's simple in that it doesn't try to be anything other than an interesting cosmic horror story, and it succeeds at that.

Ghosts of Home is a strong critique of the housing practices of late-stage capitalism, and it's especially pertinent at a time where housing prices are soaring amidst what was four straight years of rising homelessness rates before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. It pulls from the idea of house spirits, which is an idea present in a number of cultures and one I really enjoyed reading, while also showing how capitalistic giants are likely to try and gamify or attempt to mass-replicate the person-to-home relationship if there's something in it for them. The ideas in this story are some of my favorites throughout.

The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History is framed as an article in a world where Stonewall wasn't just where LGBTQ+ people fought back but when they fought back by incinerating officers via collective pyrokinesis. It's a deeply moving story, and I stand by it as an incredibly moving story.

Angel, Monster, Man is a story about what might have happened if instead of the AIDS epidemic (and the lack of action by authority figures at the time) wiping out the LGBTQ+ arts movement that was blossoming at the time, a group of people attributed it to a fictitious individual. Of course, with this being a SFF collection (that brings in horror more often than not, in my opinion), all that creative energy had to create a being, right? And that just goes swell, right?

Sun in an Empty Room is told from the perspective of a couch. It's a story of love, loss, and Nihilism, but again, from the perspective of a thrift store couch. It's a surprisingly good story, though.

All in all, this is a well-laid-out collection of character-centric science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories often, but not always, centered on social struggles or issues, primarily those relating to the LGBTQ+ community. It's one of the best collections I've read in the last few years, and it's the start of my Sam J. Miller reading, but it certainly won't be the last.