3.75 (?) stars ish this was really fun and weirdim not a big short-story-person because i much more enjoy a tied-together narrative that follows throughout the whole book but i actually really enjoyed this. my main reason for taking off stars is really just that short stories aren’t my thing, but i think if some of these had been full novellas or even novels i would have liked them a LOT. the second to last one in particular was so good. some of the stories are, naturally, much better than some

Boys, Beasts & Men is a collection of short stories, loosely tied together through brief interludes between two strangers. It blends genres, but I would largely class the stories as queer spec-fic, focused mostly on the uncanny, with a vaguely disturbing feel. The stories are well-written and thought-provoking, and my star rating reflects my level of enjoyment of the stories as opposed to the quality of the work. Some content warnings I believe should be included in the published version: exploi...

I received an arc of this from NetGalley in exchange for a review. it's review time!I have indifferent luck when it comes to short story collections. When they hit I am surprised. When they don't, I shrug and move on. This collection hit and hit hard. The stories in Boys, Beasts & Men are a swirl of queerness, magic, horror, science fiction, and good old fashioned gut-punching storytelling. Each story examines an idea in exquisite originality. Whether it's the effect of King Kong on the people o...

Special thanks to Tachyon Publications, which provided me with a copy for review. Sam J. Miller's Boys, Beatst & 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 t...

Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J Miller will be published by Tachyon Publications on 14 June 2022. I received an early copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Boys, Beasts & Men is a short-story collection, which are always difficult for me to review, because part of me wants to just review the stories individually, but I also know that, as a collection, they're part of a whole, and care was taken to determine what stories would go in, and in what order. This collection was well-chos...

The range and variety in this book absolutely fascinates me - there were stories that I found captivating and fresh, ones that unsettled me, and some that didn't hit for me. There was occasionally a sort of whiplash moving from wildly different stories, and I didn't always connect with what was happening stylistically, but the sheer extent to which it kept me on my toes is something I really respect. I really enjoyed the story notes at the end, as well, and I've been convinced to read Miller's o...

'Boys, Beasts & Men' is a phenomenal short story collection that brings to mind a pack of wolves, with each story pulsing to its own heartbeat, straining at the leash that affixes it to the whole with bestial vigor. The stories are dark, enigmatic, eerie and fantastical, all written with surprising weightlessness. As a result, they invoke the feeling of trying to breathe in subzero temperatures, when puffs of gelled heat are replaced by a chill, one which steals more than just body heat. In much...

I was actually introduced to Sam J. Miller via an excellent short story of his that I read in an anthology long ago. Thus, I was excited to learn that his new short story collection, "Boys, Beasts, & Men," was due out this year. Like most collections of stories, I found this to be a bit of a mixed bag. This makes it hard to rate. Overall, though, there are some great stories in here.As usual, Miller exhibits a ton of creativity. There are elements of horror and fantasy woven throughout the book

Disclaimer: My thoughts are my own. First, I want to thank the publisher and author for the opportunity to read and review this short stories collection. It is hard to review a collection of short stories, there are always some hit and miss.I would like to start by saying : please check the content warnings, hopefully in the final copy a list will be at the beginning before you read the book. -- back unto the review--A lot of miss for me unfortunately, my favorite part was the a page or so of wr...

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)Relevant disclaimers: nonePlease note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.Urgh, there needs to be a word for, like, that sinking feeling you get when you’re not the right person to review a book but you kind of have to try because them are the rules. So let me start off by saying: I am not the right person to be talking about this book. First off, I admire short stories more than I enjoy

Boys, Beasts & Men is an excellent short story collection. Weird, brutal, and very human, it blends hope and pain, nostalgia, fear, and grief, but with a speculative twist. The stories all contain some kind of speculative element- be it dinosaurs, house spirits, aliens, or a future with a climate apocalypse - they most often center queer men and boys, unflinchingly engaging with homophobia, race, poverty, addiction, death, and the pain of heartbreak. Several of the stories touch on the AIDS cris...

"When the worst thing you can possibly imagine happens, you're free from the fear of it for the rest of your life. But sometimes the worst thing you can imagine isn't the worst thing that can happen."Reading this book was like riding a ferris wheel for the first time. You've heard it's great, you have been seeing people talking about it in mostly excited tones, you're pretty sure you're going to love it. You've seen it compared in good light with other swings you've loved. But when you finally g...

An excellent collection of stories. I read a lot of short stories-- on their own, as part of magazines, anthologies, or collections like this one. This book actually took me quite some time to finish because I kind of hated the first story and dropped it because of that. Having finished it, it feels kind of out of place.I liked the majority of stories in this (which is a rarity for short story collections), but it took me until about 1/3rd into it before I started really loving it. These stories...

Requested from Netgalley mainly for having an introduction by Amal El-Mohtar, who as co-writer as one of the best SF books of the past decade, seemed like a signpost worth following. But once I got stuck in I realised that, Miller having such an unprepossessing name, I had in fact read and really liked two of these stories elsewhere, without the moniker staying in my brain as one worth keeping an eye out for. Hopefully a whole book's worth will be enough to get past that hurdle in future. Those

Boys, Beasts & Men was an intriguing collection of tales tenuously linked by short snatches of another story interspersed between them. The stories certainly contained some interesting concepts and ideas, all within the loose genre of speculative fiction, and I enjoyed that aspect of this collection. A couple of the stories caught my attention, but for the most part, although I found these tales intellectually interesting, I never really engaged with them on a deeper level, so I was always readi...

oh this was brilliant

This is an excellent collection of short stories. Having read Blackfish City, I enjoyed returning back to the wonderful literary voice that Sam J. Miller inhabits with science fiction with a healthy dosing of existential crises. My favorite stories include a dinosaur residing in rural US, an examination of spirits who inhabit homes and the unhoused, a drug-induced lens by which a mother tries to understand her son, and a self-aware couch who tells the stories of all the people it has encountered...

Good lord, reading this book felt like the wildest thing I've done in a long time. Let me start by saying I haven't the slightest clue what the hell happened in this book. My thoughts will likely be all over the place in this review because so much happened and I feel so much that my head hurts and I can't think straight. I don't mean that in a bad way, this is just a heavy read. A pleasantly heavy, intoxicating read. A thought that occurred to me about halfway through finishing this book was, '...

"Because I am an idiot, who still hasn’t learned how stories and movies mislead us, showing us how things ought to end up, which is never how they do; and because stories are oracles whose prophecies we can’t unravel until it is too late."Link to my blog- https://aamnarehman.wixsite.com/bookw... This was my first time reading a work of Sam j Miller and an anthology as well, so obviously I'm not the most experience person to be giving a critical review about this but I'll try my best.The part tha...

An Advanced Reader’s copy has been provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.Release Date: May 10, 2022TW: Use of the r-word, sexual content, homophobia, child abuse, solicitation, murder, drug useRating: 4 of 5About– A collection of short stories Boys, Beasts and Men features mainly LGBTQIA characters whose stories are interwoven by their strong emotions. From aliens to dinosaurs, Miller’s prose will leave you desperate for more.Overview: As a whole, I mostly loved this. I do...