Thank you (and apologies) to NetGalley for the readers copy in exchange for a (very late) review.

I love a short story collection. I was in a big ol’ reading slump and couldn’t really focus on anything and decided to give this a shot.
This was weird, queer and kinda fun.
I definitely felt like I wanted to revisit some more than others after finishing but if light horror speculative fiction is your vibe, I recommend.

An amazingly unique collection that utilizes the best parts of the speculative genre to give us a debut that packs a good punch with a great mix of weird and unsettling beats to keep readers turning the page

Like many of Sam J. Miller’s books (one of my favorite queer authors since college), a thought-provoking book on trauma and queerness.

I dnfed his at 2/3 through the book, I didnt really care about what was happening or what would happen. I kept losing interest as I went along.

I loved this so much, all of the stories were absorbing and incredibly evoking, to the point that some of them I read again and again. Phenomenally written, absolute gold star collection!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book.

this is a very weird book but it’s definitely not the weirdest I’ve read. My only complaint is the use of the R word multiple times which I am not okay with. hoping the author changes this.

"Boys, Beasts & Men" by Sam J. Miller is a powerful and deeply affecting novel that explores themes of masculinity, sexuality, and the relationship between humans and animals. The story follows a young man named Adam, who is struggling to come to terms with his own desires and identity in a society that views his sexuality as aberrant and unnatural. But when he befriends a group of homeless boys who share his love of the city's feral dogs, he discovers a world of beauty and brutality that will change him forever.

Miller's writing is raw, visceral, and poetic, painting a vivid portrait of a gritty urban landscape and the people and animals that inhabit it. The characters are complex and fully realized, with their own flaws and struggles, and the relationships between them are fraught with tension and ambiguity. The novel is at once a coming-of-age story, a meditation on the nature of desire and love, and a searing indictment of the societal norms that seek to control and suppress the lives of those deemed "other".

Overall, "Boys, Beasts & Men" is a stunning and thought-provoking novel that will stay with readers long after they have finished reading it. Highly recommended.

Thank you Netgalley for letting me read and review this book. Firstly, this cover is stunning. Boys, Beasts & Men is a collection of 15 horror, SFF stories. Some trigger warnings before you decide to pick up this book: homophobia, racism, drug abuse, abusive relationships, and gore.

The writing style is intriguing and I enjoyed the different stories. This story features an introduction by Amal El-Mohtar, queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. "Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the boys, beasts, and men roaming through Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy readers, yet leave them wanting more."

when I started this book I had a very difficult time getting into it. the first two stories were not what I was looking for at all and my confidence in the collection faded. honestly I considered just returning the book and walking away, but I decided that I would at least skim the next couple ones, just in case.

wow, am I glad I did! while I didn't like every story (imo the first two remain the weakest in the collection) I ended up really loving a couple. overall I'm giving the collection four stars. Miller cleverly inserts a narrative between every story that produces a backbone for each to follow, which was delightful. finding little bits that connected them was such fun.

I've rated every story below independent on one another, but overall I was extremely happy with this collection.

allosaurus burgers -- 1/5
57 reasons for the slate quarry suicides -- 1/5
we are the cloud -- 2/5
conspicuous plumage -- 5/5
shattered sidewalks of the human heart -- 5/5
shucked -- 4/5
the beasts we want to be -- 3/5
calved -- 2/5
when your child strays from god -- 5/5
things with beards -- 4/5
ghosts of home -- 5/5
the heat of us: notes towards an oral history -- 3/5
angel, monster, man -- 2/5
sun in an empty room -- 2/5

tbh, conspicuous plumage, shattered sidewalks, when your child strays, things with beards, and ghosts of home forcibly elevated this collection to the four stars it's getting today. I loved conspicuous plumage so so much and I'll be thinking about it for a very long time. things with beards made me unbelievably sad but also made me desperately want to rewatch the original thing. ghosts of home was frankly incredible, and I wish I could somehow force every asshole corporation involved in the housing crisis to read it.

Sam J. Miller's short story collection 'Boys, Beasts & Men' is an amazing feat of storytelling prowess.

Each story stands strong on its own, but as part of a collection, they truly shine. There's also an overarching tale that is interwoven throughout the collection, and the snippets we get at the end of each short story keep pulling you through. This was not only a powerful story in its own right, but an incredible way to intertwine each story with one another.

Though the stories were all separate, there was an overarching atmospheric feeling, as well as similar themes throughout. Not only was this an excellent collection because of the stories within, it was also masterfully curated. The overall impact is not something to be missed - I highly recommend this collection if you're in the mood for stories drenched in grief and darkness, but also power and heart.

Sometimes, one of the highest compliments you can pay a book is that it was very weird. Sam J. Miller's story collection "Boys, Beasts & Men" is absolutely, positively WEIRD. And in all the best ways. A mix of horror and speculative, and horrifying speculative fiction, the stories in this book all explore themes of Queerness and injustice. This book is filled with righteous anger, and a number of the stories are knockouts. If you are a lover of Queer fantasy and horror, I encourage you to check this one out!

This collection of stories is a mixed bag for me. The writing style is unique and many of the stories are good, but a few are just okay. My favorites were "The Beasts We Want to Be" and "Ghosts of Home". I think there are enough good stories in here to make the book worthwhile to read, so I do recommend it.

Very fun, very weird. I loved this collection! There were some topics explored that felt slightly heavy-handed, especially around child abuse and sexual exploitation, but I loved the exploration of queerness and the underlying themes of grief through weird speculative sff.

The ONLY reason I'm not rating this five stars is that I felt the use of the R-slur was excessive and unnecessary. It only pops up two or three times, but each time it is jarring and, honestly, made me resent reading the rest of the story it popped up in.

Aside from that, I loved this book. Every story feels alive and distinct, but also unified. The writing is beautiful and heart-crushing and radiates with a heat that makes for extremely effective and touching stories.

The characters in Sam J. Miller’s debut short story collection Boys, Beasts, & Men, often LGBTQIA but not always, are yearning for connection: sometimes direct connection to another human being (occasionally, but not always, romantic), sometimes to a community, sometimes to an ideal. How they surmount the barriers to making those connections is at the heart of stories that cross the spectrum of speculative fiction, from hard science fiction to fantasy to stories that blur the lines between genres. Throughout the collection, Miller’s incredible ability to combine heightened emotional stakes with current social issues is on keen display.

In the collection’s lead story, “Allosaurus Burgers,” a farmer in Hudson Falls, NY (the setting for many of Miller’s stories) finds a live allosaurus on his property. While waiting for the government to take it away, he opens his farm up for photos ops and reporters. The story’s narrator is a young boy, whose single mother is an alcoholic whose very physical job at a slaughterhouse has taken a toll on her. The boy’s hero-worship of his mother, and strained relationships with his older sister and absent father, are what the story is really all about: the ways in which adults, especially parents, condescend to children, underestimating how much they are capable of understanding about the interpersonal dynamics around them. The SFnal element by contrast is lightly worn, but does provide the impetus for the boy to confront his connections with family and neighbors—and address his own inability to communicate what he really wants.

“Calved” offers a more hard-SF treatment of its concept. This post-climate-change tale takes place on the floating city that is also the setting of Miller’s novel Blackfish City (2018), and also focuses on an absent father. But this time the father is the narrator, and he’s trying extremely hard to reconnect with the son he only sees a few times a year thanks to his job on ice ships—the only work he can get because he is an American immigrant to this ocean-bound city. In an effort to reconnect, the father gives the son a keepsake band T-shirt from the father’s own teenage years. When the shirt goes missing, the father thinks he understands what his son isn’t saying, and the story moves towards its emotional and brutal climax. The awkwardness of the strained father-son relationship is palpable, the father’s attempts to get to know his son honest and relatable. But so is the weight of the “tables turned” that characterize the way immigrants from a devastated United States are treated by the city’s inhabitants—in exactly the way many in the current-day US treat immigrants from the Middle East and Central/South America.

“When Your Child Strays from God” continues to make an argument for the collection’s theme: it, too, is the story of a parent who doesn’t understand her son, or how to communicate with him. In the story, the wife of a conservative Christian minister explains, via her newsletter to her husband’s congregation, how she has chosen to connect with the son, who is pulling away from her and from her religion. She has decided, she writes, to take the same drug, “spiderweb,” that she knows he’s been taking, because the drug connects its users in a higher mental state. The journey she goes on, and the truth behind her son’s increasing distance, is interspersed with her commentary on the hypocrisy of certain members of the congregation—and the blind eye everyone (including herself) has been willing to turn towards the abuses of her husband. I can’t say I came to like the narrator, but I did feel pity towards her.

Parents and children are not the only ones seeking to understand or be understood in this collection, however. In several of Miller’s stories that tie, obviously or obliquely, to classic horror films, broken people want to be recognized by other broken people. We’ve already seen a hint of this in “Allosaurus Burgers,” which has a very Jurassic Park feel, but often the referents are even more explicit. “Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart,” for example, features a gay Jewish cabdriver giving a ride to the actress Anne Darrow, years after they both witnessed, from different vantages, King Kong’s fall from the Empire State Building. They bond over Kong’s treatment as “exotic” (the experience of immigrants) and as property (the experience of women). “Things With Beards,” meanwhile, answers the question about what happened to MacReady (of John Carpenter’s The Thing [1982]) after his return from Antarctica, as he tries to reconnect with family, community, and a former lover while hiding how broken he really is. Elsewhere, “Angel, Monster, Man” feels like a modern riff on Frankenstein (1818): at the height of the AIDS epidemic, three gay men cobble together a “deceased” writer/artist from fragments of the work and personalities of the multitude of gay creatives whose projects were thrown away by their families—who buried them without acknowledging their sexual orientation or their work. Of course, the trio’s creation takes on a life of his own that threatens to destroy his creators.

“Angel, Monster, Man” is also one of several stories set against the backdrop of real social upheaval in our nation’s history, with SFnal or fantasy tweaks. “The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History” centers on the Stonewall Riots, in which the connection between an aggrieved and marginalized community creates a heat that incinerates people. Told from the hindsight of years later and by people who were there but don’t agree on how it all happened, the story is a wonderful treatise on community versus individual memory—and on how different a story looks depending on which side of the events you were on. Likewise, “The Beasts We Want to Be” takes place during an alternate Russian Revolution during which young men—intentionally broken by the government in order to make them better soldiers—seek connection with each other and in which past wrongs lead to bad ends.

Other settings are more contemporary. “Ghost of Home” sets our ongoing housing and banking crises for a connection that is part romantic and part revolutionary, and exemplifies both how quickly one can become unhoused and how easily the poverty-stricken can be manipulated by the rich and powerful. “We Are the Cloud” also features a romantic connection, this time between two young men caught up in the foster care system in a very-near-future New York City. The boy at the center of the story has been tossed from group home to group home, abused by the very system that is supposed to support and uplift him. He thinks he’s finally found love with another boy—but things are not as they seem. Finally, “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” builds on the epidemics of anti-LGBTQIA and misogynistic rhetoric and action of our current society, told in the “listicle” format that is so popular in online newspapers and blogs, and is easily the most brutal story of the collection. Miller ratchets up the tension expertly as the reader realizes exactly what the main character has done.

It is the collection’s closing story, “Sun in an Empty Room,” which most clearly exemplifies the theme of seeking connection that permeates this collection, though. Narrated by a sentient couch that has been moved from home to home between stints at the Salvation Army, the story comments on how ineffective communication can hamper relationships as well as how some barriers to connection turn out to be insurmountable. Also? It has unrequited love and a sentient couch.

Whether we want to admit it or not, all humans (and, indeed, all sentient creatures) need connection: to other individuals, to communities, to objects and places; across social strata, across national borders, across species. Sam J. Miller highlights that need in order to draw our attention to the flaws in our society—and also to demonstrate how good we can be if we find a way to work together.

*dnf*
Boys, Beasts & Men is a short story collection By: Sam J. Miller. I thought I would enjoy this seeing as it's queer and fantasy however I could not get into it. I don't think I enjoy short story collections so the blame falls on me for requesting this. If you enjoy short story collections you'll most likely enjoy this however I do not.

I'm not sure what it was about this collection that I just couldn't get into. I don't like to rate DNFed books but since Netgalley needs one and I wanted to provide my thoughts... Theoretically this book was incredible. It felt like it SHOULD have been and I was missing a key piece of interest in it somehow. I kept trying and trying to come back to it and skipping stories. Each one was conceptually interesting to me but not interesting enough I guess. It might just be the writing style or just some sort of reading block. I don't know. Sorry folks!

I am new to reading short story collections and while I admired many things about this one I definitely had a few issues too. I loved all the different queer focused stories for sure! I think the darker topics and atmosphere in many of the stories was appealing and touching. I was in awe of the illustrious writing and odd stories. I was disappointed to see some of the language used in the stories such as the r-word and I found it really hard to overlook. For me, reading that multiple times took me out of the otherwise immersive worlds of the stories. Overall I think the writing style was beautiful and important but I found some stories to be less immersive than others.

As someone who likes to binge read, this collection of short stories made me slow down and really think about what was happening in each of them. At times depressing and grim, each one is filled with hunger and longing and the urge to connect. They're strange and twisty, portraying worlds and realities subtly different from our own, ones where queer people have the power to start actual fires with their minds and house spirits interact with lonely humans. Some stories leave you wondering if what was described in the story really took place or not. Days later, I'm still thinking about them, haunted by the possibilities and what ifs.