Dying for It: Tales of Sex and Death
Edited by Mitzi Szereto
Thunder’s Mouth Press
ISBN: 978-1-56025-857-5
Reviewed by James Owens
Putting together a themed anthology of genre fiction can be a perilous task. An editor who solicits stories focusing on Civil War werewolves or about murders solved by robots is liable to find herself facing a high stack of responses that exhibit the worst clichés of the genre in question, rehashes of the most mechanical plots, characters who speak dialogue lifted from old B-movies. A key to success, maybe, is balance: make the thematic requirements narrow enough to elicit stories that belong together as a coherent volume, but not so narrow as to strip the writers of their own peculiar brands of creativity. Mitzi Szereto, editor of Dying for It: Tales of Sex and Death, gracefully avoids the pitfalls and offers a book of stories that are more than typical erotica.
A century ago, Sigmund Freud was already identifying Eros and Thanatos—the impulse toward death or oblivion—as the two deep engines driving most human behavior, so it seems perfectly natural to find them face to face in a gathering made shapely by the fact that each story includes both the warm tremble of desire and the cold shiver of desire’s final ending.
“Sex and death are both experiences of transcendence, which take us from one dimension to another," Szereto writes in the introduction. “Perhaps through sex we confront our own mortality—or, indeed, defy it. It’s a way to escape death, even if only for a few moments. Sex brings us together, death rends us apart—the evanescence of one versus the finality of the other.... Many believe that to know ecstasy is also to die. By contrast, it might be argued that the fear of death prevents some from being able to let go, to become lost in the sexual experience. Either way the tie between sex and death is still there."
A book founded on these premises could have ended up with two dozen stories about necrophilia, or descended into mere pornography, or, given an academic-leaning crowd, could have offered page after page of knotty, theory-obstructed texts à la Maurice Blanchot. But none of these things happen here. On the contrary, Szereto delivers a selection of mostly literate, mostly thoughtful stories that approach her thematic crossroads from as many distinct paths as there are writers represented.
Dying for It opens with Niall Griffiths’s “Like Friendship Set on Fire," a provocative story and a gutsy editorial choice for the lead position. Two young lovers, a white man and a dark, Muslim woman fleeing the intolerance of their parents, have stuffed themselves into the restroom of an airplane, where they plan to enter the “mile-high club." While they are about it, they try to discount sounds of disturbance from outside, though the sounds, followed by erratic flying, finally become too much to ignore. When the plane crashes into one of the towers of the World Trade Center (which isn’t giving away much; the twist is easy to guess early on), the lovers are ejected into the sky, still holding tightly to each other.
This is a story that may polarize readers. Some will love its lyrical final image of the couple who were thrown “upward into the clear blue sky at incredible speed and, despite the violence of their expulsion, continued to remain linked as they rocketed up into the blueness because that’s how very, very tightly they were holding each other" and read it as a celebration of the victory of human connection despite the gross brutalities of racial and religious hatred and mass violence. Others may feel that, more than five years later, the events of 9-11 are still improper material for erotica—even erotica that clearly transcends its genre, as this story does.
But even readers who hate “Like Friendship Set on Fire" will do well to keep reading. Every story is a new take on the theme. Most are good. Some are excellent.
The very next entry, for example, is worlds away in style as well as in its understanding of life. The narrative voice of Vicki Hendricks’s “Must Bite" quickly establishes itself in a worldly cynical tone that recalls James M. Cain—if Cain had ever worked as a South Florida stripper:
“I thought I’d seen everything and survived it—and I was fucking sick of it. I’d been dancing in Key Largo for four years, since age twenty-one, and men were nothing but work to me. I enjoyed women’s company—but women being a dead end economically, I was looking for a dick with major dollar signs flashing."
The narrator finds what she’s looking for, or seems to, for a while, before she realizes that she has married a man who—in a bizarre twist that Hendricks manages to make believable—apparently was looking mostly for someone to serve as a keeper to his pets, several large monkeys and a chimpanzee. She soon has enough of mixing monkey chow and scrubbing out cages, and, in the tradition of Cain, the mingled enticements of murder and insurance money begin to play on her mind, leading to a conclusion that is simultaneously understated and one of the most chilling endings ever written.
There are other more-than-worthwhile stories here. K. L. Gillespie’s “The Solo Sadomasochist" meditates on the interplay between fetish and identity. “Woman-in-a-Box" by Roberta Beach Jacobson tells the bitterly funny, wisely satirical story of a man who falls in love with a blow-up doll.
The stories in this book that aren’t particularly successful stand out by contrast. Lisabet Sarai’s “Stiff," for example, relates an encounter between a virginal mortuary attendant and a lusty grieving widow that could have been pinched from the letters section of Penthouse. Sarai has her widow standing over her dead husband’s corpse and describing the night he died in terms such as, “Roger had a mighty erection. He mounted me and plowed me like a raging stallion. It was absolutely divine, the best sex we’d had in years. At the moment of crisis, though, his heart gave out. He died pumping his seed into me."
“Stiff" seems to exist for no other purpose than to describe impromptu sex in a coffin, followed by a joke about a dead man getting an erection. Happily, lapses like this are few.
One thing all the best stories in Dying for It have in common: they are more than simple excuses for writing about sex. There is a lot of sex in the stories, yes, well written and often intense. And there is death, sometimes sad, sometimes deserved, sometimes indifferent. But there are also characters who come to life and change and learn, as well as have sex and die. These are not pale silhouettes hastily sketched for the sole purpose of writhing together on an imagined bed. But then, isn’t this what we look for in any story worth reading, the thing that goes beyond genre—“erotica," for example—reminding us that fine stories are fine wherever we discover them?
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