Review
BookPage Most Anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Tor.com Reviewer’s Choice: The Best Books of 2022
Literary Hub May’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books
Buzzfeed Best Books Coming Out in Summer 2022
Gizmodo New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books for Your Summer Reading Pleasure
“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 Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
[STARRED REVIEW] “Miller’s (The Blade Between, 2020) debut story collection gathers together a large selection of his short fiction. Most stories use various fantastical devices to reflect on gay men, their families, or their lovers. Some stories are sf, like ‘We Are the Cloud,’ where a young gay Black man deals with the insecurity of newfound love as well as the dataport in his neck, or Miller’s rewriting of John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing as a story of AIDS and the closet in ‘Things With Beards.’ Others are more fantastical or gothic such as ‘The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History,’ where the rage of the Stonewall Riots results in literal pyrokinesis or the fictional famous gay artist created by three men with AIDS (an echo of Miller’s last novel) in ‘Angel, Monster, Man.’ Even the stories that don’t feature gay relationships directly, such as the internal monologue of a Salvation Army chair in ‘Sun in an Empty Room,’ feature Miller’s frequent concerns of longing, heartbreak, and the deep desire for, but great difficulty of, love. Highly recommended for any reader interested in speculative fiction that concerns itself with queer themes, particularly messy or emotional ones.”
—Booklist
[STARRED REVIEW] Finding danger and humanity in their characters, the short stories of Boys, Beasts & Men marry emotional epiphanies with violence, resulting in imaginative, stirring meditations on LGBTQ+ struggles and acceptance.”
—Foreword
[STARRED REVIEW] “All 14 of these brilliant, character-driven short stories are perfectly crafted, subtly altering reality using SFF elements while managing to fully explore the repercussions of doing so with the conciseness that a short story requires.”
—Buzzfeed
“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
“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
“Sure to please fans of cli-fi, weird sea creatures, queer SFF and pretty much everyone who wants to read something brilliant, strange and new.”
—BookPage
“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, author of 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
“Sam J. Miller’s stories collected in Boys, Beasts, & Men are fire in about the same way a blast furnace is. They are full of evolving, disintegrating, and re-assembling identities, a funhouse hall of molten mirrors. These stories burn away façades to reveal true histories full of fierce magic.”
—Ancillary Review of Books
“Miller’s debut short fiction collection looks to appeal to both fans of his speculative and dystopian novels Blackfish City and The Blade Between, as well as those new to his body of work. . . . Queerness pulses through these fourteen stories.”
—Literary Hub
“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
“The very best horror in all its ghoulish, glorious humanity.”
—Deborah Miller, two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award
“Loneliness, manhood, and ferocious queer joy . . . thick with both the tenderness and ugliness of imperfect relationships.”
—Publishers Weekly
“If you’re not reading Sam J. Miller, you’re seriously missing out.”
—Nathan Ballingrud, author of Wounds and North American Lake Monsters
“Ultimately, the collected stories of Boys, Beasts & Men overflow with a relentless queer presence. I resonate with the book’s artistic sincerity, as well as its openness to desire, to horny risk and ferocious joy.”
—Tor.com
“Occasional encounters with Sam J. Miller’s novels (The Art of Starving, Blackfish City) and short stories certainly impress, but only an assemblage like this can truly display his talent, versatility, imagination, and flat-out uniqueness . . . Unabashedly queer, he frequently explores the relationships between parents and children, friends and lovers, and siblings, but those connections often act as an arc for an overall meaning: together we can, collectively, do something about the monsters.”
—Locus
“Throughout the collection, Miller’s incredible ability to combine heightened emotional stakes with current social issues is on keen display.”
—Strange Horizons
“A collection of short stories that are each so atmospheric and unique, it really just blends together to form a sort of queer, magic, horror, science fiction and amazing storytelling picture. Each story is so fascinating and creates about a mood that just captures you.”
—Ash and Books
“This collection is full of heart, and I can’t recommend it enough . . . a great introduction to Sam J. Miller’s catalog of short stories as well as a timely body of work that looks at the sense of isolation and yearning for connection many of us are feeling in these turbulent times.”
—Signal Horizon
“Every story is wildly imaginative, each one twists and bends its form to stun and titillate that much more.”
—Coffee Time Reviews
“The entire anthology is mesmerising. Miller’s writing is witty and hard-hitting, drawing out stories from angles that most people don’t tend to see.”
—Just Geeking By
“A superb roundup of a prolific author's short stories: tales that deal with complicated, messy lives of people trying to make their way through life, faced with uncertain and dangerous worlds.”
—Monsters and Masculinity
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
“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
About the Author
Sam J. Miller is a Nebula Award-winning author whose debut, The Art of Starving, was an NPR Best of the Year; his second novel, Blackfish City, was a Best Book of the Year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more, as well as a "Must-Read" in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, Miller's work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. The last in a long line of butchers, he lives in New York City and at samjmiller.com.
