Boys, Beasts & Men

By Sam J. Miller and Amal El-Mohtar

2023 LOCUS AWARD WINNER, BEST COLLECTION

In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection, featuring 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.

“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

Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death.

Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving) shows his savage wit, unrelenting candor, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781616963736

Sam J. Miller

Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, and more). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam's short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A community organizer by day, he lives in New York City.

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Praise for Boys, Beasts & Men

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 A Song for a New Day and Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea

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

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, 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

The very best horror in all its ghoulish, glorious humanity.

—Deborah Miller, two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award (and also Sam’s mom)

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

Loneliness, manhood, and ferocious queer joy . . . thick with both the tenderness and ugliness of imperfect relationships.

—Publishers Weekly

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

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

A rising star of science fiction in the US - and now worldwide.

—Le Soir

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

Praise for The Art of Starving

★ Matt toes the line between expiration and enlightenment, sparing no detail of his twisted, antagonistic relationship with his body. [His] sarcastic, biting wit keeps readers rooting for him and hoping for his recovery. A dark and lovely tale of supernatural vengeance and self-destruction.

—Kirkus Reviews

★ Matt is an admirably strong character who is out and proud, brilliant, creative, and determined to survive . . . Miller’s creative portrait of a complex and sympathetic individual will provide a welcome mirror for kindred spirits.

—Booklist

★ Matt is a master at suppressing his urges, but there is nothing romantic about debut novelist Miller’s portrayal of anorexia . . . discussion of Matt’s future is brutally honest. As Matt’s body deteriorates and his ‘powers’ reach new levels, readers must decide for themselves what is and isn’t real.

—Publishers Weekly

"Funny, haunting, beautiful, relentless and powerful, The Art of Starving is a classic in the making."

—Book Riot

"As gritty with salted wounds as are all great fairytales, The Art of Starving is The Outsiders with superpowers. It should be shelved alongside the classic stories of unexpected salvation."

—Maria Dahvana Headley, bestselling author of Magonia

Also by Sam J. Miller

Novels

The Art of Starving (2017)

Blackfish City (2018)

Destroy All Monsters (2019)

The Blade Between (2020)

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Boys, Beasts, & Men

© 2022 by Sam J. Miller

This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.

Cover art by Jennifer O’Toole

Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

Author photo by Kalyaní-Andrí Sánchez

Tachyon Publications LLC

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

415.285.5615

www.tachyonpublications.com

[e-mail]

Series editor: Jacob Weisman

Project editor: Jaymee Goh

Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-372-9

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-373-6

Printed in the United States by Versa Press Inc.

First Edition: 2022

9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Allosaurus Burgers. © 2014. First appeared in Shimmer Magazine #20, July 2014.

57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides. © 2013. First appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Issue 15, December 2013.

We Are the Cloud. © 2014.  First appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 52, September 2014.

Conspicuous Plumage. © 2018. First appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 100, September 2018.

Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart. © 2019. First appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 154, July 2019.

Shucked. © 2019. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #746 November/December 2019.

The Beasts We Want to Be. © 2013. First appeared in Electric Velocipede #27, Winter 2013.

Calved. © 2015. First appeared in Asimov’s, September 2015.

When Your Child Strays from God. © 2015. First appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 106, July 2015.

Things With Beards. © 2016. First appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 117, June 2016.

Ghosts of Home. © 2015. First appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 63, August 2015.

The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History. © 2015. First appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 2, January/February 2015.

Angel, Monster, Man. © 2016. First appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Issue 40, January 2016.

Sun in an Empty Room. © 2022. Original to this collection.

for Walead Esmail Rath

and Deborah Miller

my first short-story heroes

Boys, Beasts & Men title card; art by Jennifer O'Toole; design by Elizabeth Story

Table of Contents

Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar

"Allosaurus Burgers"

"57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides"

"We Are the Cloud"

"Conspicuous Plumage"

"Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart"

"Shucked"

"The Beasts We Want to Be"

"Calved"

"When Your Child Strays from God"

"Things With Beards"

"Ghosts of Home"

"The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History"

"Angel, Monster, Man"

"Sun in an Empty Room"

Afterword

Story Notes

Introduction

by Amal El-Mohtar

The first time I met Sam J. Miller he was cosplaying Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender—dressed in orange and yellow, a wide blue arrow painted on his forehead. He appeared before me like a vision, an intrusion of fantasy into reality in the already surreal space of a midwestern science-fiction convention.

The second time I met Sam J. Miller he was dressed in a silver lamé jumpsuit—at the same convention—with fuchsia-coloured hair: a study in contrasts, smiling at the intersection of glamour and gleam.

Until it came time to write this introduction, I had mashed these two meetings together in my memory, blended the shimmering silver outfit and the Airbender’s arrow. Only browsing back through snapshots from those events did I find that they’d occurred a year apart, that I was mixing my impressions of Sam and his work into my recollections of our encounters, weaving them into a story that better suited my overall sense of him. No single traditional element can embody that sense: instead, when I think of Sam I think of water mixing with fire, deep wells of compassion lit by a hungry, brilliant spark. I think of his fiction and imagine him wielding a shining, liquid silver between his hands, an infinitely shapable fluid force.

In order to talk about Sam’s writing in this collection I find I also want to talk about his photography—another kind of blending of water and fire, liquid and light. His photos are always instantly recognizable to me in the chaotic torrents of social media timelines. Sam’s gaze turns a subject inside out, perceives it like a chisel perceives stone, breaks it open into startling, devastating beauty. A rusted pipe on a mountainside, its ceiling eaten away into sky, looms up like the ribs of an impossible whale; a railway trestle over the Hudson forms a delicate, skeletal backdrop to the foregrounding of two great circular metal slabs, dislocated from origin and function, their stamped surfaces frosted over with verdigris into hieroglyphic fragments. Meanwhile a peony bud, tight as a fist and dropleted in rain, suggests the sleek, tender eroticism of human skin. His subjects always feel arrested in motion, tense and dynamic, straining, in sharp lines and fulsome colours, against the static of a frame.

In 2014, Sam launched an art series titled Intrusions, in which he’d sketch manga-influenced drawings over original photography in order to highlight and comment on the way visual narratives like comics and cartoons help us make sense of the real world in all its ugliness, beauty, and banality. Shirtless men ride dinosaurs near trestle bridges, or twist their limbs against the webby tangles of yellow Transit Authority tape; a young woman joyfully brandishes a katana as she leaps over a broken chain-link fence, folded over itself like a dog-eared page.

These intrusions, more than anything else, evoke for me the experience of reading Sam’s fiction. Sam writes alternate presents and shadow futures, turning our world inside out, breaking its ugliness into beauty, its banality into wonder. Whether set in revolutionary Russia or small-town America, these are profoundly queer stories: stories about men loving and being loved, the difficult bonds between parents and children, the gifts and burdens of inheritance. They are stories less about coming out than of coming in: stories of parents and siblings struggling towards understanding the extraordinary secret selves of their children and brothers, reckoning with the effects of that newfound knowledge on their own lives. 

In what follows, you’ll find reality and fantasy dancing together like light and silver, illuminating and exposing each other in the darkroom of Sam’s mind—and in your own. As you thumb your way through imprisoned megafauna, pyrokinetics, and the heart-broken souls of empty homes, you’ll find another presence surrounding the stories, introducing them to each other with more tenderness and danger than I could hope to achieve here. If you’ve encountered these stories in magazines or on the shortlists of awards, you’ll find them transformed by their proximity to each other, bound together by left-handed stitches of text in a sly voice that intrudes and unites like a needle.

On the internet Sam often goes by the name sentencebender, which—appropriately—bends several meanings into itself. A sentence can be a complete textual unit, a tool with which to communicate—and it can be a punishment, a consequence. When I think of Sam as a bender of sentences I think of his fiction, but I also think of his activism, his organizing, his devotion to collective action as the means to confronting vast and vicious systems. I think of how assumptions and prejudices are types of sentences, their grammars muddy and opaque, and how he bends light into them through unexpected angles of perspective and inquiry. I think of how both water and fire have nourishing and destructive aspects, like love. It’s been an honour and a privilege to watch him develop his art over the years—to see him steep his stories in that heady suspension of hope and memory that makes new worlds bloom in the dark.

i.

Eye contact; flash of animal panic.

He locks his gaze to mine, this man three bar stools down, and even though it’s what I came here hunting for I can feel my insides quiver with the existential terror of any prey animal.

Worse: he grins. His smile holds so many scenarios: sex, murder, a back room or a dark alley or decades of marital bliss. Stories inside of stories.

Hey, boy, he says.

Allosaurus Burgers

Our teacher Mrs. Strunt said the allosaurus coming to Hudson Falls was the best thing that ever happened to Hudson Falls, but the worst thing that ever happened to the allosaurus. She herded us onto the bus looking mad about it, trying to keep us from seeing she was just as excited as we were. The bus was freezing and we had all the windows fogged up in five minutes. Other boys drew curse words. I wrote F-U-C and then flinched, imagining my mother finding out, so I wiped it away and drew an allosaurus.

The poor thing, Mrs. Strunt said. Wherever it came from, it’s got to feel terribly lonely and lost and scared.

The roads were all madness on the way to the farm. Barely a day since Mr. Blecher made his big announcement, and everyone in the world was coming to Hudson Falls. Scientists and men with giant cameras, and lots of soldiers with lots of guns, but not the mean soldiers and scientists from movies. Everyone I saw had a smile so big it could have been their birthday. Everyone is coming to Hudson Falls, I thought.

And then: a treacherous, wicked, horrible thought.

Maybe my dad will come.

Where had it come from—dad—that foul, forbidden word? I sucked in my cheeks like making a fish face and closed my teeth on as much flesh as I could, and bit down hard. And then harder. Punishing myself. Until I felt the same hot smothering rage that rises up in my mother every time I say that word.

I thought my mother was God, then. Six-foot-something, all flesh and freckles, she towered over our neighbors in church and at the supermarket. She came home from the slaughterhouse smelling like blood. I was nine then, and she could still pick me up, hoist me into the air. Not even the fathers of the other boys my age could do that. She wasn’t afraid of anything.

At breakfast that morning my mother had said, Day after tomorrow, the army’s going to take it away, and I personally think it can’t happen soon enough.

I finished my milk and Mom poured me more, which I did not want, which I drank. Mom is certain that the government wants to take our stuff. Mostly our guns. She has a lot of guns and a lot of stickers on her car about them and her cold dead hands. So now I wondered why she wanted them to take the allosaurus.

Woulda taken it right away, only it’ll take ’em forty-eight hours to scrounge up the right equipment.

I nodded. Mom drank from the jug and put it back in the fridge.

Blecher’s going to make out okay, though. Heard he’s got a million in TV deals lined up. She likes Mr. Blecher because he’s an old, old man, but he can still get over on her once in a while in arm wrestling. And he’s hidden away some of its droppings to sell to the companies.

What kind of companies?

Mom frowned. How the hell would I know something like that?

I wondered what they would do with dinosaur poop. Could you clone something from its poop? Could something so gone forever come back so easily? And if poop worked, what else would? I thought of my father’s baseball cap, the one Mom didn’t know I had, the one that still smelled of his sweat when I crawled to the back of my closet late at night and in total darkness buried my nose in it.

Mom never sits at mealtimes. She made anxious circles through the tiny kitchen, moving refrigerator magnets and removing expired coupons and straightening the cat and dog figurines I could never stop forcing to fight each other. It was a Tuesday morning, which is when my sister Sue calls from college. Waiting for the call always made Mom a little tense.

What? she said, kicking me lightly. Why the face, like I just killed a puppy?

I shrugged.

You want me to be excited about it. But that thing ain’t right. They got scientists out combing that corner of Blecher’s farm, but mark my words they won’t find nothing. This is something bigger than science.

At church yesterday, Pastor said it’s a creature of God, I spoke carefully, not contradicting, just seeking clarity. I could no longer swing my legs when I sat at the kitchen table. This was a recent development, one I’d been looking forward to that had turned out to be pretty crummy. My feet rested resentfully on the cold tiles. A draft came from under the door.

Pastor’ll say what needs to be said to help Mr. Blecher out and to get people to come and spend their money in town. Creature of God, my foot.

Church was the most important thing in my mother’s life, but I don’t think she believed in God. The Hudson Falls Evangelical Lutheran Church gave her lots of things, like friends and a full social calendar and a reason not to go to the liquor store. God didn’t offer her anything extra. Mostly she just liked what Pastor said: the sermons full of blood, fire, and the devil and impending doom, about a world gone haywire and full of sinners and about to be punished.

She heaped bacon on my plate, five then six then seven slices. ‘Fore you know it, there’ll be bunches of them things, running riot over all the world. Eating us all up.

It’s locked up, Mom.

"I know you saw King Kong, because I saw you crying at the end of it— and she thumped me on the arm, not hard, because I saw her cry too when the big ape fell— so I know you know they had Kong tied up good and proper, and he still got loose."

My sister Sue called then. Mom talked to her for a little while, not sounding super-excited. Mom handed me the phone while Sue was in a sentence.

Hi, I said, interrupting her.

"Matt? Hi! Exciting stuff, right? A dinosaur in stupid little Hudson Falls! It’s on all the news channels."

Yeah.

Have you seen it?

No, I said. We go today.

I wish I could come see it, but it’ll be gone soon, right? Did you read the dinosaur books I sent you?

No.

Why not?

I shrugged.

Did you just shrug? You can’t shrug over the phone.

"I don’t know," I said.

Do you not like dinosaurs anymore?

I shrugged again. Then I remembered about shrugging. I don’t know.

But I did know. Starting around the time I turned seven, Mom frowned when I talked about dinosaurs. You get too excited about those things, she’d say. Loving something too much is dangerous. So whenever I got the urge to pick up a dinosaur book or toy, I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek.

The allosaurus was different, of course. It was something you couldn’t ignore or pray away.

I talked to Dad, Sue said. Mom was making a lot of noise putting the dishes in the sink. He’s coming to town to see the allosaurus. He begged his editor to give him the assignment.

Oh.

Do you remember your dad?

No. There was nothing to remember. Some phone calls, sometimes, some letters, and once a box with a birthday present. Mom set it on fire without opening it. Sadness-anger tightened my stomach. I bit my lip to banish it.

Mom’s . . . Sue spent a while figuring out where to go with that one. Mom’s not always thinking straight, when it comes to him. She knew she had to be careful. After she screamed bad things at Mom, I refused to speak to her for the whole week before she went to college. I know it seems like Mom’s the toughest chick on two legs, but she’s afraid of lots of things.

The being-mad-at-Sue didn’t really go away until we clambered down from the bus at Blecher’s Farm. I had been a million times, for church picnics and farm field trips, but had never seen it so full of strangers, people on cell phones, slinging weird devices. The inside of the barn was full of new gates and doors and walls, built quick by the army while they waited for the elephant cage to come from San Diego.

The allosaurus was as tall as two of my mother when it reared up to its full height, but it rarely did. Its usual leaning-forward walk placed it at just the right level to look Mom in the eye. It looked the way it did in books and movies, a tyrannosaurus but smaller, only it had something the movies don’t: a personality. Curious and mistrustful, not particularly smart, a little like a seagull that wants to steal your food.

The poor thing, Mrs. Strunt said, looking up at it. It bobbed its head as it walked.

I was glad Mom wasn’t there. I could stand there staring at the thing with what Mom calls my gape-mouthed imbecile look.

The allosaurus was anti-camouflaged, wine-colored with long, wide, yellow streaks down the flank. It didn’t need to hide from anyone. The claws were a weird marbled grey I hadn’t imagined. Blood and hay covered the floor. It had been eating; its arms and face were messy from it. It didn’t look lonely or lost or scared. It looked proud of itself, like it had lucked into a lot of food and was waiting to see how things played out.

Mr. Blecher took us on a personal tour, his hands heavy on the heads of the kids he knew from church.

We stood at the edge of the barn, beside the steep railing that penned it in. The allosaurus came closer and someone screamed. Its nostrils snorted smoke into the chilly air. The barn had been there since forever, but the sawdust-and-cement smell of the air gave the place a freshly-built feel that was not reassuring. Only raw wood and new nails kept it away from us. It nudged a bar with its head, its claws a yard from my face, and a whole bunch of someones screamed. Maybe including me. The arms are what make an allosaurus so much better than a tyrannosaurus. Tyrannosaurus is way bigger, but they have stupid stumpy little arms with two claws. Allosauruses have long, muscular, useful arms with three scary claws.

Mrs. Strunt asked, What are they going to do with it?

Rent it out to movie studios, Blecher said. Take its DNA and make little ones. Bottle its spit and sell it for engine grease. Honestly ma’am, I have no idea.

He took us around to the adjoining cages, where the goats had been crammed. He gripped the lever that would release a goat into the allosaurus pen, and grinned and said, You kids want to see what happens when I pull this?

We all screamed yes, but Mrs. Strunt said no. She said it loud and weird so Mr. Blecher didn’t.

Sure wish I could keep it, but they won’t let me. It was all I could do to get them to camp down the hill with their whole security rigmarole, not keep me up all night with their noise.

I watched the allosaurus. Mr. Blecher was telling the story about how he found it on bear patrol in his John Deere Gator Utility Vehicle, and how everyone always told him he was crazy to bring the harness and the tranquilizer cannon like he could shoot down a grizzly and bring it home. Didn’t he do them one better? . . . except that he had to call up five of his friends to bring their Gators to help drag it back.

In my head I broke the allosaurus down into the cuts Mom taught me, from the picture of the cow. Thick rib, thin rib. Silverside. Brisket. Chuck. Blade. Drumstick? Cows don’t have drumsticks. Probably the allosaurus was closer to a chicken, but Mom doesn’t work with chickens. That’s a separate slaughterhouse. That’s a whole set of words she doesn’t know.

So? Mom said. How was it?

Neat, I said, sitting down at the kitchen table. She blinked and smiled like she’d been praying, or napping. Her hands were raw, bright pink. Winter’s tough at the slaughterhouse. The meat gets cold fast.