A review by kjcharles
Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites by Hal Duncan

A fairly weird story collection. The first few stories are about a group of mostly queer ragamuffins, the Scruffians, who have been 'Fixed' so they don't age and regenerate injury. They're like highly sexed spliff-smoking Borribles, basically, with a mythos that touches on Greek stories, the Fisher King, Peter Pan, Osiris, Dickens and much more, and a backstory that's all about exploitation and cruelty and the persecution and resilience of queer youth. It feels like the stories are coming together to make a bigger story arc, but they don't: it's a collection of multiple stories so we fade out of the Scruffians world without realising, almost, and into others. I was sorry about that, I felt a unifying thread arc could really have worked and the world was compelling.

I couldn't grasp a couple of the other stories (the Pelops and Cubism ones) at all, found them incomprehensible. The werewolf story is tremendous--queer vampire hunters, one of whom is a werewolf who operates exactly like a dog, hilariously, and a spectacularly good vampire concept--and I rather wish the author would write less experimentally more often because he's bloody good. People who like experimental writing will doubtless disagree.

All in all very interesting as a story collection, if ultimately leaving me wanting lots of other things from it.