The Wild Creatures

Sam D'Allesandro may be just a nom de plume to those who have had the pleasure of reading his works in various magazines and quarterlies, but this young farm boy born Richard Anderson in 1957 and who migrated to the West Coast as a dreamy eyed young gay man, left a number of excellent hints of his gifts strewn about the premises and minds of his adopted state before succumbing to AIDS in 1988. This collection of all of his writings, edited in style by Kevin Killian, is at once joyous, funny, insightful, erotic, full of rage, and finally replete with resignation. Writing in one of the most difficult decades of the past century, a time when AIDS reared its violent head tossing the world into a terror of facing an unknown entity and striking out at young men at the peak of their erotic appetites, D'Allesandro saw, heard, felt, and experienced it all. His pungent stories deal with all aspects of being young and handsome and gay in a world of fear vs denial, finding stories where least expected and written with the grace of a man of far more experience than he owned. The stories vary in length, are about 20 in number, and dive headlong into passion, fantasy, wry humor, longing, and loneliness. Just reading the titles suggests the range of his abilities of observing: Teddy Kennedy, Speed boys, The Zombie Pit, Electrical Type of things, All I Want Is to Die Famous, Nothing Ever Just Disappears. His spell is cast as he places into words the emotions of lust and desire, and it also is fragrantly perfect in his writing about women. This is an excellent body of work, not all of it is up to the highest standards of the best, but there is certainly ample evidence that had D'Allesandro lived beyond age 31 he would have been a significant writer. Killian's collection is both a delightful discovery and a sad obituary. Grady Harp, May 06

As I read through this collection, I kept slowing down to study it, reading it like a writer, not as a reader. I wanted to enjoy it on the reader level first, but some passages were so incredible that I caught myself re-reading them several times instead of moving on. Teddy Kennedy is short but packed with humor. Speedboys brought me back to my summer days as a feral child. It is brief and perfect. Giovanni's Apartment is outstanding, but I can't begin to explain why. It simply is. Nothing Ever Just Disappears is heartbreaking in subtle shades that don't impact until you pull back from the story and realize the bigger picture you've been looking at. As one of the reviewer mentions, it's a pity that there isn't more, but what's there is worth reading.

If it had not been for Suspect Thoughts Press reprinting his collection of short stories, I would never have discovered the work of Sam D'Allesandro. His prose is spare and direct, at times darkly erotic, and auto-biographically confessional in tone. What it might lack in polish it makes up for ten fold in blunt force. His micro-fiction is especially intense, with standouts "Walking to the Ocean this Morning" and "All I Want Is To Die Famous", both pieces under three pages with the same impact as being slammed by a truck. A high recommend for readers of non-mainstream queer lit and erotica.