Overview of Heights of Passion
From the eerie mystery of You've Got Male and the homicides of Happy Hour, to the insistent rhythms of El Baile and the glitter of Heights of Passion, these tales bristle with emotional excitement. A man plans to leave his wife for a lover. Two queens get their dead batteries jump-started by a foreign student. A man tries to train a young stud as his pet. Murder in a gay community. One man's life is influenced by a closeted mentor; another's is altered by his knife-wielding mother. Bisexuals profit from a torrid novel. A Hollywood director finds excitement in being dominated. A sexy spinner of tales seduces a straight man. Conquest in a Spanish dance bar. A retired doctor finds a wet dream in a chat room; another retiree is stalked on the internet. A traveler breaks new ground with a Korean novice. An artist uses food as a metaphor for sex. An observer is invited to referee a squabbling couple in bed.
Each story is designed to intrigue. Enjoy...
Reader Reviews for Heights of Passion
| By JH Cove |
Short stories with a plot!
I would describe most of the stories as vignettes showing various gay archetypes within the older-younger context, and as such they are interesting and entertaining. In Saul and David, there is the jealous older man who treats his young lover badly because of his own insecurities. In You've Got Male, the older man makes contact with a supposedly good-looking younger man on the internet, but it turns out that the younger man is not quite who he claims to be. The two main characters in Crossing Borders, in contrast, did not strike me as archetypes. Both were three-dimensional characters that defied easy categorization. The older narrator, from Texas, told a fairly straightforward story of a weekend liaison in Vancouver with a graduate student named Barry. (Barry is a hockey-playing student of English literature, and he's Korean--so much for stereotypes!) What made the story stand out were the many small, yet genuine observations about all manner of things from the narrator's perception of the quirks of Canadian culture, to his young lover's inexperience in bed, to his own anxieties about crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. I interpreted the title of the story as a metaphor for the difficulties in "crossing the border" between generations. This is one of the very, very few short stories I've read that I enjoyed enough to read more than once. |