My House Gathers Desires
Solidly in the New Wave Fabulist writing school that blends Fantasy, History, Horror, and Science Fiction with impeccable literary writing. Influences include Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, and Edgar Allen Poe.
In the tradition of Angela Carter or Kelly Link, these stories look for new ways to consider sexual identity and its relation to history. In “Sodom and Gomorrah,” we encounter a subversive and ecstatic new version of the Old Testament story. In “The Re’em,” a medieval monk’s search for a mythic beast conjures forbidden desire. And in “Notes on Inversion,” German psychiatrist Kraft-Ebbing receives a surreal retort to his clinical descriptions of same-sex desire.
: “McOmber explores the nexus between the natural and the artificial, the intangible and the concrete.…Commandingly erudite and imaginative, McOmber meshes myth, the occult, and 19th-century technological advances in an uncanny and captivating gothic tale."
Uses historical figures and settings, and bends factual information with fantastical writing to create plausible alternative histories that ultimately comment on our own notions of modern life.
Strong LGBTQ themes and characters.
Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest (Touchstone, 2012) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA Editions, 2011). His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Fairy Tale Review. He was the longtime managing and associate editor for the literary magazine Hotel America at Columbia College Chicago before moving to Los Angeles where he now teaches at Loyola Marymount University.
