Book Review

Be Gay Do Crime edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley. Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books, 2025. 278 pages, $17.95. Paper. 

Photo Description: Front cover of collection.

Photo Credit: Dzanc Books (buy the book here!)

Book review written by Hannah Goss

With the increasing anxiety about LGBTQIA+ rights in America, this collection seems timely in its exploration of queerness, transgression, and love during economic, environmental, and other disasters. Edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, these sixteen short stories, Be Gay Do Crime, live up to the cover’s claim to depict queer chaos. These characters exhibit chaos through not only crimes like trespassing, kidnapping, and drug dealing, but also lesser transgressions like cursing exes, entering a children’s coloring contest, and watching the neighbor’s TV from the yard. This collection showcases a range of queer experiences from a transwoman’s experimentation with a stolen drug, “Dysphorable,” to Ghanan-British women debating having children in a post-Brexit Britain, to a second-person narrator thinking about a bad hair removal as a “reaction to manhood.” Each of these stories is revealing of the desire to be human amid a world that represses identity. 

Within these stories, these characters struggle against systems of power and use these transgressions as a means of exercising agency. In “It’s a Cruel World for Empaths Like Us”, Soula Emmanuel depicts a narrator caught feeling powerless and invisible in corporate life, turning to threats via phone calls when their hair lasering goes awry. In a similar resistance to power, Priya Guns’ “Make Life Great Again,” follows a custodian’s observations from inside the White House bathroom with a familiar president watching water shortages impact the nation while he pursues a volcanic island expedition, ignoring the indigenous population that inhabited it first. Meanwhile, the narrator catches two women conspiring to assassinate the president in the bathroom stalls. Other stories more explicitly connect desire to economic inequality through Temim Fruchter’s “Redistribution” in which the main character M steals as a means of reclaiming some power she lacks, thinking each stolen object is earned from the loss of an ex. “The Meaning of Life” by Myriam Lacroix explores two women finding themselves destined for motherhood in the alley behind their apartment building where they find an abandoned child. They fear taking the child for medical care, losing custody, and finally ending up in a standoff with their son’s biological mother when she kidnaps them. These stories paint crime as a necessity, a desperate act born out of inequality from wealth, corporations, and other indifferent institutions, yet still, these characters must confront the consequences whether relational or legal.  

The characters that span this collection are messy, unapologetic, and somewhat unlikable but also deeply human in their conflicts. The narrator, Iris, of Anna Dorn’s “Bad Dog” is self-sabotaging and deflecting of blame. Yet as she dresses up like her twin to try to break her engagement up, she’s forced to confront that, like the dogs her sister’s fiancée rehabilitates, there are no bad dogs. Perhaps, she has some responsibility to take for her life choices rather than blaming her life’s troubles on the dog who scarred her as a child.  Alissa Nutting’s “Peep Show” narrator performs sex with her girlfriend because she thinks her boss’s dog that she stole is a robot he’s watching them through. It gives her the confidence to perform well at work and receive a promotion but at the cost of her relationship. This story explores the nuances of having to be straight-passing at work, the thin line of being sexually available but not sexually promiscuous to a male boss, and the inequality of being a white woman breaking the law versus a woman of color. The struggles of these characters are tangible, and their desires for family, love, and belonging are affecting. Each of these stories feels current and insightful in their exploration of queerness and in positioning crime as a means of protest, of reclamation, and of necessity.  

Camera Lake by Alex Pickett. Madison, WI: The University of Washington Press, 2024. 189 pages. $17.95. Paper.

Photo description: Alex Pickett featured left and cover art for Camera Lake featured right

Photo credit: @alex_pickett1 on X

Book review written by Liz Barnett

Pickett’s short story collection Camera Lake has characters that feel human. This should be a given for any story, but Alex’s characters feel like anyone you might meet on the street. As a reader, you share with them their regrets, their anxieties, and even their loneliness.

The first short story in the collection “Practice” displays this wonderfully. The coach tests his teams’ fathers as a punishment for them, but it’s never anything embarrassing. Just the words “I love you Dad.” From this and a conversation with one of the team members we can feel how these are things the coach has probably never said to his own dad. It leaves the reader with a lingering feeling of things maybe they wish they had said to their own parents or even friends. There’s a sense of regret in the story that sits with the reader long after the story ends.

That feeling follows us into our next story, “At the Twin Pines Motel”. Our narrator who has run from her family to the motel is someone who seeks out thrills. Her old life bores her and she is currently lost with no idea where she is going. So much so that she begs Richard (A stranger) for any answer for who she is and what she’ll do next. She makes the reader confront their own feelings about what they want in life and who they want to be.

Finally, we come to the titular short story “Camera Lake”. A story in which our narrator thinks they’re being observed at home. We dive a bit into his past as a school counselor and begin to understand his need to move from a city to a small house on a lake in Wisconsin following the deaths of 3 of the students he counseled. We see his fear and the hesitation to get back to a normal life when he feels that everyone around him thinks he’s responsible for the deaths and the way he thinks he might have ruined his wife’s life because they moved so far away from their home of 16 years. When the main character finally lets out the breath he feels like he’s been holding, the relief for the reader is equally as satisfying.

Throughout the stories in this collection, there’s an ominous feeling that follows you. Like at any moment a twist could happen and the stories could turn into a horror film. Then the reader is

caught off guard when these expectations aren’t met. It’s interesting for the reader to be surprised by their own unmet ideas. Maybe Richard will be that creepy guy who murders our POV character…maybe the coach’s dog who goes missing was stolen by a student who was embarrassed by the texting punishment or their angry father who heard about the prank. Maybe our narrator in “Camera Lake” is really going crazy. There’s no one there with a camera watching them or his wife is gaslighting him or maybe he really is causing all these deaths. Then, we never have our fears confirmed. It should be something that leads the reader wanting for more excitement, but every time it feels satisfying to realize we’re jumping to conclusions and should just let Pickett’s stories carry us where he wants us to go.

Alex Pickett’s story collection Camera Lake plays wonderfully with the reader. Trying to tempt them into their worst fears and then always comes back to the human. Of course the dog wasn’t murdered. Of course Richard is just a normal guy taking over his uncle’s business. In fact, our POV character makes Richard uncomfortable.

Each story in Camera Lake excites you, making it hard to put down till you’ve read all 14 stories. The collection is gripping, powerful, and so human. A must read for fans of short story collections.

– Liz Barnett, Mid-American Review

Available for purchase: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/6240.htm