About Cowboy Up

Edited by Meredith Schwartz
141 pages / 53000 words
ISBN: 1-934166-53-7
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc

Do you like your fantasy urban? Do you want your magic real? Then look to Alleys and Doorways. Editor Meredith Schwartz brings tales of magic and mystery, all set in the cities of our realities and imaginations.

From magic users to elves, dragons to demon lovers, the stories as are diverse as they are heated. Authors like Sean Michael, BA Tortuga, Steve Berman and AJ Grant give us the experience of gay love and romance, and all the magic we can dream of!

Review

Chris Owen, bestselling Torquere Press author, writes:

Here there be dragons! Along with scryers, werebunnies, knights, love potions and cameras that take odd photos. Did I mention the baby dragon?

Meredith Schwartz has brought together thirteen stories of the odd and mysterious in the anthology Alleys and Doorways. The collection is a look at the things which are slightly beyond the normal, the occasionally creepy, the slightly weird. Covering a wide range of styles, moods and emotions, this anthology really does have something for everyone who likes a hint of the speculative in their fiction.

Boasting a roster of authors that includes such talents as Steve Berman, AJ Grant, Ann Stocce and Abbie Strehnlow, the stories range from humorous to haunting. Werebunnies and knights who battle dragons in New York city are juxtaposed against soldiers from a war they sooner forget and men who are claimed by those who dwell in the night.

The stories are urban, but they feel like fairytales; they call to our childhood beliefs in something other than what we see everyday. By this collection, we are drawn into a deeper world where anything can happen, by almost any means. There are influences in these worlds that change and color perceptions and the way the characters live, making
the stories and the characters vibrant in a way that the mundane world can't be.

This book is captivating. The erotic components are dreamlike in some cases, as fierce as a storm in others. Sean Michael gives us steamy, Julia Talbot gives us nearly desperate hope, and Rose Fox takes us to a place where sex is both an escape and a prison. There is love between partners, strangers and those captivated by forces they can't deny, though they may try. The reader needn't try; the pages almost turn themselves, from one world to the next, from secret places to the apartment next door which just may have a baby dragon in its kitchen.

See through new eyes. Walk through a doorway and into new realms. Watch out for dragons and be wary of what you drink. Consider your mirrors and your antique camera, and above all, carry a token with you at all times.

Sample

Foreword: Welcome to the Grey Wood
By Meredith Schwartz

In traditional fairy tales the green wood was a place of magic and change, where traditional ties and roles are loosed. There were perils and terrors, and you could lose your way in the dark. But those who were clever and brave -- or lucky and kind, if it's that sort of story -- might see wonders and win through to a new life, one that meets the inner needs that drove them from the safety of village or palace and out into the wild world.

In modern fantasy, the city often takes the place of the green wood: it is where the discontented begin the quest for adventure or fortune or love; where the old rules – often the constricting conformity of the suburbs, or family expectations – are loosed. In the magical city, transformation is not just possible, but glimpsed around every street corner.

Gay people, in particular, have often gravitated to the city to come out, become someone new, and find each other. Not all urban fantasy is queer, of course, but fairies have more in common with the gay and lesbian experience than just an epithet to be reclaimed. For many of us, the story of the changeling is the story of our own childhoods – knowing we are different from the families and communities that surrounded us, never feeling quite at home until we can name and claim the magic that makes us different, and then find others like ourselves.

Of course, there are some differences: the gray wood is not just trees dressed up in skyscraper drag. In urban fantasies, nature and the unknown are far less likely to be the ultimate enemy than is human nature, someone else's or our own. And while the magic of the wood lurked in dark groves where man had never stepped, the magic in urban fantasy is more likely to pool in the corners man made and then forgot: the little spaces on the edges of things, unlikely and rough-edged and disregarded – the alleys, doorways and docks; deserted parks and poor, artsy neighborhoods. These are exactly the same spaces that urban gay people have often claimed as their own; they also resonate with people who have themselves too often been overlooked.

Urban fantasy also echoes gay experience because it is so often about borders, about negotiating the fluid boundaries of two worlds, at home in both and neither. And about learning to find beauty in the once-feared strangeness of ourselves and each other. Is there a monster in the former horror canon that has not been reclaimed, in recent years, by sympathetic stories getting under its skin and looking out through its eyes?

The stories in this anthology travel to Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and Seattle, not to mention the lands of Fairy and the cities with no name, and meet elves and dragons and stranger things. Some of the characters you're about to meet made their peace with magic long ago. Some are meeting it for the first time, and some have come full circle to become the guides or guardians, mischief-makers or demon lovers or fairies that they came to meet, helping the next generation survive the monsters in the dark and find their way to the heart – whether a lover's or simply their own.

In sum, they are about love and sex and magic and real estate, fighting and fucking and making the trains run on time. We hope something in this book makes you snigger, tear up, jerk off, or look over your shoulder for a rustle of wings.