The author writes excellently about what happens between Allain and Prince Raven. She writes surprisingly erotically about them and their relationship. New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton —with a new Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter tale: "Magic Like Heat Across My Skin." It's been six months since vampire hunter Anita Blake has seen the two men in her life. Now a kidnapping brings them together--closer than a woman, a vampire, and a werewolf have ever been before... In this story, Selena meets her old college sweetheart Mona who she dumped for another girl. Mona comes to Selena's shop and asks for ingredients for a love spell.

A Scent of Roses" is a brilliant story about Janet who has rescued her husband from the Queen of the Fae. The author writes captivatingly about how Janet becomes interested in the Queen and what she thinks about her husband. I think that this story will enthrall everybody who loves stories about the Fae. New York Times bestselling author J. D. Robb —with a new Lieutenant Eve Dallas story: "Interlude in Death." At a police conference off-planet, Lietenant Eve Dallas is forced to forsake duty to take down a rogue ex-cop--and save the name she loves... Each encounter provides a simple, ethical lesson about cooperation, overcoming prejudice, positive thinking, intelligence, loyalty, caring, responsibility, or understanding. These aren’t quite ‘bang you over the head’ morality tales, but they are definitely geared toward younger readers. Still, they are endearing and entertaining to even older readers. It’s all ‘magic.’ The beings that abducted their parents used ‘magic,’ and they don’t know how it (or much of anything else) works. That’s about all the explanation we get. It’s not quite as bad as saying it was all a dream, but it’s close. There is nothing about parallel worlds, multiple dimensions, or holes in space-time. All we get for an explanation for how all this happened is that it was ‘magic.’ Humans can do magic too, but the Earth has an anti-magic field around it that makes it almost impossible. Oh, and the San Andreas fault is not really a geological fault line between continental plates, it’s a magically sensitive area that will rupture if the aliens prevent portals from opening between their world and ours.Since they are young children they find themselves making mistakes that seem so common sense, and then regretting their decision, but learning from it none the less. Each world they jump through they find new and interesting characters that become more and more dangerous.

Each strand follows a different set of sci-fi characters and aliens as they explore and colonise distant planets.Catherine Lundoff’s stories have appeared in over 80 publications including Callisto: A Queer Fiction Journal, The Cainite Conspiracies, Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam, So Fey: Queer Faery Stories, The Mammoth Book of Professor Moriarty Adventures, Tales of the Unanticipated, Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, Farrago’s Wainscot and Best Lesbian Erotica. She is the author of Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories and Silver Moon: A Wolves of Wolf's Point Novel (new updated edition) and the editor of Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) , all from Queen of Swords Press. However, the speculative is only part of the title, the fantastic only part of the adjectives given for these tales. These are stories of the queer fantastic. The protagonists found are lesbians, bisexual, gay, or “somehow queer-identified,” as Lundoff explains in her introduction. These are important to her, as a “bi/queer-identified writer,” and to such readers like me. That detective on another planet is transgender. “Beauty”, the vampire retelling of Beauty and the Beast is also a gay love story, a “bit of yaoi with vampires” (v). This vampire gay love story was among my favorites. Shakespeare’s sister has to pass as a man, thus she is a crossdresser. The tale of the witches is a lesbian love story, one marked by jealousy, and slightly less than expert spellcasting. “A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace,” another of my favorites, is about political intrigue, dynastic quarrels, body switching at the palace, among other things. As Lundoff asserts in the introduction, “We need to be able to see ourselves as heroes and villains, gods and monsters, knights and wizards, and fair ladies and dragons and all the points between” (v). I read this and cheered! However, I did want to note that a good story, and this is a collection of excellent stories, is a good story, and that the reader does not have to be “somehow queer-identified” to enjoy them. These are human stories, about the human condition and human experience, seen through the lens of fantastic fiction. Here are some answers to the question of what it means to be human, answers that are thoughtful, often funny, sometimes dark, and always, well told, by an award-winning writer with a gifted imagination and keen sense of language and story. They find themselves transported to another world and almost run over by a pair of transparent (literally) people who seemingly don’t welcome their presence and encourage them to leave through another shimmering portal. Thus, their adventure begins, jumping through portals in search of their parents, and finding themselves in different worlds populated with strange and often dangerous creatures. If I had to sum up Lundoff’s collection Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories in a single word (which would be a totally unfair thing to require me to do) it would be “versatile.” This volume touches base on a broad variety of genres and subgenres yet succeeds in being a unified stylistic whole. There is everything from steampunk horror to hard-boiled alien invasion to magical police procedural, each story both drawing lovingly from its literary inspirations and turning them upside down.