Kama: A Mini Macabre in Queereaders

Jan 08, 2011 Nancy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: erotic-horror, gay, e-books, forbidden-fruit

What starts out as a melancholy tale that explores aging and loneliness takes a dark turn once Kama enters Edward's life.

I loved this heart-stirring and bone-chilling story.

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Sep 23, 2011 T.T. Thomas rated it it was amazing

Shelves: glbt

With Kama, Paul G. Bens, Jr. has written a tour de force of nearly modern gothic horror proportions. This brief story packs a wallop that is as unexpected as it is frightening. Bens, author of numerous short stories and the novel Kelland, is a writer of huge talent, a real a master of all that storytelling was meant to be, ought to be. With his book, Kama, Bens most reminds me of the late Josephine Hart, author of the 1991 novel Damage (which was the basis for Louis Malle’s film by the same name With Kama, Paul G. Bens, Jr. has written a tour de force of nearly modern gothic horror proportions. This brief story packs a wallop that is as unexpected as it is frightening. Bens, author of numerous short stories and the novel Kelland, is a writer of huge talent, a real a master of all that storytelling was meant to be, ought to be. With his book, Kama, Bens most reminds me of the late Josephine Hart, author of the 1991 novel Damage (which was the basis for Louis Malle’s film by the same name a year later). Like Hart’s novel, Ben’s work is purposefully sparse and unyieldingly powerful.

No one I’ve read, except O.Henry and Josephine Hart, can pull off an astonishing, horrific, palpably sickening and stunningly heartbreaking ending like Paul Bens. In this story, it’s a double whammy. I might have had a faint hint of a premonition for the first shocker, but I did not see the second one coming. Did Not! Like Hart, Bens chooses his words carefully, and every word counts.

The starkness of the story’s minimalistic narrative pulls us into the quiet dramatic rendering of escalating unease. We are gently nudged into feelings of empathy for the protagonist, an empathy offset by a curious combination of both mild discomfort and intrigue. By the end of the story, we are reduced---by the simpatico of shared horror and then back into those first feelings of empathy, then horror, again, then empathy, again.

We feel, first for the protagonist, and then, later, much later, for his nemises. And there are at least two of those! But as the story unfolds in a deceptively simple way, there is a vague, indeterminate tenor of terror that grips the reader early on. I kept having a feeling that something was not going to end well. Everything was so ordinary, at first. Casual, almost. Random, even. Bens has a special talent for engendering tension in the simplest of situations. Only later does one understand that tension as the source of the earlier felt dread. What a brave display of honesty, ingenuity, and talent! The ethos and the pathos of this drama are worthy competitors for our attention.
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