After being thoroughly impressed by We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels and Other Creatures, which was edited by Rob Costello, The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times was immediately bumped to the top of my TBR pile. Costello is a powerful voice in the LGBTQIA+ community, who writes with equal confidence for both adults and YA audiences. His latest, The Dancing Bears, has been released by Lethe Press, who specialise in LGBTQIA+ literature, with Costello’s debut novel An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys being released by the same press in 2025.

Coming in at 180-pages, The Dancing Bears is the perfect length for a collection, short and sweet, and I carefully rationed the eleven stories by reading them two-at-a-time. I could just as easily have devoured them all in one sitting. These are not traditional horror stories and are all the better for it. Instead, Costello slips in and out of genres, love or longing is never far away, neither is small town horror nor the often emotional coming-of-age theme. Bubbling in the background is Costello’s most constant theme; one of acceptance, often with a convincing and perfectly natural LGBTQIA+ slant. Some of the strongest stories stayed with me long after completion, and one could tell that lurking within the weirdness are moving personal anecdotes.

"The Hole of Dark Kill Hollow" concerns two best friends who visit a hole in the ground which has unexplained supernatural powers. If you jump in the hole and make a wish, it might change something about you but will simultaneously take something you value. The two young men have a complicated friendship and privately contemplate whether they want to go through with their jumps as they hike towards the hole. This is an outstanding short story with a pitch perfect ending about friendship and protecting yourself.

Jill is another beauty. A troubled teenager falls under the influence of a wealthy, disturbed, older woman, taking him on a dark odyssey where he moves from being a passenger to willing participant in murder and beyond. "Whatever Happened to the Boy Who Fell in the Lake" is the sad tale of Tick, who longs to find his mother who many believe was lost at sea, but he is certain is a mermaid whom he attempts to seek out as a solution to his many personal problems. "I Am the Other One" concerns two fighting young brothers and the tragedy which occurs when the tables are turned and the power shifts.

Benji is the central character in "The Thing With Chains", a former child actor who hangs out at fashionable parties, letting himself be used and abused, life dimmed with drink and drugs, hoping for an unlikely return to the screen. Whilst relaxing in the jacuzzi, another young man, whom he calls El, sidles smoothly over. Benji should have refused the offered drink! "Only Castles Burning" follows the same story structure as "The Hole of Dark Kill Hollow", with two friends travelling to see a huge gas fire caused by fracking. In recent times the young men have drifted apart, with the story being as much about what is unsaid, concluding with a terrific ending perhaps taking their friendship into fresh territory. Or not.

Some of the stories are published for the first time in this collection, others have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The NoSleep Podcast, The Dark Magazine, Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-town America, Hunger Mountain and The Wondrous Real Magazine. Although this is an adult collection, most of the stories are suitable for confident YA readers and even if queer themes do not necessarily dominate the narratives, there is almost always some manner of representation, often very gently done.

I love the manner in which the majority of these stories are tricky to define and there is much to enjoy in those I have failed to mention, including a worn out polar bear and a woman stalking her former boyfriend whom she cannot accept has since come out as gay. The tales drift from melancholic to dreamlike and the manner in which Rob Costello frames his weird or supernatural events around very believable, often sympathetic characters, is second to none.