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The Wild Creatures:
Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro
edited by
Kevin Killian
Praise for
The Wild Creatures:
Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro
"Beautiful, queer, former farmboy Richard Anderson took the name Sam D'Allesandro on arriving on the West Coast—sometimes claiming he was the son of the Warhol film "superstar" Joe Dallesandro—and never looked back. Before he died of AIDS at 31 in 1988, D'Allesandro had been writing poetry and fiction, and had some stories published in literary magazines and anthologies. This compilation from Killian, who knew D'Allesandro, has the unevenness of first fiction, but contains enough gems to stand with any of the short collections published this year. It's pretty hard to beat the opening of "Nothing Ever Just Disappears," the book's first piece: "I didn't know exactly what he meant by 'accessible.'" It ends with one of the most understated, angry depictions of the loss of a lover to AIDS, ever. The best of the other 17 pieces make what is usually inarticulate in casual attraction and sex deadpan articulate; D'Allesandro also writes beautifully of women that his speaker loves, including San Francisco neighbor Judy, who searches for "effortless, perfect rhythm." The same can be said of D'Allesandro, whose refined sentences convey real grace."
—Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information,
a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"Author Sam D'Allesandro died of AIDS in 1988 at only 31, but this collection of 18 short stories is a monument to his wild talent. The Wild Creatures documents a restless but focused imagination riffing on material in an almost modal fashion, as D'Alessandro spins out a virtually continuous narrative rooted in a world he made his own metaphorical Yoknapatawpha, that of young male homosexuality. But D'Allesandro's stories offer much more than testimony; at their best they display an unsparing honesty and a heartbreaking quest for transcendence.
"The stories are all written in the first person; the narrator is generally a young gay or bisexual male on the move, both literally and figuratively. Though laced with clinically observed scenarios of romantic relations both gay and straight, these pieces veer away from standard relationship stories in both style and theme; their underlying attention, like the still-moving water under a frozen stream, is to psychological currents connecting places, people, events, memory, imagination, and reality.
"Except for the title story, the pieces do not adhere to traditional prescriptions concerning character, plot, setting, and description. A member of San Francisco's 'New Narrative' movement, D'Allesandro uses raw, incantatory, and sometimes awkward prose to push away from naturalistic representation toward a deep subjectivity. His narrators rarely anchor the reader in place or time; instead the stories move with an unusual fluidity, dispensing with things that add drag to their telegraphy.
"As this book was prepared posthumously from material published and unpublished, some of the shorter pieces seem like preliminary sketches. Still, editor Kevin Killian has created a coruscating text that builds to a powerful stopping point in the final three stories. 'I pursue feeling myself living,' (157) says D'Alessandro's narrator on the last page; this perhaps sums up the author's literary credo. Throughout The Wild Creatures he chases the elusive goal of putting the lived moment, the inside of emotion, on the page.
—Ed Taylor, Rain Taxi
"James Joyce wrote that improper art is that which has a kinetic effect--pornographic art, for instance, incites desire in its audience on behalf of some object. The effect of proper art, by contrast, is to induce 'an esthetic stasis...called forth, prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.' The best selections from The Wild Creatures meet Joyce's criteria for proper art. D'Allesandro works masterfully with language, using it to break down and examine the humblest sensations and relearn what it is like to perceive the world from within a human body. As one can infer from the cheesecake cover, sex is a frequent topic of D'Allesandro's, but the appeal is not aimed at the crotch. Reading a D'Allesandro story evokes not lust but something more elusive. The effect is, quite literally, stunning--like stepping in front of the ocean, the effect of his words is exhilarating and arresting at once.
"The Wild Creatures makes the short stories of Sam D'Allesandro, who died of AIDS in 1988 at the age of 31, available as they have never been before. It is a slim volume that includes the entire contents of the posthumously published collection The Zombie Pit, now out of print, as well as some new additions from the author's estate. Editor Kevin Killian has added some older, short pieces that were written originally as 'prose poems.' Also included is 'Travels with My Mother,' which D'Allesandro recorded at the end of his life and asked a friend to transcribe when he was too ill to type. Not all the stories are masterpieces. The range, in fact, is quite marked. The short, early pieces read much as one would expect. Only three or four stories offer the kind of esthetic experience described above. The rest fall somewhere in between.
"In all his stories, D'Allesandro employs a first-person narrator, writing in a voice that is calm and oddly heatless. Even when describing a sexual encounter in explicit detail, D'Allesandro's characters have a way of seeming only half-present in their own lives. In 'The Zombie Pit' the narrator watches his companions as they cheer on a tawdry performer at a dive bar. Meanwhile, he leans back in his chair and thinks of a lover who has disappeared some time ago. Later, he ruminates on being transparent: 'Sometimes I just sit and watch when it happens, wondering about the mechanics of feeling real while having no real form to others. Like a little story where only I can see what's happening.' In the midst of all the heat and light, the sweaty spectacle at hand, the narrator can't, like his friends, feel engaged. Ghostlike, he regards the world as someone who is both of and not of the world. The desire to let go of everything and drift away weightlessly is strong. But something prevents him from letting go completely. Something must be holding him back. He lets drop that he 'hate[s] the way you have to fight from being made invisible all the time.'
"The characters are spectral in more that one way. Whispers of mortality are always in the air, though sometimes one needs to listen closely to hear them. In others, death's presence is more explicit. 'Travels with My Mother' is a terminal man's account of taking an RV trip to the home of his recently divorced mother. The narrator of 'Nothing Ever Just Disappears' tells a simple story about a lover who died of AIDS. Death's role in our humanity is great, D'Allesandro's stories suggest. With death's scent in the wind, drifting seems the path of least resistance. Better to detach, these voices suggest, as though they are rehearsing their absence from the world.
"The paradox is that while death makes human attachments seem small and faraway, it also makes our cravings for these involvements stronger than ever. Giovanni is, for the narrator of 'Giovanni's Room,' 'something important, primal, needed.' The title characters of 'Sam and Jane,' lifelong drifters who learn to kiss on mescaline by the train tracks, can't not return to human connection, fragile as it is: 'we sleep very close, like spoons. Like dozing kittens... Now we don't want sex from each other as much as we want to be close to each other. To warm and calm each other. We used to use sex as a means of getting that. Now we don't need to.' Death's proximity pushes them towards one another, making them crave more than ever such small moments of sympathy and warmth. People want to connect with other people. Death's approach only heightens the stakes, and D'Allesandro's characters, whether by being spanked during sex or by looking at old video reels with family, seek out that solace and create attachments in spite of themselves.
"The tension arising from the combination of, on the one hand, an isolating sense of the detachment and, on the other, small moments of connectedness is what makes D'Allesandro's writing vibrate and stun. Beauty, on any scale, can be awesome. 'Even here the grain of the wood could fascinate or overwhelm me into shutting my eyes for a dreamless float,' says the narrator in 'Giovanni's Room.' When an author as gifted as D'Allesandro dies so young it is often the case that more is made of what he hasn't written than what he has. That the scale of D'Allesandro's works isn't grand doesn't detract from the accomplishment. He wrote stories that leave the reader in a state of quiet rapture and that make the most ordinary things seem momentarily illuminated. What more can any writer hope to achieve?
—Joanna Petrone, Bookslut
"Through the years, I have admired so
much of D'Allesandro's work and now we
have a chance to feed our guilty pleasure
in a well rounded short story collection
in his memory, some of which are no
longer in print.
"Picking a title for
the collection must have
been an interesting
process. It is the title of
one of the included short
stories, but truly, wild
creatures would be an apt
description of many of the
characters he has created
and I imagine an equally
fine reference to the
thoughts that obviously
haunted the poetic mind
of this author.
"Few people can more
adeptly cast a mood for
a cold wintry day. Or, for
that matter, the secret
and forbidden, thought
processes that may be
furtively lurking in the
brain of a murderous,
drug-dependent hustler.
"His words can give rise to crystal
clear visions of a young man's difficult
childhood on a farm OR the painful need
of sexual fulfillment that eats at the soul
like 'jonesing' for the next 'fix.'
"I would have to agree with editor
Kevin Killian that D'Allesandro's writing
'is so powerful it drags the reader in by
the neck.' The characters are not always
pleasant and the circumstances may
be distasteful, but every sentence is
compelling; driving you to read through
the next paragraph and turn to the next
page.
"His early passing is a dramatic
example of how the AIDS epidemic has
robbed us of unique and courageous
voices in the arts.
What more could they have
contributed? We will never know with
certainty.
"It serves us well to enjoy what each
of these artists contributed to our body
of consciousness and protect their works
for the generations who follow.
I recommend this book to those who
seek to overcome their fear and leave
banality to others. Embrace this biting
and lucid insight to the raw underbelly of
our more basic psychological emotional
and mental subtext. It is hiding just
beneath the surface of lives lived in
the quiet coexistence of harmony and
peace.
—Christopher Lawrence, Stonewall News Northwest
"Warhol's scrumptious 1960s bad boy Joe Dallesandro was not amused the day he learned that San Francisco poet/writer Sam D'Allesandro had claimed him as daddy. This was the early '80s, and Sam was giving a reading in Venice, California to his growing legion of fans. The press release made the masquerade public, and the reading venue got an irate phone call from Joe.
"Editor Kevin Killian has gathered together all of D'Allesandro's stories for the first time under one cover. In his intro, Killian considers Sam's reasons for taking a pen name that co-opted the working-class appeal of the Dallesandro legend. "Sam... proffered this fake name as if only he and you were in on the joke, as a shortcut to intimacy. Another part of him wanted to be famous, so he could get to meet and know as equals his idols." That long list of idols included Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Warhol, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, William S Burroughs and Leonard Cohen.
"As a writer, D'Allesandro (who died in 1988) made his mark as part of a group literary project called New Narrative. The goal, says Killian, was "to recuperate narrative from the trap of modernism by rearticulating it as a postmodern conceptual art, wise to the precepts of language poetry."
"The po-mo jargon is quickly redeemed by the ensuing fiction. Killian reports that D'Allesandro obsessively revised his work, sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph. The result is a compression and refinement of thought and observation that may force habitually speedy readers to step on the brakes.
"Sam's narrators feel like variations on their probing, hyper-aware author. The emotional power of the stories comes from their candour and intimacy. The first tale moves so quickly from falling in love to final loss that, read too casually or inattentively, it's over before you can feel the fire of the crucible you've been drawn through. On the last of its seven pages, the narrator considers grief (though he never uses the word):
"It's how I feel him most sharply. Without it, every move I make echoes because he's not there to absorb me.... A dead lover wants your soul, wants your life, and then your death too. And you give it, it's the only way to feel anything again. Take the death as a lover and sleep with it and eat it and purge it and suck it back in quick. And finally it's no event, it's nothing that happened, it's just you: an anger and beauty that never really goes away."
"The wild creatures of the book's title story are both farm animals and the predators that torment them -- and by extension the 12-year-old boy and his father who find themselves slogging through an icy river in a rainstorm to save two newborn lambs and their mother. The tale presents family ties and elemental farm life as the defining backdrop for a restless son's departure -- his "wordless leavings" as an "adolescent devil" takes hold of him. "My mother and father are the way I remember them, still patiently waiting out prodigal returns."
"The voice of anecdotal memoir is at its strongest in "My Day With Judy." The narrator clearly adores his best friend despite, or sometimes because of, her long monologues about the messy pointlessness of existence. They holiday in a desert of shimmering white sand in an attempt to jolt Judy out of her doldrums. Driving naked through searing heat in an old stationwagon, dripping sweat, drinking beer, with Buster (goofy dog) in the back seat, they attain a tenuous happiness.
"Some pieces are ultra-short, finely focussed. "Teddy Kennedy," at a mere half-page, confirmed just about every thought I've ever had watching media portrayals of the surviving brother of Bobby and JFK. The man always seemed a sad, hapless shadow of his iconic brothers.
"We all recall enduring dead-end conversations with irritating navel-gazers, finally sputtering something along the lines of, "It's all about you, isn't it?" Here's D'Allesandro's refreshing version of the same utterance: "Listen, not everything I say to you relates only to the fact that it's being said to you. Some of it relates to me!" Wherever a cliché might have snuck in, this prose wrests extra meaning from the familiar.
D'Allesandro was not much into story arcs or narrative closure. There are no striking climaxes or final redemptions. He focusses on minutely dissecting brief moments and putting rich (sometimes farfetched) conversational confabulations into his narrators' mouths. It's all so earnest and probing and forthright that you can forgive the insistence on content over form. Anything called New Narrative, after all, is meant to challenge storytelling expectations. But finally, D'Allesandro's work is less a challenge than a veiled homage to his idols Genet and Burroughs, from half a century ago."
—Jim Bartley, Xtra
Full review available here.
"Sam D'Allesandro, author of the short-story collection The Wild Creatures, was born in 1956 and died of AIDS in 1988 at the age of 32. Kevin Killian, the collection's editor and D'Allesandro's friend and collaborator, only learned his real name--Richard Anderson--after his funeral. On the scene for San Francisco's 1980s writing renaissance, D'Allesandro was a presence at the Small Press Traffic workshops that served as a "laboratory for New Narrative," as the writer Bob Glück put it. This republication of work from a lesser-known writer of that time is an insight into that heady era in San Francisco's queer literary community. The Wild Creatures includes the stories D'Allesandro published in his lifetime, along with several more Killian extracted and worked up from manuscripts and notebooks. One story-sketch, "Travels with My Mother," was transcribed by Dodie Bellamy from an audiotape D'Allesandro recorded a couple of months before his death. The rawness of some of its material means that The Wild Creatures is an inconsistently satisfying read. That rawness, though, gives glimpses into the mechanisms that make his stories work.
"And some stories work like charms. They read like unselfconscious letters to lucky intimates from a brilliant personality. The stories, all first-person narratives, explore queer and unconventional desire and the fragmented manifestation of identity--central subjects of New Narrative. Unlike in most New Narrative writing, some of D'Allesandro's narrators describe their own desires with an exhilarating absence of shame. "The truth of the matter is I like to be beaten and fucked like a dog" is the opening line of "Walking to the Ocean"; and that story's gusto doesn't falter. These "shameless" stories (another is "Electrical Type of Thing") are sharp and fun, but also a little alienating in their seamless confidence.
"When anxiety is included and described, the writing is most compelling. In "Giovanni's Apartment," the narrator gets completely consumed by a relationship that starts with being picked up by a stranger on the street. "I'm now thirty days old, all a continuation of that first night - hot bath, dream without end, big fat death of the outside world. He used sex as a means of communicating. I need sex as a way to get into heaven. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, and what I need I got." At his best, D'Allesandro's writing has a poetic brevity that shoots right to a reader's bloodstream."
—Masha Gutkin, SF Bay Guardian
Full review available here.
"When Sam D'Allesandro died in 1988 at the age of 31 he was already a revered writer among a select group of artists. His death from AIDS cut short any hope of his attaining a larger audience. Now Suspect Thoughts Press has collected his stories, and, with the editing help of D'Allesandro's friend, poet Kevin Killian, is presenting them together for the first time.
"It is hard to categorize the stories of Sam D'Allesandro; they are mesmerizing, puzzling, raw and powerful. The atmosphere is not dark so much as a kind of steady twilight. Most of the characters are lost--at least, in traditional terms--but view with suspicion those who would lead them to safety. D'Allesandro creates an immediate intimacy; swiftly drawing us into these lives. The men of his stories are adrift in a boat--no destination but alive to every moment of the journey. Once begun these tales are impossible to stop reading. While giving the ragged appearance of hastily constructed tales told on the spur of the moment--the writing is spare, the vocabulary simple--each narrative is created with Mozartean precision and the words glitter like diamonds in roadside gravel.
"D'Allesandro brings to life characters whose mistrust and wary curiosity about sex, success and beauty reveal our own growing preoccupations. In '14 Days' a hedonistic tourist pursues sexual sensation in Brazil. 'Giovanni's Apartment' shows us a lonely reclusive escaping into obsession and counting the days of his rebirth with his new lover. In 'All I Want Is to Die Famous' a self-absorbed young man wiles away his time in the tanning salon pondering the last days of starlet Carol Wayne.
"The stories, which range in length from a few paragraphs to a short novella, are written in the first person and read as monologues. Even when other voices are heard, they speak to us through the filter of the main character.
"The recurring themes are home and love. The home we run from or long for when away, the home we've lost and most of all, the home we hope to find in another's company. Love is not quite attained, is fleetingly held, or is sometimes grasped but not recognized.
"In his lifetime Sam D'Allesandro had the kind of physical beauty that was both a blessing and a curse. His handsomeness turned heads wherever he went but when the famous good looks became ravaged by AIDS he withdrew into his darkened apartment, unable to face the public. Now, nearly thirty years after his death, with the publication of The Wild Creatures, we are treated once again to the pleasure of his company."
—Ralph Higgins, Wayves
"Of all the young talents swept away by the gay health crisis, Sam
D'Allesandro was one of the bitterest losses. By the time his first
book, Slippery Sins, came out in 1983, he was already a clear,
distinctive voice--the real thing. Even his dalliance with the overly
intellectual 'post-modernist' group headed by the late Steve Abbott
could not divert his sweet, sharp talent.
"Extraordinarily handsome (few photos do him justice), with a flair for
self-promotion, he abandoned his original, blandly American name,
pretending to be the son of Warhol actor Joe Dallesandro. Though this
didn't quite compute unless Papa Joe had been extraordinarily
precocious, no one bothered to think much about it until one day, in
the middle of one of Sam's performances, Joe himself phoned in to
adjust the record.
"This and other anecdotes are recounted in the Introduction by Kevin
Killian, who has done a good job of gathering Sam's out-of-print
stories, including a few performance pieces previously published as
poems. In this slim collection there are no duds, and even the
briefest pieces achieve a quiet resonance. 'Walking to the Ocean This
Morning'--all of one paragraph long--is one of the hottest gay stories
ever, and 'Speedboys' is a haunting evocation of the last of childhood,
just before the teens take over and the world changes: 'Dealing fast
with fear of the too-serious, speedboys race to meet an untried world
before the hot fix of young blood pales and the night begins to show
its cold.'
"In a time when young writers often seem desperate to appear 'dark,'
'edgy' or 'sick,' The Wild Creatures shows how you can cover the whole
spectrum--and shine. This is one book of stories you won't forget."
—Ian Young, Torso
"Sexual tension, truth-telling and clear straightforward writing are what you find in Sam D'Allesandro's stories. It's too bad he's not around to see this collection, arranged, edited and introduced by novelist Kevin Killian. But any writer knows that all that matters is that the book appears. The very handsome San Francisco writer was getting published and recognized when he was suddenly lost to AIDS in 1988 at age 31. Some of us wonder if the top writers lost in those horrible years will be remembered-for example, France's Herve Guibert (definitely) and America's Christopher Coe (maybe). Killian and the publisher have done a great service in bringing D'Allesandro back in print. Every one of the 17 stories, from one-page gems to 30-pages, is an experience--sometimes it feels like a three-dimensional experience. "Jane and Sam" is a glimpse of pansexuality; "Jimmy" is the lover who got away; "Nothing Ever Just Disappears" is the best anyone can do on the loss of a lover; "Speedboys" is a flash memory of early youth; "Giovanni's Apartment" has the sexual power of the James Baldwin novel it evokes; the long story "The Zombie Pit" is a whole universe of interwoven feelings about a past and a present lover. Publishers Weekly said it best: "Sam D'Allesandro's focused, vivid writing is the stuff of legend: writing so powerful it drags the reader in by the neck."
—Jerry Roscoe, Mandate
"If my recollections are right, I heard of Sam D'Allesandro in several ways. First, there was "Nothing Ever Just Disappears," his short story that was included in the anthology Men on Men, edited by George Stambolian and published in 1986 by Plume. Before the deluge of gay-themed fiction and erotica anthologies of this century, twentysomething years ago in the last one there was just Men on Men and a few gay bookstores where this particular anthology could be found, and for those of us trying to imagine ourselves as a new breed of writer--a gay writer writing about gay life--being included in Men on Men meant that Sam was already some kind of god-like talent. A few years later I learned of The Zombie Pit, Sam's collection of short stories which arrived in 1989, because I knew of Crossing Press, having had a correspondence with editor John Gill over a potential collection of my own short stories (and which didn't come to pass). At the time I was living in exile in New Hope, Pennsylvania, after a decade of struggling in New York City, quietly having a breakdown after the death of a friend, disassembling all the pieces of my psyche, repairing and polishing them, and reassembling them into what I was hoping would be a new and improved model of the cheerful young man I had once been. I'm not exactly sure where I picked up my copy of The Zombie Pit--it must have been at either the Oscar Wilde Bookshop or A Different Light during a weekend jaunt back into New York City--or maybe even at Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia, but wherever I purchased it, when I sat down to read it, I was struck by lighting when I came to the second story titled "Electrical Type of Thing." "Electrical Type of Thing" is the story of a young man obsessed with another man who, as the story progresses, becomes obsessed with another young man. Also, as this simply written episodic tale unfolds, the first young man finds another man who becomes obsessed with him. In other words, guy likes guy likes another guy in a sort of series of overlapping triangles. Before I read this short story I had always dreamed of taking the best parts and traits of one boyfriend and graphing them onto another imperfect boyfriend, in hopes of creating the ideal kind of boyfriend--or at least the sort of perfect one that I could set out and search for. Having that sort of romantic quest, I was usually unfulfilled in matters of both love and sex. Somehow, it had never dawned on me that I might be a different person with different people as Sam so vividly explains in that story and my psychological awakening of that notion was a truly inspired moment--the kind of thing whereby a reader turns to fiction in order to better understand his own life, to find his world illuminated and explained in a way he might not be able to grasp himself, and zing-zap-crash-boom!--it actually happens, only it is something different than what he thought he would find. Mind it, that year I was still a neophyte in affairs with men and grieving over just about everything that had come to pass thus far in my life. And the truth of the matter was I discovered "Electrical Type of Thing" at the same time I was discovering a lot of other first-rate writers--at the time I was also slowly making my way through Echo Press's thirteen volumes of the Collected Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. But my psychological awakening of what to expect from sexual relationships also incorporated an awareness that Sam D'Allesandro was a very talented writer and that the bitter truth was his bright light had already been diminished. In the back pages of The Zombie Pit was a chronological time line of Sam's life, with the startling fact that he had died February 3, 1988, at the age of thirty-one, a year or so before I had ever picked up this book. For years I've held onto my copy of The Zombie Pit and used "Electrical Type of Thing" as one of those occasional touchstones a writer often refers back to, turning to it for inspiration when an idea strikes me and I begin to work my way into writing a new story or to revisit to see if a final version of a story is working as well as I hope it does--and I can trace Sam's influence on a string of stories I've written over the years--particularly those triangular ones where matters of the heart often intersect with the realities of sex. So it's heartwarming to discover that good gay writing lasts because it's good gay writing. Suspect Thoughts Press has recently issued a new collection of Sam's writings titled The Wild Creatures. Delightfully included is "Electrical Type of Thing," a story I hope many other would-be gay writers will discover, enjoy, and find inspiring."
—Jameson Currier, Publishing Notes
"There's a little animal inside of me. It's eating me. It's building me each day. It starts with a blank lump and animates the person it wants from it. It controls me. It makes me do things. It won't let me stop thinking about it. Other times I can't think at all and I become more like a small fire emitting a lot of sparks that pass for talking, sex, behavior. A walking zombie pit where anything can fall into me."
--Sam D'Allesandro
"Orange soda is so nice to drink when reading something that's just, well, delicious. It's a FANTA Orange kind of moment, and I've got one, right here at the computer. The thing is, this quote above from Sam D'Allesandro isn't isolated, it's actually typical of his writing.
"Selfishly, part of me didn't want to write about the new collection of stories because I know how much flack I'll be getting in e-mails from folks I always tell how much I hate short stories, hate novels, etc.. But I have no choice I feel but to share the NEWS of these exquisite stories just re-released.
"Kevin Killian has got to be one of the busiest writers and editors alive, and those who have entrusted their pages of writing to him for future use after their deaths were brilliant to do so. The Wild Creatures is the very thing many of us have been waiting for, since the other, earlier collection, The Zombie Pit has been out of print for years.
"Jim Cory gave me a copy of The Zombie Pit years ago, and I didn't read it for a while, because it was short stories. Then I was dating this ridiculous swine actor named Christopher (who had one, maybe two good tricks for treats, and that's it) who saw it on my bookshelf and said how much he loved D'Allesandro, that the book was genius! He read the story "Lenny" out loud to me because he knew what a big Patti Smith fan I was, and it's a story about D'Allesandro's fling with Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith's lead guitar player. It was all I needed to hear, and NOT because of Lenny Kaye, or Patti Smith. The words were coming to me the way poems come to us, or at us when they're so good.
"When it happens it's like the film broke in mid-reel, you don't expect it and you're still expecting everything you were before. Everything in my life except me was suddenly different. Eventually that would make me different too, but it takes a while to catch up. Someone said the pain would go away, but I'm not sure that's where I want it to go. It's how I feel him most sharply. Without it, every move I make echoes because he's not here to absorb me. I don't like bouncing back at myself. A dead lover wants your soul, wants your life, and then your death too. And you give it, it's the only way to feel anything again. Take the death as a lover and sleep with it and eat it and purge it and suck it back in quick. And finally it's no event, it's nothing that happened, it's just you: an anger and a beauty that never really goes away. Not something you can wait out as it disappears, nothing ever really just disappears."
--Sam D'Allesandro
"AIDS, Ronald Reagan, all kinds of things make me angry when I think of the loss of D'Allesandro who died at age 31. It is an incredible loss, in so many ways, of course, and when you reach the end of his thin, but amazing collection, you know there's nothing more to come, not even with this newer collection edited by Kevin Killian. It's like, I want to TELL KEVIN KILLIAN TO LOOK HARDER THAT HE MIGHT HAVE OVERLOOKED A FEW MORE STORIES! But there's just nothing more, and we've got to be with this as best we can.
"Sad to find out that D'Allesandro was dead before the original, smaller collection The Zombie Pit came out. To make this story even more tragic, the editor of this earlier collection was Steve Abbott, who also died of AIDS in 1992. AIDS has tendrils and branches that get tangled and lost looking at so many men from this period, even as I say this I really do know you already know but....
"Dodie Bellamy and Betsy Bayley did the cover of The Zombie Pit, and its cover said much about the fact that D'Allesandro, and his work, although beautiful, neither were ever (at any point as far as I can tell) superficial, or vain in that sad, rancid way so many gay men become when they don't feel or think anything beyond the flesh. His eyes on the cover, it's not just that they were looking back from an already dead author, they were eyes that were ready to tell you these stories no matter when you came to them, no matter what you did or didn't know of the author's fate.
"When I worked at Giovanni's Room Bookstore, a couple years after reading The Zombie Pit, I was dismayed to sit through numerous readings by authors over the six years I was there, only to never hear much of an echo of that kind of D'Allesandro story. What did I hear? I'm telling you, I just can't stand short stories and novels, but I like his, very very much! These stories direct the force at your solar plexus as if they're guided on a beam and you can't get away from the feeling, and you feel everything else is cheap, and boring.
"There was this customer at Giovanni's Room with the last name Faust who came around a lot, and he was one of those older gay guys who never read anything if it wasn't gay. And he only went to see movies if they were gay. He kind of got on my fucking nerves actually with his whole damn gay thing, as he was without a doubt heterophobic. We would get free passes to movie screenings every week at the store because whatever company gives those out seems to think that gay people are the best kind of people to have in the audience. Maybe we are, I don't really know to be honest. Anyway, Mr. Faust would ask if the movie pass was for a gay movie, which of course it never was, and he'd ALWAYS talk about how sick pussy made him, as though any movie which wasn't gay had naked women in them. He was so disgusting this guy, his misogyny, man, he pissed me off! And he also made me angry that he never read Goethe's Faust. Wouldn't you if your name was Faust? And when I asked him why he never read it he said--no lie--that it wasn't gay. Brother! Anyway, one day he came in, and I was annoyed upon seeing him, as usual, and after he putzzed and poked about in the used book bin, he came to the counter with a copy of The Zombie Pit. It was the first time I actually had a real conversation with this man Faust. I asked if he had read it, and he angrily said "YES OF COURSE! Anyone with any sense of taste would have already read it! I'm buying it for a friend who hates to read, but he'll like this." He then admitted that The Zombie Pit was one of the few books that made him cry, and he added, "And I don't mean once, I mean I cried at some point in every story!" Another customer later told me about Faust, how he had been gay bashed horribly back in the 80s, and had the scars to prove it, and I was never annoyed with him again when I would see him. It's strange, but it's the kind of compassion D'Allesandro seems to enforce, I'll say enforce because although it seems strange to enforce compassion, the compulsion to feel is overwhelming when dealing with the stories, and even more importantly, the stories of those who have read them, and who are about to read them no doubt.
"Driving across the Southwest, my head in his lap, I watch headlights slowly swerve through the car's interior in a rhythm. One at a time. In Texas, my turn driving, I spill coffee all over myself when I break for a jerk in a Galaxy 500 reaching into the backseat to slap one of his kids. Farrell can't stop laughing and I get mad. Later that night we sleep pulled over on the side of a back road. Farrell leans against the car door with his long legs stretched out on the seat. I sit between his legs and lay against him. It's his idea. We sleep this way all night. I can hear his heart beat and feel the heat of his skin. The moment is so tender and bound to pass, that I'm nearly in tears."
--Sam D'Allesandro
Not enough thanks can be given to Kevin Killian for making it possible that these stories are back in print!"
—CAConrad, PhillySound
"When someone talks about a "writer's writer," a "poet's poet," a "director's director" and the like, you can almost be certain that the artist in question is going to have a small, nearly impenetrable body of work that's deeply appreciated within a sort of mutual admiration society of mostly similar artists but with one or two members of broader fame or acclaim. Often, the person and the work are inseparable from each other, so that an appreciation of the art requires either knowing the artist, or knowing a lot about him/her.
"It's tempting to put Sam D'Allesandro in this category. His life was as brief (31 years) as his output is small, and editor Kevin Killian's introduction to the new collection of D'Allesandro's short fiction and micro-fiction, The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro will leaving you rarin' to leap into the book's pages. These stories don't hold up to browsing or skimming, but require real engagement on the part of the reader. The title story, "The Wild Creatures," is ironically the most vivid and powerful. Its creatures are both literal and symbolic, yet there's no hint of anything gay.
"Given the overall paucity of D'Allesdandro's output, one suspects that he will remain a footnote in gay literature, and I cannot imagine his writing being nearly as interesting without Killian's introduction. But we have to give kudos to Suspect Thoughts Press for being bold enough to publish this work, because the "little stories" of men like D'Allesandro and their circle of fellow writers like Killian, Robert Gluck and Dode Bellamy are such an integral part of the rich tapestry of queer literature and culture.
—Ken Furtado, Echo
"Available now from Suspect Thoughts Press The Wild Creatures is a thoroughly engrossing anthology encompassing the career of "New Narrative" writer Sam D'Allesandro (born Richard Anderson), whose life was cut tragically short in 1988 at the age of 31; a casualty in the initial onslaught of AIDS. Shockingly honest and unrestrained "Electrical Type of Thing" explores the guilt-free pleasures of sexual attraction in the same readily accessible way that the opening selection,
"Nothing Ever Just Disappears," addresses existential questions of life, death and relationships. And where "Jane and Sam" relives the angst of adolescence the longer - and more involved - composition "Giovanni's Apartment," reveals the pitfalls of becoming too enmeshed in a partner's life to the detriment of your own identity.
"Edited by author and critic Kevin Killian, The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro presents the entirety of the author's works, published both during his life and posthumously, and expands on the now out-of-print compilation The Zombie Pit. From the satisfaction of people watching and interacting with intriguing strangers ("14 Days") to meditating on ambition and celebrity ("All I Want to do is Die Famous") and childhood reminiscence ("1960"), the eighteen works contained in the mere 160 pages will leave readers either riveted or perplexed, but undoubtedly entertained."
—Shawn Revelle, EXP Magazine
"Those mass market paperbacks at airport magazine stands are sometimes a bit much. Even a fast-paced spy or detective tale may be too long for a single flight, but not quite so compelling that you'd ever finish it once the wheels hit the tarmac. So here's a smart new collection that's tight enough to finish between liftoff and landing. At 156 pages that punch and snap with the creative energy of a man who could turn an average day into a safari of observation and experience, The Wild Creatures is a testament to author Sam D'Allesandro. The self-mythologizing writer, who died of AIDS at 31 in 1988, offers sharp, observation-rich reflections on friendships, love affairs, and San Francisco in the early '80s that range from sad to funny to breathtakingly honest--often all at once. In a particularly travel-savvy moment, D'Allesandro displays his characteristic dry humor, remarking: 'I like a man's ass best when he's been sitting on it all day. When it's...been crammed into an uncomfortable plane seat traveling thousands of miles to come see me. When, lying on his stomach on the hotel bed, it manages...to inflate...like a heat-and-serve roll.'"
—Jim Gladstone, Passport
“Sam D’Allesandro’s stories blur the lines between truth and fiction, in the cause of a devotion to writing as strong as anyone’s I’ve ever known. Even before his death he had attained icon status, and now, years later, the work still holds up—its purity and its power still stun, like jewels in a tomb. We all make up our own legends as we go along, but Sam had only to look inside to find the divine.”
—Dodie Bellamy,
author of Pink Steam
“The Wild Creatures is enough to give anyone a crush on Sam D’Allesandro. His voice is beguilingly intimate, but never gossipy or confessional—perfect for his spare, focused little stories. He describes relationships with an attention to emotional nuance that makes his characters seem both unique and eerily familiar. His thoughts glimmer with a lucid, unsentimental intelligence and freshness. This is what queer literature looks like freed from pretension and banality.”
—Alvin Orloff,
author of Gutter Boys
“For years I’ve scoured used book stores for copies of Sam D’Allesandro’s work, buying up what I could find and passing it on to friends with the injunction: Read this. The Wild Creatures is more than the resuscitation of a brilliant, out-of-print writer. It’s that rarest of things: a true literary event.”
—K.M. Soehnlein,
author of You Can Say You Knew Me When
“Sam D’Allesandro’s writing is like crying and then taking a nap, or taking a nap and then crying.”
—Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore,
author of Pulling Taffy
release: August 2005
gay fiction
softcover, 5X8
160 pages, $12.95
0-9763411-1-5
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