Jeffrey Ricker

For such a short story, 'Straightening Up' delivers quite a punch. The situation as such is bad enough: Greg and Michael live together, but Michael has only told his father the truth about them being lovers. When Michael's mother announces a surprise Christmas visit, Michael rushes back into the closet, and forces Greg into a role as roommate. What impacted me even more though is the quiet sadness with which Greg reacts. Yes, he gets angry, but overall he is sad and pretty much resigned to show more his fate.

It isn’t until Greg has to live through the indignity of being relegated to the guest room, Michael not even coming for a 'visit' once his mother is asleep, followed by Michael's mother cooking roast because Michael hasn’t even told her Greg is a vegetarian. As much as Greg loves Michael, that is just one step too far. So he leaves to stay with a friend. At that point, it was probably the only thing he could have done to get through to Michael.

Michael is too caught up in 'keeping the peace', not upsetting his mother and risking her scorn, or whatever other excuses he has come up with to justify his lack of standing up for himself – and Greg. The thing is, the woman isn’t even horrible! It just goes to show that the prejudice against gays can do tremendous damage to some gay men by undermining their self-confidence to the point where they deny themselves at any cost.

If you like stories that will make you think, if you're looking for a high dose of realism, and if 'walking in another's shoes' means something to you, this story is a great opportunity to see the world from a gay man's perspective – the one who becomes an outcast because his lover is afraid of confronting what he believes to be his mother's disapproval.




NOTE: This book was provided by Untreed Reads for the purpose of a review on Rainbow Book Reviews. show less

Shortly after his return home to St. Louis from a holiday in London where he met Philip, the man of his dreams, Joel is told that his mother has died. After the funeral he agrees to drive his parents' RV from Portland across the country to San Fransisco to deliver it to a family friend his parents had sold it to shortly before his mother's death. He is accompanied by the brother of a girl he briefly dated in high school and his mother's ghost. After the trip he must decide whether to stay in show more Portland with his father, return to St. Louis, or follow Philip to London.

I enjoyed this book while I was reading it and it certainly kept me turning the pages. Afterwards it felt curiously insubstantial. Things happen to Joel rather than him doing anything much. I was ready to accept his essential passivity as due to the hiatus in his life in reaction to his mother's death but it appears to be typical of the way he seems to drift through life.

{SPOILER ALERT}

Even at the end Joel's decision is really made for him as his life conveniently arranges itself so that there is no struggle involved. His father opts for a retirement home, his friends in St. Louis move away or pair up, and even his dog transfers his affections, so there is no sense that he is giving anything up in following Philip. show less

This book confounds me. I feel like it's marketed as a romance, which it mostly definitely is not. I feel like it has some interesting characters, but they're shoved into the book, most with only the broadest strokes of a personality, abruptly discarded when the book is done with them. I don't know that I've read another book where important secondary characters literally walk off stage without their plotlines being resolved, and without the reader having any clue as to who they are, never show more to be seen again. Its baffling.

Some of the characters are baffling as well. Motivations are murky and some actions seem driven by the plot rather than by the character. Then there are characters that the author clearly thinks the reader should either like or dislike, as every other character in the book feels that way about them, but we're never given evidence of that in the writing. It's not a poorly written book by any means and I don't want to say that I didn't enjoy it. I know this was the author's first novel, and I'd be curious to see him grow with subsequent novels or see his short stories. show less

I think I need to start this with the table of content: Highland Sleeper by Jeff Mann, No Mincing Words by Rob Rosen, Elsewhen by ’Nathan Burgoine, Mount Olympus by Jeffrey Ricker, Reunion on the Rails by Hank Edwards, The Blue Train by Erastes, The Train Home by Rick R. Reed, Royal Service by Dale Chase, Resist Me, Please! By Daniel M. Jaffe, Engine of Repression by Gavin Atlas, One Night on the Twentieth Century by Jay Neal, Shadow Mapping by J.D. Barton, Geronimo’s Laughter by Joseph show more Baneth Allen, The Roundhouse Men by Dusty Taylor, The Last Train by William Holden. Why? Because aside for very few names I didn’t know about, this is a collection of la crème de la crème in Gay Fiction. All these authors are bestsellers on their own, and having them all together in one anthology is a treat that make me forget for a moment that anthologies are usually not my cup of tea. It’s also a compliment to the editor, Jerry L. Wheeler, because I think it hadn’t to be simple to put them all together, maintaining by the way the feeling of uniqueness of the collection, all the stories work together for the same target.

Like the majority of these anthologies, Riding the Rails falls into the Erotica category, but I was quite surprise to find out that indeed this is also a Romance collection; some of the stories in it are not even about sex ( see ’Nathan Burgoine’s one), and almost all of them are about love story with an happy ending. Sure there is a bittersweet aftertaste all along the anthology, something that, truth be told, I have always found when reading stories related to trains… there has to be some deep connection between the two things, or maybe the train itself is a metaphor for something you wish but cannot catch. In any case, aside for maybe one or two exceptions (Rick R. Reed and Jay Neal probably), the romance reader will have plenty of happily ever after to enjoy, some of them a little kinky (Jeff Mann), some of them sweet (’Nathan Burgoine) and some of them funny (Daniel M. Jaffe)… to everyone their own.

A collective compliment to all authors go for the high quality of the stories, more little novel than short stories; different in genre, from historical, to sci-fi, to steampunk, but all of them way more than the average you usually are expecting to find in a collection; here the authors sent their best production, not what they had laying around in a forgotten folder.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1602825866/?tag=elimyrevandra-20 show less