From The New York Blade:

Steve Berman's first book, "Trysts," is a haunting collection of stories imbued with both the dark temperament of the goth culture and the eerie otherworldliness of old fairy tales. In Berman's world, everything has the power to take on life; anything can become the incarnation of our deepest desires or darkest fears.

From plaster statues to Ouija boards, from paper dolls to old clothing, nothing is without potential. Berman subtitled his collection "A Triskaidecollection of Queer and Weird Stories," and has produced 13 stories to fit that description aptly. "Trysts" includes stories of awakening desire and dreams fulfilled, as well as tales of innocence corrupted and dark passions sated. Some tales barely dance on the edge of the supernatural while others revel in it. Throughout, Berman infuses each story with enough atmosphere to grab even the most jaded of readers. While each tale in "Trysts" is well worth reading, a number of stories stand out: "Stormed and Taken In Prague" is a goth dream, complete with pounding music, club excess, violent sexuality, and a growing desire to be consumed by this dark underworld. What makes the story most intriguing is the way it melds the sensibilities of H.P. Lovecraft with the modern goth atmosphere. "Vespers" is a wonderfully creepy story of how one young fraternity brother juxtaposes the world of an old monastic brotherhood with his own life. "Left Alone" plays an emotionally rich melancholy chord on loss and regret as a man deals with the death of his lover. Berman even plays with familiar fictional characters in "Finn's Night", where we see one of the lesser-known adventures of Huck Finn.

All in all, "Trysts" is a marvelous collection and a surprisingly adept debut for Berman. Goths, fans of the horror and dark fantasy genres, and those seeking a little something to spice up an autumn evening will all certainly get their money's worth here. -Rob Gates ________________________________________________________________

From TLA Books.com:

Trysts is an interesting and sex charged collection of short stories for a dark, rainy night. The first story "Beach 2" is fully grounded in a reality that seems like mine, it's a nice gentle way to begin these tales of the darkside. "Stormed and Taken in Prague" brings us a scary little story of gargoyles come to life. There are lots of details left to the imagination in this witty story. "Path of Corruption" brings us into the heart of Steve Berman's dark mind. It's a story of two young men in lust and the new boy's entry into another world - it's a sexy updated gay vampire tale guaranteed to make you hard. "Resemblences" is the first story of four interconnected tales about a parallel existence on our planet in the future where people go to the "fallen". It's an urban land where strange creatures lurk in abandoned office buildings and people scratch out a bare existence. Currency has lost it's value - but touch has gained in value!

Gay people seem integrated and respected into this new society, but many moral values have crumbled. These stories are vivid and cry out for a novel! Trysts is an excellent, dark and nasty collection of homoerotic horror. -Scott Cranin, editor TLABooks.com ________________________________________________________________

From Asimov's:

Subtitled A Triskadeicollection of Queer and Weird Stories," Steve Berman's Trysts delivers dark fantasy of varying degrees of gay eroticism. His prose somber, melancholy, and polished, Berman achieves subtle effects in a nighted palette reminiscent of this description from the opening story: "The shades of dark gray and black were all new, perhaps had never even been named before." From the Poesque "The Ressurectionist" to the Lovecraftian "Path of Corruption," Berman reinvigorates old tropes with a modern queer sensibility. Several stories take place in a deracinated urban venue known as the Fallen Area, and this homage to the Bellona of Delany's Dhalgren proves effective and enticing. -- Paul Di Filippo

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From The Harrow:

Steve Berman's 13-story collection, Trysts, is a collection of queer dark fantasy, but like all of the best queer literature, it's the parts that transcend sexual orientation and speak to all readers that make it memorable. Each story involves a tryst, a rendezvous with passion – all too often, dangerous passion.

Trysts is, overall, a strong debut collection. Trysts' only problem is that its strongest stories have been placed at the end of the collection, and its weakest starts it up. Thus, the reader must have faith that the book improves, saving its best four stories for the end, like a dessert of surrealism and strangeness.

The first story, "Beach 2," is a mundane and relatively uninteresting piece about a man who, with a nudge from a Ouija board, chooses another man over his own girlfriend. The weirdness quotient is low in this one, and its theme of choosing a same-sex partner over an opposite-sex partner has been done with more spice in numerous Nifty.org stories.

From there, though, the pace picks up. Two stories, "Stormed and Taken in Prague" and "Cries Beneath the Plaster" combine rough, if not deadly, sex with a fascination about statues; "His Paper Doll" is a low-key first-meeting story with a voodoo element; "Vespers" and "Left Alone" deal in very different ways with obsession and "unholy" pacts; "Path of Corruption" is queer Lovecraft, and "Finn's Night" is literary slash. "The Resurrectionist" is, perhaps, the hardest to pigeonhole, a period piece about incest, hatred, family responsibility and graverobbing. The stories show breadth of interest and style and reveal the steps Berman has taken since 1997 toward finding his authorial voice.

The final four stories were, to me, the strongest. "Resemblances," "Tea Time with Corn Dolly," "The Anthvoke" and "Hair Like Fire, Blood Like Silk" are linked by their common placement in a nameless "Fallen" city – what Fallen means is never quite explained, but it seems to imply some fall from mundane rationality into urban magic – and the recurring character of Caleb, a man whose power is to open what is closed, from doors to minds. The four stories are quietly surreal and invite comparison to Tor Books' Borderland stories and novels, but without the latters' boring reliance on Faerie. Berman's dark "Fallen" stories invoke a strangely fantastic cityscape without cliches and, best of all, without elves. With luck, Berman will eventually parley the "Fallen Area" setting into a novel or, at least, a collection of its own. Trysts is, overall, a compelling collection of short stories that puts Steve Berman's name on my "writers to watch" list. I recommend it, and I'll be on the lookout for more of Berman's work. - Dru Pagliassotti, Editor-in-Chief

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