Eros & Dust

Trebor Healey's masterly prose is known for its visceral energy, muscular edge, flights of lyrical fantasy and elegiac reflection; from places of both light and dark, he thoroughly captures the poignant and erotic life of gay men. In his 2016 short story collection, Eros & Dust, Healey sets loose an unforgettable cast of characters as he returns to many of his favourite themes: desire in Mexico and South America, the search for fauns, folly, death, erotic obsessions, and a bit of the supernatural.

Many of his stories offer flawed characters, using faulty reasoning to make bad choices. Others are more an elegy to lost innocence than what the surface indicates. There's the meth-addled youth bent on redemption by returning to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mischievous imp wreaking havoc in 1980s Berkeley, and a circus clown fleeing his Mexican trapeze artist lover by escaping to Argentina. The reader will also encounter an elusive faun of the Oaxacan highlands, a traveler expiring from dengue fever, a revisionist Jack Kerouac, and a victim of Pinochet's brutal coup, along with troubled chickenhawks and ambivalent lovers trying to work it out in venues as diverse as chatrooms, a junkyard, and a puppet theater.

"I read Eros & Dust over the course of weeks, a story here and there, and walked away well contented. Healey's short fiction themes - here very much a tangle of desire, aging, Mexico and South America, queerness - play lightly at one glance even as they settle into the reader's skin."

- Nathan Burgoine

"I picture three Trebor Healeys: one poetic, one crazed with lust, and one shaggy with heat and dust. When all of them work in concert as they do in Healey's novels their combined power is formidable. But the shorter pieces, such as those in Eros & Dust, reveal the strength of those beasts on a more individual level ... Each voice is as distinctive in solo as it is an essential component of the blend. Truly a marvelous trick to pull off, and Trebor Healey does it with skill and grace."

- Jerry L. Wheeler