Second Thoughts

I’ll admit, I approached *Second Thoughts* skeptical of yet another ‘queer horror’ collection—too often, they lean on trauma porn or camp. But Berman’s work is neither. His horror is *domestic*: a gay couple’s road trip derailed by a hitchhiking ghost who’s more exasperating than terrifying (‘*The Road to Find Out*’), or a man haunted by his dead lover’s voice on an answering machine (‘*Static*’), a premise that could’ve been maudlin but is instead devastatingly precise. Lindberg’s narration is the perfect vessel for this material. He doesn’t *perform* so much as *inhabit*—his delivery is understated, almost conversational, which makes the occasional surge of emotion (like the trembling rage in ‘*The Men from Porlock*’) land like a gut-punch. That said, the collection isn’t flawless. A few stories (‘*The Faun*’) meander into abstraction without enough payoff, and Berman’s essays, while compelling, sometimes disrupt the fiction’s momentum. The production is clean but unremarkable—no immersive sound design, just Lindberg’s voice against silence, which suits the intimate tone but might leave audiophile listeners wanting. Still, the highs outweigh the stumbles. ‘*The Snows of Yesteryear*’, a ghost story wrapped in AIDS-era nostalgia, is worth the price alone. If you like your queer fiction with teeth—literary but not pretentious, eerie but never exploitative—this is your next listen. Just maybe not before bed.