Twelve O’Clock Tales, by Felice Picano
Bold Strokes Books/Liberty Editions.
236 pages, $16.95 paperback
Book Review by Richard Labonte
Gay Calgary Magazine
From July 2012 (Online)
Think of Picano as a queer literary renaissance man. He writes plays and screenplays, poetry and memoirs, sex manuals and sexy thrillers, historical novels and – this is his fourth collection – short stories. These 13, he notes in a preface, pay homage to writers he savored as a young man (and still reads), the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Saki, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare and others of their dark, ghostly, eerie and sometimes downright weird ilk. In that sense, Picano is also something of a literary chameleon – there are echoes of each of these writers, and all of those sentiments, in this solid collection. The first, "Synapse," is a creepily science-fictional account of how an elderly man has come to inhabit a boy’s body; the last, "The Perfect Setting," is a masterpiece of detection, wherein an obsessive narrator solves the mystery of a landscape painter’s murder. Not a one of the stories is like another, such is Picano’s wide-ranging imagination; what they have in common is their power and their polish.