The Beasts have plans for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. But you're going to have to trust them.

• The Lemmings are really researching the Arctic biologists,
• The werewolves sing sweet Christian praise songs,
• The signing gorilla just wants someone back in the cage for a minute or two,
• The black dog who tells you God loves you may not be believable, no, and
• Those old lions in the canyon are up to something, aren't they?

The shaggy aliens just want to have dinner with the people who pillaged and destroyed their world, honestly, and the vampires just want to cure you of a terrible blood disease.

In the forest, the sasquatch has fallen in love with the cryptozoologist who follows him. By the lake, the god of Lake Michigan struggles with the nature of reality while acting in his first buddy cop TV series. While the god of the Brazos River, only wants to court the young, pretty Texas college students.

These 15 stories of beasts, and the beasts we sometimes become, ask us how much influence we have over each other — to bring out our beast or best sides — and how much control the beasts already have over us.

Jerome Stueart's profile page

Jerome Stueart
is a writer of science fiction, fantasy and memoir. He is a Milton Center fellow, Lambda Literary Workshop for Emerging LGBT Voices fellow, and graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, San Diego.

Jerome's work has appeared inFantasy, Strange Horizons, Geist, Queers Destroy Science Fiction(from Lightspeed), On Spec, Joyland, Geez, Queerwolf, Evolve, as well as three of the Tesseracts anthology series of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy and was a runner up to the Fountain Award. He was the co-editor of Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods, a collection of scifi/fantasy stories where characters wrestle with Faith. He has written 5 radio series for CBC North, one of which, Leaving America, was heard round the world on Radio Canada International. His sketches of his train trip across Canada can be found in Geist in 2015. His first novel, One Nation Under Gods, will be published by ChiZine Publications, late 2017.

He lived in Whitehorse, Yukon for nearly 10 years, became a Canadian citizen, and, then, much to his surprise, recently moved to Ohio. He currently makes his home between Whitehorse, Yukon and Dayton, Ohio.