Black Clock 17 — Steve Erickson

Charting the crossroads of obsession and the back alleys of eroticism, Black Clock 17 is a topography of forbidden passions--the terrors that lurk beneath what we desire, the attractions that lure us to what we dread--as mapped by authors including Henry Bean, Cecil Castellucci, Scott Bradfield and many others. The afterglow of an afternoon affair leaves a woman to satisfy a more illicit yearning in Dana Spiotta's "Watch," a group of teen orgiasts converge in Tom McCarthy's "Pyramid Party" to recreate the sexual humiliations of Abu Ghraib, and in Aimee Bender's "Vigilante" a young female police captain intrudes on the psychodramas of strangers to enforce the laws of the heart.