Never Easy

by Johnny Murdoc

Full of yearning and equivocal male eros, Never Easy is seven stories of men adrift and longing for reprieve from erotica masters Natty Soltesz, Rob Wolfsham, and Johnny Murdoc. In Murdoc’s “Local Legends” a recent graduate falls for Sam Longhorn, the mysterious alpha male of Blackwood, and is compelled to unearth the woodland myth of the Blackwood Beast. A cold lawyer laments his path in life after he’s marooned on an island with an ambivalent, hard-bodied fighter in Rob Wolfsham’s “Penguin.” A tiring family homecoming trip with a malcontent boyfriend turns perilous and steamy in Natty Soltesz’s “My Boyfriend’s Horny Brothers.” These three writers have joined to chronicle vivid, sexually charged encounters between men with kaleidoscopic introspection and sometimes prodigious self-discovery.

“As the pages of Never Easy unfold, writers whom I thought I knew well reveal new and dazzling angles that leave me breathless. Rob Wolfsham’s shaggy dog stories have the meat and texture of classic modernist fiction; I wish Robert Altman had lived long enough to film them. Natty Soltesz mines archetypal porn situations with insight and imagination, heavy on the totem and taboo of family, school and workplace. And Johnny Murdoc is the poet of everyday life and the extraordinary boys who sometimes move next door, if you’re lucky enough and horny enough.”

-Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess

187 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 24, 2012