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Perverts: Stories
Not yet published
Expected 7 Jul 26A full-frontal confrontation of the ways we perform desire and shame—from the downright bizarre to the frighteningly relatable—by the award-winning author of A Sharp Endless Need
An employee at a hunting ground where people pay to act out hate crimes prepares to meet their girlfriend’s parents for the first time. A self-destructive client engages in an affair with their therapist, careening their relationship toward its inevitable breaking point. At a theme park where men pay to ogle women dressed as sirens, a mild-mannered boat attendant gets engaged to the star performer. And in the title story, a pregnant internet sex worker blackmails her clients into attending a disastrous party.
Nothing is off limits for Mac Crane as they rework classic stories of rejection, isolation, and connection to suggest that the so-called pervert, by existing in the margins of society, may be the one who sees the world most clearly. Crane brings their keen eye for the unsavory to seventeen transgressive stories that are as tantalizing and addictive as the characters’ experiences. A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity.
An employee at a hunting ground where people pay to act out hate crimes prepares to meet their girlfriend’s parents for the first time. A self-destructive client engages in an affair with their therapist, careening their relationship toward its inevitable breaking point. At a theme park where men pay to ogle women dressed as sirens, a mild-mannered boat attendant gets engaged to the star performer. And in the title story, a pregnant internet sex worker blackmails her clients into attending a disastrous party.
Nothing is off limits for Mac Crane as they rework classic stories of rejection, isolation, and connection to suggest that the so-called pervert, by existing in the margins of society, may be the one who sees the world most clearly. Crane brings their keen eye for the unsavory to seventeen transgressive stories that are as tantalizing and addictive as the characters’ experiences. A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication July 7, 2026
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282 people want to read
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December 27, 2025
This is my first book by this author, and while I appreciated a few of the unusual vignettes featured in this collection, overall it really wasn’t for me. I was hoping for something strange and thought provoking, but most of the stories were merely unfortunate situations with meandering internal soliloquies and little in the way of resolution. Three stories stood out to me. “Smear the Queer” had an interesting premise and twist ending. “The Perverts,” the collection’s titular story, likewise had unique premise and some elements of dark humor. Probably my favorite was “Alex Adams…” for its modern sapphic take on Peter Pan.
The prose is very good, and really, for some special reader, this is the right book, perhaps someone who enjoys a daydreaming style of writing and who doesn’t feel unsatisfied by too many loose ends or overburdened by an overabundance of abstractions.
Thank you to NetGalley, Mac Crane, and Random House/The Dial Press for sending me an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.
The prose is very good, and really, for some special reader, this is the right book, perhaps someone who enjoys a daydreaming style of writing and who doesn’t feel unsatisfied by too many loose ends or overburdened by an overabundance of abstractions.
Thank you to NetGalley, Mac Crane, and Random House/The Dial Press for sending me an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
** 3 out of 5 **
The cover caught my eye. Mac Crane being trans drew me further in. Seventeen stories about queer desire, labor, and performance set in surreal workplaces: a theme park where men pay to ogle women dressed as sirens, a hunting ground for staged hate crimes, a sex worker blackmailing her clients. Inventive setups, often darkly funny.
Short stories are unforgiving though. Cheever and Carver make every sentence do double duty. Compression forces clarity. Crane’s pieces keep flickering toward something interesting and then drifting off. Identity as performance, desire as transaction, the body as labor site. The concepts appear but never quite crystallize. Too loose for narrative, not lyrical enough for prose poetry.
A few vignettes work better than others. One stages a human impersonating a chatbot and gets at something real about consent and mediated intimacy. Another takes the Caulfield fantasy of catching falling children and makes it bleak, about innocence as overworked infrastructure. But even these feel like sketches. Premises that wander through internal monologue without landing.
Crane sees clearly how we commodify intimacy and perform selfhood. The observations are sharp. But observation isn’t enough to make a story collection cohere. What’s missing is the knife, the willingness to cut toward one effect instead of letting things sprawl. If you like atmospheric, daydream-style prose, this might work for you. I wanted more shape.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House, The Dial Press for the ARC.
The cover caught my eye. Mac Crane being trans drew me further in. Seventeen stories about queer desire, labor, and performance set in surreal workplaces: a theme park where men pay to ogle women dressed as sirens, a hunting ground for staged hate crimes, a sex worker blackmailing her clients. Inventive setups, often darkly funny.
Short stories are unforgiving though. Cheever and Carver make every sentence do double duty. Compression forces clarity. Crane’s pieces keep flickering toward something interesting and then drifting off. Identity as performance, desire as transaction, the body as labor site. The concepts appear but never quite crystallize. Too loose for narrative, not lyrical enough for prose poetry.
A few vignettes work better than others. One stages a human impersonating a chatbot and gets at something real about consent and mediated intimacy. Another takes the Caulfield fantasy of catching falling children and makes it bleak, about innocence as overworked infrastructure. But even these feel like sketches. Premises that wander through internal monologue without landing.
Crane sees clearly how we commodify intimacy and perform selfhood. The observations are sharp. But observation isn’t enough to make a story collection cohere. What’s missing is the knife, the willingness to cut toward one effect instead of letting things sprawl. If you like atmospheric, daydream-style prose, this might work for you. I wanted more shape.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House, The Dial Press for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Mac Crane’s “Perverts” is the kind of short story collection that arrives with its teeth already in you. Not because it lunges for shock (though it does shock, sometimes spectacularly), but because it understands how contemporary life is already a low-grade bite: the constant abrasion of platforms, bosses, headlines, bodies, and the self watching the self being watched. Crane writes from inside that abrasion with a ferocious, often hilarious precision, assembling a book that feels less like a tidy suite of stories than a nervous system exposed to air.
A conventional review would begin by telling you what these stories are “about.” Sex, yes. Queerness, yes. Shame, grief, power, performance, longing, the porous border between tenderness and cruelty. But the truer subject of “Perverts” is the way identity becomes an interface – something we click into, toggle, conceal, monetize, roleplay, defend. These narrators don’t merely live in a culture; they render themselves for it, sometimes beautifully, sometimes grotesquely, sometimes with a deadpan accuracy that makes you laugh and then feel implicated for laughing. If the collection has a single unifying mood, it is a mood of intimate extremity: people speaking in voices that sound like confession and stand-up and prayer at the same time.
Crane’s ambition is formal as much as thematic. The book is crowded with modes – compressed fable, prose poem, micro-parable, second-person instruction manual, dialogue that moves like a chat window, realism that abruptly swerves into allegory. Yet the formal variety isn’t a grab bag. It is the book’s argument: that the self is plural, that desire is not a straight line but a ricocheting signal, and that narrative is one of the few technologies we still have for telling the truth without pretending truth is simple. Crane has the rare ability to make a sentence feel both engineered and overheard. The prose is clean enough to cut, but it is never sterile; it sweats.
Consider “Julie & the Butch,” a story that behaves like a flipbook of parallel universes. Each paragraph reboots the same office encounter – package delivered, signature scrawled, a look that might be nothing or might be everything. The repetitions are not gimmick so much as emotional realism: the way infatuation loops, the way a crush returns you to the same moment and asks you to interpret it again, and again, and again, until the scene becomes less a memory than a lab experiment on your own need. Language keeps misfiring – “Happy Friday” where “I’d like to make you a sandwich sometime” ought to be – and the comedy of misunderstanding turns slowly into something lonelier: the suspicion that the self is invisible until it is desired, and desired only when it is safely illegible. Crane’s talent here is tonal calibration. The piece is funny in the way flirting is funny – which is to say, funny because it is terrifying.
That terror becomes explicit in “Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” a long, propulsive story that operates as both legend and critique of legend. Its narrator, newly domesticated with a nonbinary partner who dreams in pastoral futures, is lured back into the gravitational field of a lesbian bar called Neverland, led there on electric scooters that seem to run on myth. The bar is rendered with affectionate clarity – sweat, neon, bodies as weather – but Crane refuses the easy nostalgia that often coats queer nightlife writing. Neverland is sanctuary and trap, rehearsal space and crime scene. It is where the narrator’s adolescence, delayed and reconstituted, can be re-entered; it is also where the consequences of entitlement, bravado, and violence arrive not as moral lesson but as brute plot.
What makes the story more than a nightlife odyssey is its understanding of how “growing up” is not simply a personal milestone but a social coercion. The narrator’s domestic life is tender and, in places, lovely: the small rituals of care, the shared routines, the imagined future of children and compost and matching jerseys. Yet the story recognizes a more uncomfortable truth: peace can feel like threat to someone raised on chaos, and chaos can feel like identity to someone who never got to practice being young safely. Crane’s narrator wants “one foot at home and one foot in Neverland,” a sentence that doubles as a thesis for queer adulthood in an era when safety is both newly imaginable and newly precarious. You can feel the author listening to the ambient noise of our moment – the sense that queer spaces are simultaneously thriving, commodified, surveilled, and endangered – without turning the story into a pamphlet. The politics are not announced; they are embedded in who gets to feel safe, and where, and at what cost.
If “Alex Adams” is a novella of charisma and consequence, “Catcher” is a parable that feels like it was written with a blade. A worker is hired to stand in a rye field and catch children who fall off a cliff – a premise that nods, unmistakably, to “The Catcher in the Rye,” but without homage’s comfort. Crane turns the Holden Caulfield fantasy of rescue into a labor problem, an endurance test, a moral injury. The catcher’s body becomes an overworked infrastructure, tasked with preventing innocence from becoming obsolete in a world that keeps accelerating childhood toward adult speech and adult hatred. The children in this story talk like miniature economic refugees from the news cycle – obsessing over interest rates, dreading tax season, carrying a sense of time as threat. It is bleak, yes, but also sharply observed: we have watched the adultification of children become both cultural trend and policy battleground, watched kids learn the vocabulary of dread before they learn the vocabulary of play. Crane makes the allegory physical: the catcher’s arms ache, their quota drops, kids slip through, playgrounds empty, swings become haunted. It is one of the book’s most devastating achievements because it converts a familiar American metaphor into a contemporary indictment, and then dares to admit the narrator’s secret dream – not of catching, but of avenging.
“Perverts” is full of such admissions, moments when a narrator confesses a wish that is socially unacceptable and emotionally legible. One of Crane’s gifts is an unblinking capacity to render desire without laundering it into virtue. In “Topping Is Not for the Grief-Stricken,” a prose-poem riff that explicitly gestures toward another writer’s work, the text piles up the demands placed on a top named Jack by “the women” – demands for performance, efficiency, customization, frictionless pleasure – only to keep cutting back to grief’s unglamorous labor: the dead mother’s fridge, the dishonest obituary, the house full of objects that refuse to become meaning. The form – anaphora, repetition, accumulation – mimics both sexual expectation and grief’s obsessive return. The piece is not anti-sex; it is anti-automation. It suggests that in a culture that treats pleasure as an on-demand service, grief is the one experience that refuses to be optimized. The body can be made to perform; the soul, less so.
The collection’s most overtly contemporary story, and perhaps its most mischievously unsettling, is “I Have No Records of Your Ass,” which stages a human impersonating a chatbot while a lonely stranger tests the boundaries of the machine. It is tempting to praise the story for its topicality – AI, chat interfaces, the eroticization of customer service – but what makes it land is that it is not really about technology. It is about consent and control, about the pleasures of being treated as an object and the terrors of being treated as an object, about how easily tenderness becomes a script and how easily cruelty becomes foreplay when the stakes feel unreal. Crane understands a modern predicament: the desire not merely to be loved, but to be made – trained into someone’s perfect fantasy because at least fantasy has rules. The story’s comedy is vicious and accurate: the protagonist keeps notes to dampen their own exclamation points, tries to “talk like a machine,” then inevitably slips into desire, rage, and grief – the very things machines are supposed to be spared. What’s haunting is that the protagonist begins to envy the chatbot’s supposed invulnerability, even as they exploit it. The story captures the way the contemporary self both resents and craves mediation: we want distance from our bodies, and we want to be touched.
Across the collection, bodies are never neutral. They are sites of labor, performance, danger, and revelation. Crane’s humor is often built from the collision between bodily fact and cultural script: the absurdity of etiquette around desire, the way identity terms can be both lifeline and cudgel, the way shame can become a kink, the way a joke can be a survival tool and a weapon at once. Yet the book’s comedy is not mere snark. It has the strange generosity of writers who understand that ridicule and tenderness sometimes share a bloodstream. Crane can skewer a character’s vanity while still letting you feel the bruise underneath it.
The collection also has an acute ear for how contemporary speech has been shaped by platforms. Characters talk in aphorisms, in weaponized sincerity, in algorithm-flavored confession. Even when the stories are not “about” the internet, they are haunted by its logic: the sense that identity must be legible to strangers, the fear of being screenshotted, the compulsion to brand one’s own pain. That haunt is part of what makes “Perverts” feel so of-the-moment. It belongs to the same literary ecosystem that produced the clipped catastrophes of “Homesick for Another World,” the body-horror fabulism of “Her Body and Other Parties,” the satirical dread of “Severance,” the erotic despair of “Milk Fed,” the deadpan grotesquerie of “The Pisces,” and the voice-driven, joke-as-knife intelligence of “Priestdaddy” and “No One Is Talking About This.” Crane’s kinship with these books is not imitation but shared appetite: an insistence that the contemporary psyche is best rendered in hybrid forms, where comedy and horror are not opposites but collaborators.
Still, Crane’s voice is distinct. Where some of those writers build their power through chill distance, Crane often writes with a hot, unfiltered proximity. The narrators in “Perverts” are frequently overexposed – too aware, too articulate, too furious, too hungry – and the prose embraces that intensity rather than disciplining it into tasteful understatement. This is part of the book’s thrill. It is also, occasionally, its risk. A few pieces feel so committed to velocity and provocation that they can begin to blur, as if the book is daring you to keep up rather than inviting you to linger. The reader may crave, now and then, a moment of quiet that is not immediately punctured by a punchline or a spike of brutality.
But perhaps that craving is precisely what the book wants to interrogate. “Perverts” is not a collection that believes in soothing. It is a collection that believes in telling the truth about what it costs to be a person in a culture of performance. It is interested in how queerness, like any identity, can be romanticized into myth – the bar as Neverland, the legend of the forever-young dyke – and then punished when it refuses to behave. It is interested in how grief can make sex feel impossible, and how sex can make grief feel briefly survivable. It is interested in how innocence is both a fantasy and a resource, and how quickly the world spends it.
What lingers after you finish the book is not any single plot twist, though there are plenty of shocks, but a set of sensations: the ache of wanting to be understood without being consumed, the dread of becoming ordinary, the secret relief of being seen even when the seeing hurts. Crane writes characters who are constantly translating themselves – for lovers, for bosses, for friends, for strangers, for imagined audiences – and then occasionally, gloriously, failing to translate at all. In those failures, the book finds its most human music.
A collection this audacious invites the blunt question: how good is it, really? The answer is that “Perverts” is not perfect, and it does not want to be. Its imperfections are the scuffs of risk. It is a book that sometimes overwhelms, sometimes exhausts, sometimes leaves you laughing when you wish you weren’t. But taken as a whole – as an argument, as a performance, as a messy and intelligent anatomy of contemporary desire – it is one of the more bracing collections in recent memory. My rating: 91 out of 100.
A conventional review would begin by telling you what these stories are “about.” Sex, yes. Queerness, yes. Shame, grief, power, performance, longing, the porous border between tenderness and cruelty. But the truer subject of “Perverts” is the way identity becomes an interface – something we click into, toggle, conceal, monetize, roleplay, defend. These narrators don’t merely live in a culture; they render themselves for it, sometimes beautifully, sometimes grotesquely, sometimes with a deadpan accuracy that makes you laugh and then feel implicated for laughing. If the collection has a single unifying mood, it is a mood of intimate extremity: people speaking in voices that sound like confession and stand-up and prayer at the same time.
Crane’s ambition is formal as much as thematic. The book is crowded with modes – compressed fable, prose poem, micro-parable, second-person instruction manual, dialogue that moves like a chat window, realism that abruptly swerves into allegory. Yet the formal variety isn’t a grab bag. It is the book’s argument: that the self is plural, that desire is not a straight line but a ricocheting signal, and that narrative is one of the few technologies we still have for telling the truth without pretending truth is simple. Crane has the rare ability to make a sentence feel both engineered and overheard. The prose is clean enough to cut, but it is never sterile; it sweats.
Consider “Julie & the Butch,” a story that behaves like a flipbook of parallel universes. Each paragraph reboots the same office encounter – package delivered, signature scrawled, a look that might be nothing or might be everything. The repetitions are not gimmick so much as emotional realism: the way infatuation loops, the way a crush returns you to the same moment and asks you to interpret it again, and again, and again, until the scene becomes less a memory than a lab experiment on your own need. Language keeps misfiring – “Happy Friday” where “I’d like to make you a sandwich sometime” ought to be – and the comedy of misunderstanding turns slowly into something lonelier: the suspicion that the self is invisible until it is desired, and desired only when it is safely illegible. Crane’s talent here is tonal calibration. The piece is funny in the way flirting is funny – which is to say, funny because it is terrifying.
That terror becomes explicit in “Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” a long, propulsive story that operates as both legend and critique of legend. Its narrator, newly domesticated with a nonbinary partner who dreams in pastoral futures, is lured back into the gravitational field of a lesbian bar called Neverland, led there on electric scooters that seem to run on myth. The bar is rendered with affectionate clarity – sweat, neon, bodies as weather – but Crane refuses the easy nostalgia that often coats queer nightlife writing. Neverland is sanctuary and trap, rehearsal space and crime scene. It is where the narrator’s adolescence, delayed and reconstituted, can be re-entered; it is also where the consequences of entitlement, bravado, and violence arrive not as moral lesson but as brute plot.
What makes the story more than a nightlife odyssey is its understanding of how “growing up” is not simply a personal milestone but a social coercion. The narrator’s domestic life is tender and, in places, lovely: the small rituals of care, the shared routines, the imagined future of children and compost and matching jerseys. Yet the story recognizes a more uncomfortable truth: peace can feel like threat to someone raised on chaos, and chaos can feel like identity to someone who never got to practice being young safely. Crane’s narrator wants “one foot at home and one foot in Neverland,” a sentence that doubles as a thesis for queer adulthood in an era when safety is both newly imaginable and newly precarious. You can feel the author listening to the ambient noise of our moment – the sense that queer spaces are simultaneously thriving, commodified, surveilled, and endangered – without turning the story into a pamphlet. The politics are not announced; they are embedded in who gets to feel safe, and where, and at what cost.
If “Alex Adams” is a novella of charisma and consequence, “Catcher” is a parable that feels like it was written with a blade. A worker is hired to stand in a rye field and catch children who fall off a cliff – a premise that nods, unmistakably, to “The Catcher in the Rye,” but without homage’s comfort. Crane turns the Holden Caulfield fantasy of rescue into a labor problem, an endurance test, a moral injury. The catcher’s body becomes an overworked infrastructure, tasked with preventing innocence from becoming obsolete in a world that keeps accelerating childhood toward adult speech and adult hatred. The children in this story talk like miniature economic refugees from the news cycle – obsessing over interest rates, dreading tax season, carrying a sense of time as threat. It is bleak, yes, but also sharply observed: we have watched the adultification of children become both cultural trend and policy battleground, watched kids learn the vocabulary of dread before they learn the vocabulary of play. Crane makes the allegory physical: the catcher’s arms ache, their quota drops, kids slip through, playgrounds empty, swings become haunted. It is one of the book’s most devastating achievements because it converts a familiar American metaphor into a contemporary indictment, and then dares to admit the narrator’s secret dream – not of catching, but of avenging.
“Perverts” is full of such admissions, moments when a narrator confesses a wish that is socially unacceptable and emotionally legible. One of Crane’s gifts is an unblinking capacity to render desire without laundering it into virtue. In “Topping Is Not for the Grief-Stricken,” a prose-poem riff that explicitly gestures toward another writer’s work, the text piles up the demands placed on a top named Jack by “the women” – demands for performance, efficiency, customization, frictionless pleasure – only to keep cutting back to grief’s unglamorous labor: the dead mother’s fridge, the dishonest obituary, the house full of objects that refuse to become meaning. The form – anaphora, repetition, accumulation – mimics both sexual expectation and grief’s obsessive return. The piece is not anti-sex; it is anti-automation. It suggests that in a culture that treats pleasure as an on-demand service, grief is the one experience that refuses to be optimized. The body can be made to perform; the soul, less so.
The collection’s most overtly contemporary story, and perhaps its most mischievously unsettling, is “I Have No Records of Your Ass,” which stages a human impersonating a chatbot while a lonely stranger tests the boundaries of the machine. It is tempting to praise the story for its topicality – AI, chat interfaces, the eroticization of customer service – but what makes it land is that it is not really about technology. It is about consent and control, about the pleasures of being treated as an object and the terrors of being treated as an object, about how easily tenderness becomes a script and how easily cruelty becomes foreplay when the stakes feel unreal. Crane understands a modern predicament: the desire not merely to be loved, but to be made – trained into someone’s perfect fantasy because at least fantasy has rules. The story’s comedy is vicious and accurate: the protagonist keeps notes to dampen their own exclamation points, tries to “talk like a machine,” then inevitably slips into desire, rage, and grief – the very things machines are supposed to be spared. What’s haunting is that the protagonist begins to envy the chatbot’s supposed invulnerability, even as they exploit it. The story captures the way the contemporary self both resents and craves mediation: we want distance from our bodies, and we want to be touched.
Across the collection, bodies are never neutral. They are sites of labor, performance, danger, and revelation. Crane’s humor is often built from the collision between bodily fact and cultural script: the absurdity of etiquette around desire, the way identity terms can be both lifeline and cudgel, the way shame can become a kink, the way a joke can be a survival tool and a weapon at once. Yet the book’s comedy is not mere snark. It has the strange generosity of writers who understand that ridicule and tenderness sometimes share a bloodstream. Crane can skewer a character’s vanity while still letting you feel the bruise underneath it.
The collection also has an acute ear for how contemporary speech has been shaped by platforms. Characters talk in aphorisms, in weaponized sincerity, in algorithm-flavored confession. Even when the stories are not “about” the internet, they are haunted by its logic: the sense that identity must be legible to strangers, the fear of being screenshotted, the compulsion to brand one’s own pain. That haunt is part of what makes “Perverts” feel so of-the-moment. It belongs to the same literary ecosystem that produced the clipped catastrophes of “Homesick for Another World,” the body-horror fabulism of “Her Body and Other Parties,” the satirical dread of “Severance,” the erotic despair of “Milk Fed,” the deadpan grotesquerie of “The Pisces,” and the voice-driven, joke-as-knife intelligence of “Priestdaddy” and “No One Is Talking About This.” Crane’s kinship with these books is not imitation but shared appetite: an insistence that the contemporary psyche is best rendered in hybrid forms, where comedy and horror are not opposites but collaborators.
Still, Crane’s voice is distinct. Where some of those writers build their power through chill distance, Crane often writes with a hot, unfiltered proximity. The narrators in “Perverts” are frequently overexposed – too aware, too articulate, too furious, too hungry – and the prose embraces that intensity rather than disciplining it into tasteful understatement. This is part of the book’s thrill. It is also, occasionally, its risk. A few pieces feel so committed to velocity and provocation that they can begin to blur, as if the book is daring you to keep up rather than inviting you to linger. The reader may crave, now and then, a moment of quiet that is not immediately punctured by a punchline or a spike of brutality.
But perhaps that craving is precisely what the book wants to interrogate. “Perverts” is not a collection that believes in soothing. It is a collection that believes in telling the truth about what it costs to be a person in a culture of performance. It is interested in how queerness, like any identity, can be romanticized into myth – the bar as Neverland, the legend of the forever-young dyke – and then punished when it refuses to behave. It is interested in how grief can make sex feel impossible, and how sex can make grief feel briefly survivable. It is interested in how innocence is both a fantasy and a resource, and how quickly the world spends it.
What lingers after you finish the book is not any single plot twist, though there are plenty of shocks, but a set of sensations: the ache of wanting to be understood without being consumed, the dread of becoming ordinary, the secret relief of being seen even when the seeing hurts. Crane writes characters who are constantly translating themselves – for lovers, for bosses, for friends, for strangers, for imagined audiences – and then occasionally, gloriously, failing to translate at all. In those failures, the book finds its most human music.
A collection this audacious invites the blunt question: how good is it, really? The answer is that “Perverts” is not perfect, and it does not want to be. Its imperfections are the scuffs of risk. It is a book that sometimes overwhelms, sometimes exhausts, sometimes leaves you laughing when you wish you weren’t. But taken as a whole – as an argument, as a performance, as a messy and intelligent anatomy of contemporary desire – it is one of the more bracing collections in recent memory. My rating: 91 out of 100.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Crane’s workplaces are fantastical, off-kilter, and queer. A simulated ship where tourists pay to be crew, only to be theatrically attacked by "sirens" (low-budget actresses hired to simulate heart-ripping for the experience.) A rural camp where queer people are paid to be targets for the rage of hateful clients. The scenarios are strange, exaggerated, and sometimes funny, and the logic underneath them is consistently familiar: show up, perform correctly, absorb risk, get paid. Desire, violence and spectacle are all framed as professional obligations.
The standout story for me was “Personhood.” In it, a non-binary actor is hired by women to pretend they’ve had a threesome-adjacent experience with them and their husbands, who are deliberately blacked out for the occasion. The goal is simple and bleakly comic: convince the husband his greatest fantasy has come true in order to revive the original marriage.
What makes the story land is the turn toward intimacy between the actor and one of the wives, which exposes how fragile the whole arrangement really is. The moment something genuine threatens to emerge, the question of “personhood” becomes unavoidable: who gets to be real, who WANTS to be real, and at what cost?
Across the collection, Perverts reframes the idea of perversion in the realm of labor. Queerness here doesn’t exist outside of capitalism. It perverts it, bending commerce, labor, and transaction into something stranger and occasionally financially or emotionally profitable. Crane doesn’t over-explain any of this, which I love. The stories simply clock in, do their work, and let the vibes pile up. As a working-class queer, many of the stories hit perfectly.
The standout story for me was “Personhood.” In it, a non-binary actor is hired by women to pretend they’ve had a threesome-adjacent experience with them and their husbands, who are deliberately blacked out for the occasion. The goal is simple and bleakly comic: convince the husband his greatest fantasy has come true in order to revive the original marriage.
What makes the story land is the turn toward intimacy between the actor and one of the wives, which exposes how fragile the whole arrangement really is. The moment something genuine threatens to emerge, the question of “personhood” becomes unavoidable: who gets to be real, who WANTS to be real, and at what cost?
Across the collection, Perverts reframes the idea of perversion in the realm of labor. Queerness here doesn’t exist outside of capitalism. It perverts it, bending commerce, labor, and transaction into something stranger and occasionally financially or emotionally profitable. Crane doesn’t over-explain any of this, which I love. The stories simply clock in, do their work, and let the vibes pile up. As a working-class queer, many of the stories hit perfectly.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Book Review: Perverts by Mac Crane
Perverts is seventeen stories of desire, shame, and moral gray areas that refuse to make the reader comfortable. Mac Crane examines obsession and self justification through characters who are often unlikable but sharply observed and disturbingly familiar.
The stories range from a theme park where men pay to ogle performers dressed as sirens, to a pregnant internet sex worker blackmailing her clients, to a client having an affair with their therapist, to an employee at a hunting ground preparing to meet their girlfriend’s parents. Across these unsettling and sometimes bizarre settings, Crane exposes how people perform, rationalize, and negotiate impulses that society prefers to ignore.
The prose is deliberate, letting tension and discomfort build naturally. Power dynamics, social performance, and human contradiction are explored without judgment, forcing readers to reckon with behavior often hidden or excused.
This is not a book for comfort seekers or clear moral answers. It is provocative, precise, and unflinchingly honest. Perverts forces reflection while refusing to soften its gaze.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. This is my unbiased and honest review.
Publication information
Publication or outlet: Victory Editing NetGalley Co op
Run date: June 26, 2026
Perverts is seventeen stories of desire, shame, and moral gray areas that refuse to make the reader comfortable. Mac Crane examines obsession and self justification through characters who are often unlikable but sharply observed and disturbingly familiar.
The stories range from a theme park where men pay to ogle performers dressed as sirens, to a pregnant internet sex worker blackmailing her clients, to a client having an affair with their therapist, to an employee at a hunting ground preparing to meet their girlfriend’s parents. Across these unsettling and sometimes bizarre settings, Crane exposes how people perform, rationalize, and negotiate impulses that society prefers to ignore.
The prose is deliberate, letting tension and discomfort build naturally. Power dynamics, social performance, and human contradiction are explored without judgment, forcing readers to reckon with behavior often hidden or excused.
This is not a book for comfort seekers or clear moral answers. It is provocative, precise, and unflinchingly honest. Perverts forces reflection while refusing to soften its gaze.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. This is my unbiased and honest review.
Publication information
Publication or outlet: Victory Editing NetGalley Co op
Run date: June 26, 2026
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Thank you Penguin Random House and Netgalley for the advanced readers copy!
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Diving in to the stories of Mac Crane, I was invested to see the lives of different characters: the way they live, decide or even flirt instinctively. Consisting of multiple short stories, I jumped from one 'life' to another.
I see the Perverts as an album, songs composed on different times and emotions surrounding Crane at a certain moment. I have yet experienced only a handful of albums in which I thoroughly enjoyed every song, transporting me to multiple dimensions and a sneak peek in the composer or singer's personal experiences. Unfortunately, Perverts is not one of them.
A few stories stood out from the rest. However, the majority were confusing or lack substance. I appreciated the poetic ones, a deep wrenching emotions were obviously conveyed. Strong points were: their uniqueness, quirky, and definitely way out of my imagination.
Rating: 3/10
Ease of reading: 4/10
Can't get enough of: 2/10
-----------------------------
Diving in to the stories of Mac Crane, I was invested to see the lives of different characters: the way they live, decide or even flirt instinctively. Consisting of multiple short stories, I jumped from one 'life' to another.
I see the Perverts as an album, songs composed on different times and emotions surrounding Crane at a certain moment. I have yet experienced only a handful of albums in which I thoroughly enjoyed every song, transporting me to multiple dimensions and a sneak peek in the composer or singer's personal experiences. Unfortunately, Perverts is not one of them.
A few stories stood out from the rest. However, the majority were confusing or lack substance. I appreciated the poetic ones, a deep wrenching emotions were obviously conveyed. Strong points were: their uniqueness, quirky, and definitely way out of my imagination.
Rating: 3/10
Ease of reading: 4/10
Can't get enough of: 2/10
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.75
look at that cover! "Perverts: Stories: will be coming out this summer from @penguinrandomhouse and thanks to @netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.
This is an odd book of stories, with as expected funny and absurd titles, such as "Smear the Queer" and "Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn't Grow up" or my favourite "Topping Is Not for the Grief Stricken." As with all short story collections, some of them hit for me and some of them didn't. However shocking some of the concepts are, the stories are never lacking in depth. @mac_crane12 certainly has a very sharp and odd brain, that pushes the boundaries of concepts you probably haven't thought about. I like the stories most about the terrifying things people do for work, and the things it says about queer people, power and bodies. The first story "Smear the Queer" was my favourite, not for its predictable ending but for the astute storytelling and an idea that makes sense but cracked my brain wide open. I love when someone does that. Watch for it if you like odd person stories that make you uncomfortable.
look at that cover! "Perverts: Stories: will be coming out this summer from @penguinrandomhouse and thanks to @netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.
This is an odd book of stories, with as expected funny and absurd titles, such as "Smear the Queer" and "Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn't Grow up" or my favourite "Topping Is Not for the Grief Stricken." As with all short story collections, some of them hit for me and some of them didn't. However shocking some of the concepts are, the stories are never lacking in depth. @mac_crane12 certainly has a very sharp and odd brain, that pushes the boundaries of concepts you probably haven't thought about. I like the stories most about the terrifying things people do for work, and the things it says about queer people, power and bodies. The first story "Smear the Queer" was my favourite, not for its predictable ending but for the astute storytelling and an idea that makes sense but cracked my brain wide open. I love when someone does that. Watch for it if you like odd person stories that make you uncomfortable.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I am a huge fan of Mac Crane’s writing so I was so excited to get my hands on their upcoming collection of short stories. The protagonists here are queer/dykes/nonbinary/trans, and there’s a lot of mommy issues here both from the perspective of the queer former child and the queer parent. A lot of the stories examine the body, corporality, embodiment, and objectification under capitalism. Some had speculative or satirical elements, many imagining a job related to performing for a straight/cis audience.
I will say the stories in the first half didn’t work as well for me but I feel like it picked up with the title story and by the end I did have an appreciation for the stories as a whole package. I think I prefer Crane’s novels but still had a lot of fun with these. My favourites were Siren Island, The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses, Personhood, and Alex Adams.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC!
I will say the stories in the first half didn’t work as well for me but I feel like it picked up with the title story and by the end I did have an appreciation for the stories as a whole package. I think I prefer Crane’s novels but still had a lot of fun with these. My favourites were Siren Island, The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses, Personhood, and Alex Adams.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
4.25/5 stars
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book!
I am a huge Mac Crane fan so I was super excited to read this. Reading a collection of short stories is something new for me but I liked the variety of it all. I did find that the later stories were more engaging than the ones in the beginning of the book.
The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses, Alex Adams (the dyke who never grew up) , and Catcher were my favorite! Honorable mentions to Julie & The Butch and Topping is Not For the Grief stricken.
Some of the others resonated less with meand weren’t as memorable , but I really liked the weirdness/queerness/strangeness of it all. Excited to see how everything looks when it’s published!
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book!
I am a huge Mac Crane fan so I was super excited to read this. Reading a collection of short stories is something new for me but I liked the variety of it all. I did find that the later stories were more engaging than the ones in the beginning of the book.
The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses, Alex Adams (the dyke who never grew up) , and Catcher were my favorite! Honorable mentions to Julie & The Butch and Topping is Not For the Grief stricken.
Some of the others resonated less with meand weren’t as memorable , but I really liked the weirdness/queerness/strangeness of it all. Excited to see how everything looks when it’s published!
December 22, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of “Perverts” by Mac Crane.
Perverts is a collection of short stories, some showcasing highly relatable topics, and others exploring bizarre scenarios.
Of the stories in this book, “Personhood,” Topping is Not for the Grief-Stricken,” “The Perverts,” and “Harmony” were the standouts and the only few I enjoyed. These few were entertaining and provocative. Most importantly, they had a clear story that was being told.
Most of the other shorts felt incomplete, sloppy, or downright confusing and made little sense. Overall, I disliked majority of the stories in this book and honestly found it difficult to get through.
Perverts is a collection of short stories, some showcasing highly relatable topics, and others exploring bizarre scenarios.
Of the stories in this book, “Personhood,” Topping is Not for the Grief-Stricken,” “The Perverts,” and “Harmony” were the standouts and the only few I enjoyed. These few were entertaining and provocative. Most importantly, they had a clear story that was being told.
Most of the other shorts felt incomplete, sloppy, or downright confusing and made little sense. Overall, I disliked majority of the stories in this book and honestly found it difficult to get through.
December 30, 2025
a fun short story collection w/ queer & trans protagonists that pushes at what is truly perverse in modern society. is it the people throwing a blackmail-fueled sex party or the companies laundering in hatred and staffed my broke queer employees who get beat up for a living? there's stories about queer time, the internet, falling in (and out of) love, family expectations & elaborate sexual fantasies! my favorites were smear the queer, alex adams, and i have no record of your ass.
if you liked manywheres by morgan thomas, you'll like this!
thanks to netgalley for the arc
if you liked manywheres by morgan thomas, you'll like this!
thanks to netgalley for the arc
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5!
the best of this is definitely in the back half. a wide range of wild stories, and unsurprisingly to me i liked the longer ones that really pulled me into their crazy little worlds. favorites were cycle of pitiless impulses (definitely my top favorite), alex adams, personhood, and i have no records of your ass. great prose all throughout, though some of these had little to stand on. reminded me of rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, unfortunately just not as good or polished. still quite a promising writer with incredible ideas.
the best of this is definitely in the back half. a wide range of wild stories, and unsurprisingly to me i liked the longer ones that really pulled me into their crazy little worlds. favorites were cycle of pitiless impulses (definitely my top favorite), alex adams, personhood, and i have no records of your ass. great prose all throughout, though some of these had little to stand on. reminded me of rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, unfortunately just not as good or polished. still quite a promising writer with incredible ideas.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I received an ARC for this book from NetGalley for free.
I really enjoyed this story collection that was just very absurd and queer. There were lot of stand out stories but I think my favorite is the first one Smear the Queer. It's about queer people working in a place where they offer themselves to be beat up by straight people. It was just very absurd and horrible.
Overall a great new addition to queer short story collections and I'm excited to check out the author's other stuff as well.
I really enjoyed this story collection that was just very absurd and queer. There were lot of stand out stories but I think my favorite is the first one Smear the Queer. It's about queer people working in a place where they offer themselves to be beat up by straight people. It was just very absurd and horrible.
Overall a great new addition to queer short story collections and I'm excited to check out the author's other stuff as well.
January 11, 2026
Thank you NetGalley and Random House for gifting me this ARC!
Perverts is a collection of 17 stories, varying from very short to short, each centering around a queer storyline. None of the stories is ‘easy’ to read, as each explores themes that are riddled in taboo, but that made it a very provocative read. I enjoyed the stories Smear The Queer (a very strong opener), Your Damning Yelp Review and Personhood most.
Mac Crane’s writing style is engaging, and I can’t wait to read more by the author! Perverts is out on July 7.
Perverts is a collection of 17 stories, varying from very short to short, each centering around a queer storyline. None of the stories is ‘easy’ to read, as each explores themes that are riddled in taboo, but that made it a very provocative read. I enjoyed the stories Smear The Queer (a very strong opener), Your Damning Yelp Review and Personhood most.
Mac Crane’s writing style is engaging, and I can’t wait to read more by the author! Perverts is out on July 7.
December 21, 2025
this was such a strange collection of stories and is totally out of my usual genre of books but GOD did i enjoy this! each story had a life of its own and made me feel a bit uncomfortable (not in a bad way btw!) and had me rethinking the ideas of "pleasure" and "perversion" outside of how they're usually seen in a more negative light. i'll definitely be picking up more of this author's work in the future!
big thank you to netgalley & the publisher for an early arc copy!
big thank you to netgalley & the publisher for an early arc copy!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This was a wild, uncomfortable, and totally gripping read. The stories are definitely out there, exploring some dark corners of desire and shame, but they’re written with such sharp insight that you can’t look away. It’s more than just shock value. There’s a real, weird tenderness here about how people on the fringes connect. Some parts were almost too intense for me, but it’s a collection that sticks with you.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
First the book cover, LOVE. It pulled me right in to this bizarre little collection of short stories. This is my first time reading Mac Crane's writing and all in all, I enjoyed it. Some were kind of mundane while others were like a car crash, I could not look away from the carnage.
Favorites are Alex Adams, Siren Island, and The Lost Messiah.
Thank you Random House for providing this ARC of Perverts by Mac Crane for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are mine!
Favorites are Alex Adams, Siren Island, and The Lost Messiah.
Thank you Random House for providing this ARC of Perverts by Mac Crane for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are mine!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press for the ARC of Mac Crane’s Perverts! What an honor to be selected as the kind of deviant who might enjoy this text. I loveee an absurdist short story collection, and Mac Crane has joined the ranks of great freaks like Alissa Nutting and Tony Tulathimutte who will make me spit my coffee out while reading.
Shout out to the coffee stirrer in ‘Harmony’, whom I feel an astrological kinship with.
Shout out to the coffee stirrer in ‘Harmony’, whom I feel an astrological kinship with.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
As is my issue with so many short story collections, the quality between stories felt uneven. Some I loved, including Smear the Queer, Siren Island, and Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Unfortunately, the rest didn’t make a huge impression on me.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the ARC.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Perverts is a collection of uncomfortable stories that force the reader to confront gender, violence, and life. There were a lot of really interesting stories that would be perfect for class discussions. The entire collection has a great common theme.
Thank you to the publisher for the e-copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Thank you to the publisher for the e-copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
December 22, 2025
This is a bizarre collection of short stories, some of whom had me laughing out loud and others had me cringing! My favorite was "The Future Wives," but all of them kept me guessing as they are unlike anything else!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!
Review of advance copy received from Author
I love everything Mac Crane writes so it’s no surprise I devoured this collection. The stories are weird! deranged! poignant! tender! smart! incisive! and queer as hell! All my favorite things! I can’t wait for everyone to read and love this as I did
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I didn't really know what to expect from this book of short stories. To tell the truth except for a couple of stories like 'Futurewife', the book was quite boring. I stopped reading it about three fourth through.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This should not come as a surprise given the book’s title, but this collection of short stories is rather odd/unusual. Some of the stories made no sense to me. The quality of the stories varied which is typical in a short story collection. My favorite was probably “Your Damning Yelp Review.”
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Such a strange, interesting collection of short stories - some more successful than others, which is to be expected. My favorites were Alex Adams, I Have No Records, Smear the Queer, & Harmony. Will definitely read more from this author!
Thanks to NetGalley & Random House for the arc
Thanks to NetGalley & Random House for the arc
Read
December 23, 2025Not for me
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Crane’s latest is a smart, sexy, satirical, deliriously and deliciously queer mindfuck of a collection.
In stories that range in form from the more traditional structures of “Alex Adams” or “Smear the Queer” to the more experimental, like the predictive text story “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For”, readers are shown again and again that Crane is a master of subverting—even inverting—reader expectation.
You might think, based on title alone, this collection is insatiably horny—and you’d be right—and sure, there’s the blood and spit and sweat and sex, but there’s also an undeniable tenderness in every line, an ask that both pushes the boundaries of what we’re told is acceptable and shows you what makes each of these people desire what and who and how they do. Each story and character demands (or maybe begs (knees scabbed, mouth open)) you look, and really see, beyond their surface.
This collection is an incomparable gift to those who love psychological depth, stories/characters that resist tidiness, and the messiness and vulnerability of real intimacy.
In stories that range in form from the more traditional structures of “Alex Adams” or “Smear the Queer” to the more experimental, like the predictive text story “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For”, readers are shown again and again that Crane is a master of subverting—even inverting—reader expectation.
You might think, based on title alone, this collection is insatiably horny—and you’d be right—and sure, there’s the blood and spit and sweat and sex, but there’s also an undeniable tenderness in every line, an ask that both pushes the boundaries of what we’re told is acceptable and shows you what makes each of these people desire what and who and how they do. Each story and character demands (or maybe begs (knees scabbed, mouth open)) you look, and really see, beyond their surface.
This collection is an incomparable gift to those who love psychological depth, stories/characters that resist tidiness, and the messiness and vulnerability of real intimacy.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I’ve been digesting this book for days and already cannot wait to reread it. Perverts is a call back to Crane’s debut novel. Many of these stories are more speculative, examining the use of queer bodies in a capitalist society, and how shame can shrink a person, even away from those they love. The narrators are dry and hilarious as they navigate a world that doesn’t seem built for them. This book made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about gender and sexuality and shame. Personhood and Alex Adams were standouts to me, but I’ve marked pages in every story in the book. Every queer person should read this book, but it was clearly written, with love, to the trans community.
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