Perverts: Stories

by Mac Crane

A 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.

Genres: Short Stories, Queer, LGBT, Fiction, Adult

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication July 7, 2026

Reviews

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: NG
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.

***


So I think short stories can either be an excellent introduction to an author’s work or a not so great one. I think in this case the answer was … both? In the sense that reading these short stories really made me want to explore the author’s voice in long form (so that’s a win) but also I felt as frustrated by these stories as I was intrigued by them. So basically, I really liked everything about these stories--the author’s voice, the ideas they were exploring, their approach to identity, their very specific blend of, I don’t know how to describe it, whimsical darkness--without quite managing to completely like the stories themselves.

And, again, this could just be me not being super into short stories in general. I always appreciate the artistry of them - I think it’s honestly harder, from a craft perspective, to write a good short story than it is to write a moderately adequate novel (please note the way I happen to write moderately adequate novels, rather than short stories of any kind). But I rarely connect with them the way I’m hoping to.

Don’t get me wrong, though, there are a handful of really brilliant stories here, which I think, making the whole collection worth a read. All of them revolve around themes of queer performance and queer labour (often in deliberately absurdist settings) and how those things impinge upon (and perhaps shape) queer identity, queer love, and queer desire. And, wow, I’ve just said the word ‘queer’ so many times, it’s lost all meaning. But, err, this is a very queer book about very queer things. While the stories explore (queer) trauma, they also touch on (queer) hope. Unfortunately I think one of the limitations of the medium is that it’s easier, as a reader (or maybe just for this reader), to connect the dots on queer trauma, even when lightly sketched, but I tend to feel cases of queer hope need to be more specific and dug into a little more deeply. Or that could be my trauma talking.

Of these stories, and again this speaks so much to my personal taste it’s probably crossing the border into unfair, my favourites tended to be the longer ones: Smear the Queer (whose protagonist works for a company that allows queerphobes to pay for the opportunity enact violence on queer people in a semi-controlled environment), Siren Island (the protagonist works for a theme park where cis men pay to ogle women dressed as sirens), Harmony (the protagonist is ill-advisedly pursuing a sexual relationship with their therapist), The Failed Messiah (the protagonists encounters…well, the clue is in the name), The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses (the protagonist is kidnapped by someone who forces traumatised queer to perform their trauma as puppet shows in the name of therapy), I Have No Records Of Your Ass (the protagonist is pretending to be ChatGPT in an effort to connect with someone), and--my personal fave--Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, a self-consciously weird Peter Pan riff about the complexities of growing older as a queer person, of having to choose between the safety of adulthood and domesticity, and the heady freedom of youth and community. The Failed Messiah, Siren Island, and The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses where some of the more hope-tilted stories, and I think I was drawn to them because of that, although, as mentioned earlier, I did find myself wanting slightly more emotional grounding so that I could fully engage in (and believe in) those transitional moments when the protagonist shifts from acceptance to defiance, from helplessness to action, from fear and despair, to optimism and freedom, and even sometimes a kind of love. Oddly enough I didn’t need that with others, which are memorable for different reasons, haunting in their sense of disconnection and self-destruction, and the sad inevitability of both.

Sometimes I think the distance between loneliness and connection is nothing more than self-delusion.

The writing, as I think the above quote demonstrates, is a wonderful mix of sharp, disconcerting, matter-of-fact, and darkly funny. For example, one narrator writes of their abusive mother:

Before the vow [of silence], she taught my sister Blair and me how to despise ourselves. She did grant us that kindness.

Or there’s this wry throwaway that got an equally wry snortchuckle out of me:

You’d have thought I was a leper except for the fact that Jesus didn’t bother healing me

In any case, this is a stylish, intriguing collection of stories. Not all of them, for me, were winners but that’s how story collections tend to go in general. What each of these pieces share--even the less successful ones--is a uniquely queer perspective, effortlessly juggling self-loathing and trauma with a deliberately destabilising absurdist levity. I can’t wait to discover what this author can accomplish in their long-form work.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Aves Trainor · Rating 3 out of 5]

** 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.

[Holly | Raise Your Words · Rating 2 out of 5]

| 2/5 Stars | ★★☆☆☆

Trigger Warnings for Perverts​: Sexual Content, Affairs, Blackmail.

Perverts is a set of short stories written by Mac Crane. Each of these stories are independent of one another, though they each have a core of queer desire and shame. This collection of stories ranges so heavily from a general relationship, to a theme park where men pay to eye folks dressed as sirens, to self-destructive folks who just can't stop what they're doing.

Perverts is a really hard set of short-stories to conceptualize. These stories have such a broad core that it feels like they are completely disparate of one another. This results in some stories being really impactful, like Smear the Queer, Harmony, and The Failed Messiah and some that completely miss the mark, like Personhood, Julie & the Butch, and The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses.

As a queer person myself, I was really looking forward to reading this. That being said, Crane just doesn't have enough of a through line between these stories. I did genuinely enjoy a handful of the stories, however, but the ones that were misses really missed. Thank you to Mac Crane, Random House, The Dial Press, and NetGalley for an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) in exchange for my honest review.

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[Vini · Rating 2 out of 5]

what the hell, sure

even though i love the cover and the title, i should have known this was not going to be for me bc short story collections rarely are. this was interesting! i liked some of the first few stories, especially the first one. but after a while, they all started to feel too similar to each other. it's interesting how, despite what the title makes you think, this is less about actual perversion or erotica, but more about queer bodies. i think that's what connects all of the stories together, which is interesting! but idk i got tired after a while i skimmed some of the last few stories. i liked the writing, though! would read a full novel from this author.

[betsy · Rating 2 out of 5]

i’m not sure that this book of short stories worked for me. it started strong then quickly fizzled—i found myself pretty bored throughout and it became a bit of a slog for me to get through. i think the author tackles a lot of hard subjects without shying away from absurd and messy storylines and characters but overall this wasn’t my fav.

also! lotta trigger warnings throughout the various stories so be mindful.

thanks to the author and publisher for the eARC.

[Aislinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

[2.75⭐️] The writing, prose, and imagination in these short stories is impressive and captivating, but many of these short stories felt flat for me unfortunately.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House, The Dial Press for the ARC.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Alex Róbertsdóttir · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, thank you so much to NetGallery for providing me with an advance reader copy of Perverts by Mac Crane. The premise and major themes of this book really intrigued me, especially featuring all queer stories by a non-binary author, and I am so glad I gave it a read.

I was so ready to absolutely fall in love with this book and these short stories. I am not a usual short story reader, but it felt like the perfect medium to tell the tales highlighted in the synopsis. Sadly, it left me wanting more. Most of the stories felt, to me, like they were lacking the depth that would have given them the final punch. One example of this is in the first short story, Smear the Queer, where the main character works at a theme park made for people to act out their hate crimes. It could have been so good. It left me wanting so much more, not in the thought provoking way but in the "if x, y, or z scene had been more emotionally charged, tangible, or full then the ending would have hit a thousand times harder" sort of way.

Many of these stories had lines or themes that did intrigue me, the constant through theme of the book being queer desire and pain (quiche and afab people peeing standing up as well, weirdly enough). Your Damning Yelp Review had the question of what does it mean to be trans enough? Can you be "not trans enough"? Personhood had an incredible business idea, faking threesomes so your partner is fulfilled and stops asking (then again, I am a firm believer in actual communication but this has so much potential!) With a searing line of "Believing you had sex was the same thing as having sex." Julie and the Butch, while just a series of miscommunications, asks "are we always going to be stuck in language?" which is one of my favorite lost-in-thought questions, that along with how our native languages shape our world view.

My favorite out of this collection is Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn't Grow Up, and I believe that it is because Crane took the time and really fleshed this one out. We got the stakes of this misadventure, and we really heard the narrator's dilemma. Not only does the narrator admit that they don't know what to do with peace, but they go back and forth about the benefits of leaving their perfect domesticity. And at the end, shit actually happens. In many of the other stories, we are left wondering what happens next, which once in a while is nice, I like an ambivalent end that makes me think, but these were with goalless characters who mostly seemed reactionary, making imagining and ending for them difficult and almost not worthwhile.

I believe that these stories all really had great plots or ideas, but most of them were not executed in the emotional fashion I was looking for. Even stories that were inherently heavy, such as Topping is Not For the Greif Stricken, kept me at arms length, not allowing me to feel with the main character, Jack, when they are literally sobbing on the ground (also, just because someone is topping does not mean they should be carrying all the emotional weight). I wanted this author to let me in and give their characters more drive. I will likely pick up another book by Crane, and I will indeed wonder about a few of these stories, but most of them have slipped through my arms like the children in Catcher.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would like to extend my thanks to NetGalley and The Penguin Random House Marketing team for providing this arc copy. Highlighted as “A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity,” these short stories are unique and manage to get under the crevices of my brain and kintsugi the cracks of my heart: You will find yourself asking, how am i feeling fear, love, desperation, and reflection simultaneously. Reading is truly my favourite drug; I was already a big Mac Crane fan, and if you haven’t read I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, do it when you can!

Providing a review on this short story collection I would like to underline my awe at bringing the audience into this not-so-out-of-reach dystopia with certain stories that , unfortunately with the state of North America, is within grasp. Crane shined a light on insecurities and themes surrounding the pillars of identities and what life would/could/may look like in a queer “happy”, safe, and authentic future.

There were two stories out of this entire collection that didn't resonate or perhaps went over my head, but they were overshadowed by the many that I would encourage the author to write longer versions of ....for instance the literary gift of a full novel of Juniper with multiple women and meeting Bandit for the first time…if I were to suggest.

Quotes living in my brain rent free include, “I had to admit, it was a beautiful life. Joyful, and tender, and peaceful. But I’d never known what to do with peace.” and “...she could quit her job and make candles full time—my favorite was her queer smells line including sexy armpit, vodka soda lime, sweat cum, and iced coffee.” and this heavy hitter, “I think of all the things my mother hasn’t said in the past twenty years. Where did those words go? Did they dissolve into the sad breath of regret? Certainly, her words must exist somewhere. In someone else’s mouth. Doing someone else things. Tell them hi for me if you ever meet them. You’ll know them by the way they dig into your fat and call you home.”

[Chelsea Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like Perverts, by Mac Crane, as I am a firm believer that sexuality is an essential part of our humanity and that queer experiences of sexuality deserve sacred space to be told. However, I noticed it was difficult for me to finish this collection. I’m having a bit of a hard time identifying specifically why this was, but I wonder if this is partially because I was deeply troubled by how in all of these stories, I didn’t come across a single character that felt fulfilled in their relationship.

But perhaps this is party the point—not that those who are queer can’t have fulfilling relationships, but rather that due to the discrimination against and violence towards queer people that is embedded in our social systems, the trauma that so many queer people hold due to merely existing as themselves makes it difficult to have the space to experience wholehearted relationships. Because how could it not be challenging to be fully present when one has experienced significant ongoing trauma, and when one may again at any moment?

In this sense, I am so glad for the moments of joy as resistance that showed up throughout these stories even amidst pain, trauma, and difficulty, and I am left wondering if perhaps it is important and appropriate that I troubled by the amount of “dysfunction” and distress experienced by the characters. I am left with the uncomfortable question of who the “perverts” actually are—the characters in this book, or those of us who so often wield our hetero-normative privilege in ways that harm others?

(I want to be careful to acknowledge that my perspective as a heterosexual cis woman in a long monogamous relationship is of course very limited—so I appreciate Crane for helping me broaden my perspective by sharing these important stories. <3)

Many thanks to NetGalley & The Dial Press for this digital ARC. Publication date July 7th, 2026!

[Luca Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Megan Beauregard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press for the ARC!
This is one of my most anticipated titles for 2026. I’m a huge admirer of Mac Crane‘s novels “I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself” and “A Sharp Endless Need”. With “Perverts”, they deliver a fresh and provocative collection of short stories. If you’re queer, love wonderfully offbeat premises, and reading in quick bursts, this is for you!
There were a good handful of stories in this collection that I really loved and that spoke to me as a queer reader. But there were also an equal number of stories that promised great premises or concepts, but ultimately fell flat, didn't seem to make sense, or the writing didn't meet the quality in some of the other, better stories. Still, the stories I loved in this collection will be sticking with me for a long time.
"Smear the Queer" is a fantastic, thought-provoking and deliciously-written first story, setting a great tone for what is to come in the rest of "Perverts". Mac Crane, as in all of their books, does an excellent job of exploring queerness, otherness, belonging, perversion, and desire in all of it's forms. I'll continue to read all of Mac Crane's releases from here on out!

These were my 5 favorite stories in Perverts (with a quick introduction/summary):
Smear the Queer: An employee gets bashed by homophobes for a living to keep the streets safer for queers, before going home to meet their girlfriend’s parents.
Harmony: A therapist and client have an erotic affair while trying to work through the client’s lifetime of parental and body image issues.
The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses: By reenacting their earliest trauma every Saturday evening, a puppeteer explores what it means to heal, lest they fall back into old habits.
Personhood: A gig worker is paid to sleep next to, but not with, various husbands to improve their marriages. Then, one wife catches the worker’s attention.
Julie & The Butch: A delivery person drops packages off to a captivating butch in an office, becoming more infatuated with each visit.

[KC · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Lily Barna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you so much to NetGalley, Random House | The Dial Press, and Mac Crane for this advanced copy in exchange for my honest review! This anthology of short stories explores many feelings across a diverse range of settings, each character feeling very fully formed and intensely human.

The first story was definitely my favorite, a play on “The Most Dangerous Game” with an ending that may be predicted, but nonetheless packs a punch. The story has clear build up, stakes, emotions, and characters. I knew it was setting the stage for the journey to come.

My other favorites included “The Futurewives,” “The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses,” and “Alex Adams…”

I felt a couple of the stories ended more abruptly than I would’ve hoped for, stopping in moments where not only did I want to know more, but I felt I needed more to glean the through lines and deeper themes within the stories. Feelings permeate the page, but at times I struggled with the structure/length of the stories and what they may be trying to accomplish (maybe they are not trying to accomplish what I, the reader, think or want out of them! That’s so valid!).

If you love short stories that leave you thinking, queer focused stories across a myriad of life experiences and ages, and strong emotions, this book is for you! Thank you for letting me lend my thoughts.

[RavenReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an utterly bizarre and deeply compelling collection of stories. Perverts moves across a wide spectrum of LGBTQIA+ identities and experiences, offering perspectives that feel raw, confrontational, vulnerable, and at times deliberately unsettling. It’s not a comfortable read, nor is it meant to be.

Because this is a short story collection, the characters rarely have space to become fully fleshed-out in the traditional sense. And yet, I’m not convinced that’s a flaw. These stories feel more like emotional snapshots or jagged fragments, intimate glimpses into desire, shame, power, longing, and self-perception. The brevity adds to their intensity.

The tone throughout is strange and often ambiguous. Crane resists neat resolutions and instead allowing discomfort and contradiction to sit heavy on the page. At times I wasn’t sure exactly what I was meant to take away but I was always thinking, always processing.

This collection demands engagement. It challenges assumptions, pushes boundaries, and explores identity in ways that are messy and unapologetic. It’s bizarre, yes, but also thoughtful, sharp, and lingering. I walked away intrigued, unsettled, and very aware that these are stories meant not just to be read, but to be wrestled with.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Mac (Marisa) Crane, and Random House for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

[billie ☆]

Perverts is an accurate title. All of these are weird, bizarre, and perverted in their own way. full of mommy issues and repression. thought-provoking and weird. sexual and sentimental.

Mac’s writing style was dreamy and strange. i really liked it. i liked that this reminded me of other weird queer litfic, and i love how that’s becoming its own niche genre of literature.

i think my main issue with short stories is that they are too short (i know kinda the point). regardless, my favs were the failed messiah, siren island, cycle of pitiless impulses, and personhood. special thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the e-arc! without it i might’ve not heard of this story collection!

individual star ratings
smear the queer ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
harmony ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
the futurewives™ (no rating)
the failed messiah ⭐️⭐️⭐️.65 bizarre
siren island ⭐️⭐️⭐️
this isn’t what i signed up for (no rating)
emergency ⭐️⭐️
the perverts ⭐️⭐️.5 (?)
the cycle of pitiless impulses ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5 hmmm
your damning yelp review ⭐️⭐️⭐️ funny
personhood ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
julie & the butch (idk)
alex adams, the d slur who couldn’t grow up ⭐️⭐️.5
catcher ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
topping is not for the grief-stricken (damn)
i have no records of your ass ⭐️⭐️

[Meaghan Efford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am grateful that I was able to read an ARC of this collection in return for an honest review.

This collection starts off with visceral discomfort and a realization that things are, in fact, truly horrible. From there, each story taps into strangeness, some in a soft way, some through trauma, but all surprising. The stories capture a vivid picture of queerness, pain, survival, love, and longing. Each one contains a gut punch that is reflective of the world we live in, but wrapped in a unique fiction. Sometimes I find short stories frustrating because I want the story to continue, and I often wished I could read what happens next in these stories, but they are all so well contained that you don't need more to get the gut punch, to feel seen in your queerness or uncomfortable in your body.

I haven't yet read anything else by Crane but I now plan to because their writing style is so interesting. These stories give a variety of types of narrative and scenes that Crane can write, and the collection has definitely made me curious about their full length stories.

I recommend this for sure, and be prepared for discomfort and the strange and surprising!

[Newbietobyy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you Penguin Random House and Netgalley for the advanced readers copy!

-----------------------------

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

[Laurie Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Matheus Souza · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection of queers stories that tackle a variety of subjects; psychological, sexual and surreal.

I thought this book was a rollercoaster because there were some stories that simply live in my head even after I finished reading and others that were not for my taste, at all.

Like it or not, you cannot deny Mac Crane’s courage to tell these stories and to put it all in a book that still feels interconnected even though the subjects are different every chapter.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review and I’m very grateful to have been chosen to know this book before the launch in July, I will definitely be talking about it to friends of mine.

Here are my rankings for each story:

Smear the queer: 5
Harmony: 4
Future wives: 3,5
The failed messiah: 3,5
Siren Island: 1
This isn’t what I signed up for: 1
Emergency: 2
Perverts: 4,5
The cycle or pitiless impulses: 5 (favorite)
Your damning Yelp review: 3
Personhood: 4.75
Julie & the butch: 3
Alex adams: 3
Catcher: 2
Topping is not for the grief-stricken: 1
I have no records of your ass: 2

[Megan F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this arc through netgalley, and am grateful to them as well as the publisher and author for allowing me to read this before it was released. Now, listen- I love a collection of short stories! This took me quite some time to get through, despite the racy/quirky/chaotic otherness of most of these stories. Some were better than others, and I felt that the beginning stories started out much stronger than the middle/end. It gets three stars because it’s subversive, but it also gets three stars because it’s subversive, if that makes any sense at all. I love the “fringes” and “underbelly” of society, and I love hearing about perspectives so far away from my own. This is clearly a labor of love, but I’m not even sure what I would change about it to make it more engaging. In no sense of the word am I a prude, but it does seem like some of the stories could’ve been edited better or foregone altogether. Not a bad effort, but it just didn’t hit the “greatness” make for me.

[ct lydon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is heavy with trigger warnings, so please be mindful of your mental health prior to reading this collection of short stories.

Mac Crane does have a knack when it comes to discussing topics that may make people feel uneasy and vulnerable. In most short story collections, some are great and really hard hiting...while others fall short of that mark. A few that I enjoyed included "Personhood," "Your Daming Yelp Review," and my favorite, "Topping is Not for the Grief-Sticken." Other stories were enjoyable but at times I was defintiely confused and unsure what was happening.

I liked this book, but hey, I like really weird shit. My queer heart has sung.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC copy. This book is expected to be released on 7/7/26.

[Noelle De Martini · Rating 4 out of 5]

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!

[Brody Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5.00

Lovely collection of short stories from a queer POV, much preferred this to Exoskeletons. Most of the stories were engaging enough that I was a little miffed when they were over; the latter half was all bangers. Crane is gifted with the ability to write characters that you want to fuck, marry, and kill at once. The titular story might be my favorite, perfect for fans of Eyes Wide Shut and Clue 👀

The predictive text experiment didn't really resonate with me, I think it's a bad environment for that kind of thing right now, but I appreciate a swing. Also, a lot of stories have a bit of a "Nonbinary Names Be Like 'Sock'" problem, Bandit, Comet, Jupiter, etc. I confess Comet is sort of growing on me, though.

If you were really into Exoskeletons, Catcher has a similar vibe.

[ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is hovering somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars for me. There were a couple stories here that really stood out to me such as ”Smear the Queer”, ”Personhood”, and ”I Have No Records of Your Ass”, however overall, I think this collection just fell a bit flat for me. A lot of the stories seemed to feel either really rushed or too short, as if we were missing half of the story itself. I think there are some phenomenal ideas and absurd premises in here that I really really enjoy, but I don’t know if the execution was entirely there for me overall. I still enjoyed this collection, however it just wasn’t my absolute favourite.
Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Ruth Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short stories was a mixed bag for me. Some I enjoyed and thought were successful like 'Smear the Queer,' 'Harmony,' and 'Emergency.'

Others I did not connect with as much, and it took me a bit to figure out why. I think the answer is that on the last page, many of them tried to do too much--they stopped being anchored in the moment and looked toward a future too vast for the story or an epiphany that seemed unearned. I think I like my short stories a little more grounded and to make these inferences myself.

I really enjoy and respect Mac Crane as a queer writer as a fellow queer person, and will continue to pick up what they write. The highs were high in this collection, just not consistent.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC!

[Novels and Nummies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved A Sharp Endless Need, and was excited to read this collection of short stories.

They were all, for the most part, well written and entertaining. The first one “Smear the Queer” was such an outstanding way to start and set the bar pretty high and I loved the formatting of The Perverts. Unfortunately, some of the other stories didn’t blow me away. While technically good, they didn’t explore new thoughts and ideas which is fine, but the presentation was not especially unique and instead came across juvenile.

This book had both hits and misses, but overall I’d recommend.

[Jordan Stash · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Helen Wu ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love Perverts, but this ended up feeling very mood dependent for me. The ideas are bold, queer, and intentionally unsettling, and a few stories genuinely stayed with me. Still, the collection felt uneven. Many pieces were so short they barely had time to land, and I often felt more intrigued by the concepts than emotionally connected to the characters. At times it felt like style was doing more work than substance. I can see this being a hit for the right reader in the right headspace. For me, it felt less like a miss and more like a case of not quite being in the mood it requires.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.