I reviewed this for Erotica Revealed.

Richard Labonté opens up Wild Boys with an admission: he’s not a wild boy. In fact, he’s pretty much the anti-wild boy. Besides giving me a good chuckle – I could certainly relate to Labonté’s position here – it framed the collection nicely. I went in to the collection expecting these wild boys to be intermingling with the nice guys who just can’t help but find the bad boys alluring.

With a few exceptions, that’s the general theme of the anthology – men finding themselves with young studs who are definitely not the “bring them home to the parents” types. Back alleys maybe, and definitely to a knife fight, but not home to the parents.

You can always count on Labonté to collect a good range of story types, even within a theme. I’ve been lucky enough to work with him twice, and so when I glanced through the table of contents, I found a nice mix of masters of the erotic genre, a few new names, and a few names I’m starting to see pop up quite a bit in various anthologies. This is – as usual – a strong collection that holds to the theme but mixes it up in the specifics quite a bit.

The type of story I was expecting most from the collection was Michael Bracken’s “The Hitter and the Stall.” Here we’ve got a cute young blond who picks the pocket of the wrong guy – someone better at that job than he is. Here there’s a kind of mentoring involved, but the younger punk’s attitude and nonchalance was exactly what was conjured for me with the title, cover, and description of Wild Boys . That the two men end up sharing more than pickpocketing skills is a given, and the narrator’s awareness that this boy could be trouble, even as he’s tumbling the fellow into bed, rang true.

Dale Chase turns back the clock in “The Outlaw Paulie Creed.” This is one of Chase’s trademark westerns, involving a sheriff, who should – and does – know better than to mess with the young man locked up in his cell, but gives into temptation and has to live through the fallout. The sex scorches, but taking a wanted man is sure to leave the sheriff burned. Chase always manages to give an amazing flavour to historically set pieces, and “The Outlaw Paulie Creed” is no exception. I always know I’m in for a treat, and including this piece in the collection gave it real variety. Like I said, Richard Labonté knows what he’s doing.

Jeff Mann’s “Satyr” also twists the theme just a notch sideways with a young man that the narrator has admired from afar for a while now finally making his way into his car via hitchhiking. Mann’s story had the main character with the most awareness, I’d say – he knows this kid is trouble, and this kid is availing his body to the man for cash, but there’s more going on than appears at the surface, and the untangling of the sweaty mess – and of course the knotting up of the sweaty boy – is all a part of Mann’s usual skillful narrative.

These three stories give you an idea of the variance going on in the tales, but there’s more to explore in Wild Boys still. Dominic Santi’s “Red Right” gives the reader a fisting story, with a top who wants to see his new boy explore his dom side. Joe Marohl’s “Mr. Lee’s Men” has a pair of boys fighting at its core while the eponymous Mr. Lee watches. “The Devil Tattoo” by Jonathan Asche deftly explores the uncle-and-his-niece’s-boyfriend scene it creates with a sly dark wink or two. And in the rest of the tales, there’s some boot worship, some punishment, and of course a wild boy for every tale.

There’s likely something here for everyone who has even that brief reaction of attraction to the bad boy. The collection’s varied tales are exactly that – varied – without losing the theme, and the end result is what I’d expected in the first place from Richard Labonté: a solid anthology.