American Readers Series

She admits she is pleased when the new placard is raised, "Madame Tussaud's House of Wax." She stands in the crowd with Francois at her side. He leans close enough to touch her ear with the fringe of his mustache and whispers, "What part of the museum would the famous Madame Tussaud like to survey on her inaugural visit?" "The Chamber of Horrors, I think," she says softly. "Really, my dear? All that grim fantasy and blood?" "There is no fantasy about it, Francois. It is an embryo, a showing of what is to come." Blending historical fiction with fantasy and the macabre, Adam McOmber's debut short story collection brings the influence of Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, and Edgar Allan Poe to the next generation. In "The Automatic Garden," a solitary architect from the court at Versailles builds a water-powered pleasure garden; in "There Are No Bodies Such as This," we read a haunted and romantic fiction about the creation of Madame Tussaud's wax museum; in "Fall, Orpheum," a small town movie palace becomes the temple for an entire town's devotion and sacrifice.
McOmber seamlessly blends history, artifice, and desire to create a dream of the past that intertwines with our own notions of modern life. Adam McOmber's stories appear in Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Third Coast, The Greensboro Review, Arts & Letters, and Quarterly West. He is assistant director of creative nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago and associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.

My House Gathers Desires

by Adam McOmber

Published 21 August 2017

Adam McOmber's lush, hallucinatory stories are both familiar and wholly original. Drawn from the historical record, Biblical lore, fairy tales, science fiction, and nightmares, these offbeat and fantastical works explore gender and sexuality in their darkest and most beautiful manifestations. In the tradition of Angela Carter or Kelly Link, My House Gathers Desires is covertly funny and haunting, seeking fresh ways to consider sexual identity and its relation to history.

In "Sodom and Gomorrah," readers encounter a subversive, ecstatic new version of the Old Testament story. In "The Re'em," a medieval monk's search for a mythic beast conjures forbidden desire. And in "Notes on Inversion," the German psychiatrist Kraft-Ebbing receives a surreal retort to his clinical descriptions of same-sex desire.

From "Sodom and Gomorrah":

The strangers then are no longer like two men at all. They have undressed themselves, giving up the pretense of skin and becoming a denser part of the air. We are hungry for them. Ours is a sacred desire that was buried too long in our chests, like some city beneath the sand.

Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest (Touchstone, 2012) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA, 2011), from which he had stories nominated for two 2012 Pushcart Prizes. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Fairy Tale Review. He served as the managing and associate editor of Hotel America at Columbia College Chicago from 2007-2015. He now lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches at Loyola Marymount University.