Love is Strange, edited by Richard Glyn Jones (Indigo, £7.99 in UK)

Weird, more like, in this collection of stories which explore the wilder side of human sexuality, whether it be in the form of a female contortionist looking for true love, a biting - yup, biting - machine, copulating with a corpse or an imagined affair with Raymond Chandler. It must have seemed like a good idea when Richard Glyn Jones proposed it to the publisher ("using fiction to probe areas unreachable by other means", etc, etc) but it all seems rather soulless on the page, despite the presence of some heavy hitters in the contributors list: Georges Bataille, Angela Carter, Milan Kundera, Steven Berkoff.