Perverts by Mac Crane Is the Queer Book We’ve Been Too Polite to Ask For

Quick Take

Perverts is seventeen short stories about desire, shame, kink, queerness, and the gap between who we are and who we’re performing. It is funny and bleak and formally inventive, and it will make you uncomfortable in exactly the right ways. This is the book that makes the taboo not just speakable but necessary.

About the Author

Mac (Marisa) Crane is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself and A Sharp Endless Need, two of the most emotionally precise queer novels published in recent years. They live in San Diego and write fiction that sits at the intersection of the deeply personal and the structurally strange. Perverts is their debut short story collection.

What Is Perverts About?

The seventeen stories in this collection are not unified by genre or setting or character. What connects them is a preoccupation: the ways desire gets performed, commodified, punished, and hidden. There is an employee at a hunting ground where people pay to act out hate crimes, preparing to meet their girlfriend’s parents. Another is a pregnant internet sex worker who blackmails her clients into attending a disastrous party. One of our favourites is a theme park where men pay to watch women dressed as sirens, and a boat attendant who falls in love with the star. The scenarios are wild but the emotional logic is airtight.

Crane’s central argument, embedded in every story, is the one on the book’s cover: that the so-called pervert, by existing at the margins of what society defines as normal, may be the one who sees the world most clearly.

Making the Taboo Talkable

The word pervert has always done a specific kind of work. It names something as outside the acceptable, as wrong by definition, as best kept unspoken. Crane takes that word back and turns it into a lens. By naming the collection what they did, they force the question the book keeps asking: who decides what’s perverse? And who benefits from that decision?

What makes Perverts extraordinary is that it doesn’t answer that question with a thesis. It answers it with specificity. Each story takes one scenario that polite discourse would usually hurry past and stays in the room with it. The therapist affair. The kink economy. The commodification of queer pain as entertainment. Crane doesn’t sensationalize any of it. They sit with their characters long enough to make them legible and, more often than not, recognizable. By the end of each story, the reader has done something quietly radical: talked about it.

Where We Place Ourselves in Society

The Velvet Rage, Alan Downs’s 2005 landmark, gave gay men a language for the internalized shame that comes from growing up in a world that communicates, from the beginning, that your desire is wrong. It named something that had been living nameless in a generation of queer people and gave them the framework to start dismantling it.

Perverts feels like the next progression of that conversation, expanded and updated for a generation that has more language but is still negotiating the same core problem: the way society’s categories of acceptable and unacceptable desire don’t just describe us from the outside but get inside us and do damage from within. Where The Velvet Rage was a framework, Perverts is the fiction. Crane shows rather than tells, and what they show is that the shame is structural. It’s not a personal failure. It’s a system, and the system is what’s perverse.

The stories keep returning to the marketplace as their organizing metaphor. Desire is always, in this collection, also an economy. Some people pay to act out violence. Other people sell access to their bodies and their pain. Most people commodify their relationships for visibility and approval. Crane is writing about rainbow capitalism as much as they are writing about kink, and the two are, in their telling, the same conversation. What we’re allowed to want has always been policed by what someone else can profit from.

What Crane Does That No One Else Is Doing

The comparisons to George Saunders are apt. Like Saunders, Crane writes speculative scenarios that are outrageous on the surface and quietly devastating underneath, with a satirical eye on labor and capitalism and the absurdity of the systems we build to contain human need. But where Saunders is observational, Crane is inside the body. Their fiction is about what desire actually feels like when it’s been shaped by shame, and that specificity is what separates Perverts from anything adjacent to it.

The collection is also, against all odds, funny. Not funny in a way that softens the edges, but funny in the way the best queer fiction is funny: as a survival mechanism, as a refusal, as proof that the people the world calls perverse have always known something the world doesn’t.

Final Verdict

Perverts is the kind of collection you read in fragments and think about whole. It will not let you stay comfortable, and it doesn’t want to. It wants you to sit with the things you’ve been trained to look away from and ask yourself who taught you to look away, and why. That is a harder thing to do than it sounds, and Mac Crane does it with precision and wit and no apology whatsoever.

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A copy of Perverts was provided in advance by Penguin Random House via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.