Brian Allan Skinner

Cliché-verre is a technique of etching and painting directly on photographic negatives. The term means "glass negative" in French and is as old as photography itself, dating to the 1840s and earlier. The first successful photographic process involved coating glass plates with light-sensitive chemicals from which reversed (positive) prints could be made. Artists experimented with drawing, etching, and combining images directly on the glass, resulting...

Lucifer, to escape the cold of a northern New Mexico winter, steps into an old adobe church, intruding on a baptism. By insinuating himself into the boys and sponsors lives, Dr. Luke Ferrer becomes Adms tutor, though it is unclear whose education is being undertaken. The Prince of Darkness, intent on instructing a new race of human beings loyal to him, is confounded to learn that his protg does not like girls in that way. Adm likes boys, especially...

Weird Santa & other Xmas Tales is magic realism with a dash of erotic spiciness. The ten independent stories in this collection range from A Doggies Tale, a boy-and-his-dog story appropriate for children, to Never Too Old, Never Too Late in which an old babushka recounts her Christmases in the Old Country. After receiving her magic gingerbread cookies, Anas young American friends, two couples, discover the depth of their passion for each other on...

Humor is an essential element of each story. The eleven linked tales move forward and backward in time in the manner of flashbacks and foreshadowing in a novel, though the plots are always character-driven. It is their realizations, insights, and inner changes that move the collection along. While the characters retain their essences from story to story, the details of their lives, from their occupations to their sexual proclivities, change with each...