Review: Chance Encounters, ed. M. Rode

I need to remember to cross-post these from my GoodReads account!

Chance Encounters by M. Rode (Editor)
ebook, 211 pages
Published July 2004 by Torquere Press

I still remember reading this anthology back in 2006 -- 26 short stories by many familiar Torquere authors, all about chance meetings that range from sweet to heartbreaking, across different historical periods. One of the things I loved about this was the fact that the stories were a mix of m/m and f/f.

Some favorites were:

Virtuoso By Jodi Payne: A f/f story about turned tables and defied expectations at a night club, definitely hot.

Searching For A Hero By Lorne Rodman: A m/m story about an author on vacation who runs into an old fling and realizes how much of an impact their encounter 20 years ago had on his work. Told in the present with hot little flashbacks to the past.

West Side By Jordan Price: A m/m story about a chance encounter at the laundromat that turned into something more than either party was expecting. I loved the acknowledgement of cultural differences in this one.

Mustang By Tulsa Brown: A m/m story about an author who meets book collector, and makes a surprising connection.

Lime By Kathleen Dale: A f/f story where a woman decides to visit a psychic artist on a lark and gets a far more intimate reading than she expected. No actual hooking up in this one, but the language and the reading from the psychic is beautiful.

Birds of a Feather By Vincent Diamond: I have to admit, this one traumatized me a little because a bird is injured in it, but the sex was hot (m/m) and more of an emotional connection than the majority of the stories.

A Day in New York By Gabrielle Chevalier: The last story in the anthology, and the one that stuck with me the longest -- haunting, I suppose. A m/m story set during WWII, and just so evocative of the time period. A soldier the last day before shipping off to war, and his life when he gets back, with a melancholy and hope interwoven throughout the day. I generally avoid war stories, but I loved the ending, and this was the perfect choice to cap off the anthology.