First published in 1993, Lovedeath explores the intertwined themes of love and death in five stories—four novellas and a short novel—from a variety of perspectives.

The volume opens with “Entropy’s Bed at Midnight,” a portrait of parental love and anxiety that broadens to become a meditation on the random, frequently absurd hazards of ordinary life. “Dying in Bangkok” is a graphic, often deeply unsettling story of vengeance and erotic vampirism set against the flesh markets of Bangkok during the height of the AIDS crisis. “Sleeping with Teeth Women” is a tale of the Lakota Sioux and of a young brave—Hoka Ushte—who embarks on a vision quest that will alter both his own life and the lives of his people. “Flashback” examines the impact of the eponymous drug that allows its users to recapture—and relive—specific moments from the past. Finally, “The Great Lover” uses the wartime journals of a fictional British poet—James Edwin Rooke—as the basis for a hallucinatory recreation of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The result is a narrative filled with horror, poetry, and images of the First World War.