The boy sleeps and dreams and wakes and feels the same. Different, but the same. The core of his body burns bright, hazy but strong. He's never felt so strong as he does now, on the verge of something he's not sure about, and terribly excited.
-from "The Boy Who Stopped"

In these raw, uncompromising stories, author George K. Ilsley explores the thin line between love and hate, and the outer parameters of desire that can both heal and destroy. Random Acts of Hatred infiltrates the dark confines of decidedly queer sensibilities, in which young men are undone by self-loathing and the powers-that-be, begging the question: What happens when people know they are hated?

And yet in between the primal fantasies and bitter ironies are images of humour and light: the wayward families, the unspoken gestures, and the faces in the mirror--of posers and dreamers, saints and demons. Both gay and straight, they suggest a new definition of masculine power as a field with two poles, dissonant and equal at the same time.

Evocative of Dennis Cooper and David Wojnarowicz, Random Acts of Hatred collects the fragments of a disintegrated generation, numbed yet empowered by their varied, inexplicable desires.