After penning more than 20 novels, award-winning author Karin Kallmaker has once again given the reader a fresh look at romance. 18th & Castro is a witty and sexy collection of short stories with a unique, creative, and fun approach.

18th & Castro is a compilation of stories that occur in one apartment building in San Francisco’s Castro District on the biggest night of the year, Halloween. They include accounts of couples, singles, women looking for love and those just wanting a one night stand. The individual vignettes embrace threesomes, strangers, friends and lovers. Some are erotic and steamy. Others are loving, sweet and full of yearning. But all of the tales are short, concise and to the point.

Kallmaker has capitalized on her trademark in this book, her versatility as a storyteller and her inclusiveness of her varied audience.  While every story is a little different, some overlap with the same apartment dwellers, lending continuity to the collection so it acts like a novel more than an anthology. Kallmaker writes each to fit the individual situations. There is not one size fits all for her. Her characters, their setting and the erotica all match the story told. This author knows the language of love and sex and is not stuck on one style when sharing with her readers.

Kallmaker’s strength as an enduring well-liked author has been her understanding that we, the reader, want and need fantasy.  She delivers on this every time whether in a short story, anthology or novel. Within this fantasy, she has learned to reach out to the reader with a bit of realism mixed in that does not overwhelm us. Her story “Tick, Tock” does that well in 18th & Castro. It is a pause in the middle of the book that is sobering and heartfelt, but it fits perfectly with the overall theme and advances the book naturally.