Husbands, wives, and lovers, desperadoes,  mistresses, adulterers, transsexuals, prostitutes and  paedophiles: these are some of the people who populate Mandy Sayer’s 15 Kinds of Desire. Despite such a roll-call of confronting players, Sayer’s short story collection is not so much an itemisation of sexual peccadilloes but an exploration into various gradations of love, sex and obsession.

Many of the stories are set in and around Sydney’s Kings Cross, a locale favoured by Sayer for playing out fractured or inverted fairy tales. Eleven-year-old Scarlet, for instance, seems like the modern-day Little Red Riding Hood, picking her way down a gauntlet of drunks, pimps, bums, perverts and assorted other wolves. Instead of delivering a basket of goodies to her transvestite grandfather, she carries close to her chest a packet of smack.