Ninth in the series of eclectic collections of gay male short stories by habu, the fifteen stories of Grab Bag 9 offer up a wide-ranging cornucopia of lush gay fiction from the romantic to the rough. The stories all were written in the second half of 2015 and are run in the order in which they were dropped by habu's Muse, most often in the morning in that half-awake period as he was contemplating facing a new day.
The stories in this collection range from the historical to the contemporary and from the introspective (e.g., "What Friends Do" and "The Oldest Ball 'Kid'") to the tongue in cheek ("I'm So Sexy"). In setting they range from the greater world (e.g., "Widows of the Prince" and "Not in Kenya") to specific locales in the United States, where the setting is almost a major character of the piece (e.g., "Halfway" and "Summer's End at Spirit Lake"). They include pieces written for erotica contests ("Naked, Not Nude," "Ever Rest at Evernew," and "Summer's End at Spirit Lake") and short stories written on request for readers ("Thirty-year Anniversary" and "Hanging Off the Appalachian Trail"). And, as always, there is the stray police detective or spy story ("Inevitable Case").