DANCING ON THE MOON by Jameson...

DANCING ON THE MOON by Jameson Currier (Penguin: $9.95; 188 pp.). Currier’s short stories focus on gay men coping with their own illness and with the deaths of their friends, relatives and lovers, as the AIDS pandemic inexorably destroys everyone it touches. The better stories are genuinely moving: The narrator of “Ghosts,” unhappily concludes, “Often I think it is not so much death that now maddens me, but the extinction of those I know who are too young to die; death, as it were, from an uncontrollable war.” But in the weaker entries, the subject matter touches the reader, rather than Currier’s sometimes uncertain prose.