★★☆☆☆ – Couldn’t quite abide.

It’s a bold decision to frontload your anthology with psychosexual discomfort – for your framing narrative to heavily feature a group of young men being sexually exploited. That’s a plot device I, to be honest, am not particularly comfortable with. Had it been a short story positioned on the same level as the others, this would not have been quite such a problem – but being the framing narrative, it’s interwoven between the other stories, and thus makes its presence known again and again, meaning a part of me dreaded the interludes this story comprises. That and the fact that it’s a bit vague and fuzzy on the details – I certainly have a grasp on the emotional arc of the story, but the exact plot is a bit up in the air.

Still, “Playing for Time” contains some beautifully wondrous (and unsettling) imagery, and ties into one (only one, but nevertheless one) of the short stories to great effect (see my review of “Red Rover Red Rover”). The anthology would be poorer for a lack of it. It does elevate the book to “more” than a collection of short stories.