Review of Short Stories by E.B. Jones and Kathryn O’Halloran

For me, personally, one of the great rewards of running a serious review site for erotica is the opportunity to “discover” and introduce talented new writers to the wider community. I’m proud to have given early notice to such exceptional voices as Elizabeta Brooke, Yasmine Jones, and V. Moore. And now, it seems, I can add yet another name to this distinguished list; E.B. Jones. Her short stories, The Composition Book and  24 Frames per Second show enormous promise, and are well worth the curious reader’s time.

Kathryn O’Halloran may be better known to readers, especially in her native Australia, but for those who have yet to find any of this gaudily gifted writer’s jewel-like erotic short stories, consider the reviews below an emphatic wake-up call. O’Halloran’s collection, appropriately enough entitled Desire, along with her superbly executed short story, Photos, are marvels of the genre.  

Enjoy! TAS

 

E.B. Jones: The Composition Book and 24 Frames per Second

“Wise” is not a term one often associates with erotic fiction. The word itself has become something of a crutch in highbrow blurb writing (“wonderful, witty and wise . . .” “as wise as it is nebulous”); a platitude of first resort for easily dazzled interns and bubble-headed network-radio-affiliate reviewers with delusions of far-reaching influence.  I suspect Marilynne “Housekeeping” Robinson could make a handsome side income by demanding an escalator clause in her next contract; say, an extra thousand bucks or two for every time some calf-eyed sycophant uses “the w word” to fête yet another of those tediously plotless, interminably rambling, puritanically pretentious, potentially-Pulitzer-Prize-winning  exercises in literary water torture.  

Wisdom where sex is concerned may well have its place, but not, we generally think, in stories designed to pique prurient interest, or entertain by way of erotic evocation. The prospect seems deadly dull—a mood-killer if there ever was one. And yet, if wisdom is that critical mass of insight gained through acute observation, no word is more appropriately applied to the finest works of erotica, a genre, which, at its literate best, delves the human condition—the secrets of our inner lives—with an astute intimacy that most “respectable” literary authors could only envy.  Robinson, who seems to have assumed the mantle of “professional wise woman” of late, might well learn a thing or two about the honest portrayal of common everyday life, human passion, and elegant sentence structure from E.B. Jones, a promising new author of erotic literary fiction.

 “Night is when I allow myself to become someone else . . .” the narrator of Jones’ The Composition Book tells us:

My dreams take me to dark places. I never know where I’ll end up when I close my eyes. I have dreams so lucid that I feel compelled to write them down in a secret journal. Who else vividly remembers their dreams? Mine haunt me during the day. I sometimes ask myself if maybe I’m actually living outside my own body during these nighttime intervals. I feel guilt over the fantasies that I have. I know my husband is sleeping upstairs, exhausted from hauling plywood and pounding nails with his crew. And yet my thoughts sometimes betray him in a way that I could never share. A subtle wedge between us. He would understand that. With each excursion of my mind I drive it deeper.

Note the short, graceful, telegraphic sentences, each on its own a mere thread. And yet, skillfully woven together, these small segments collectively form a supple matrix of expression, drawing us inexorably into the author’s imagination, practically unawares. The structure is deceptively simple, and yet, the needs of story are supplied; character, conflict (albeit internal here); some obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of a desire. It all works—and quite beautifully at that.

Where The Composition Book is about escape from workaday life through unbidden sexual fantasy; 24 Frames per Second  drops us into an arid landscape of grueling realism. The story is at once wistful, deeply introspective, and grittily nostalgic. The narrator recalls a dusty road trip through the American southwest, an unconsummated relationship, and a present life, depressingly incomplete in retrospect. The story has a decidedly  Hemmingway-esque feel to it; the language is spare but abundantly evocative, its artful economy reminding us that in literature as well as in life, the essence of cool lies in few words, expressing much while saying little.

Exquisitely written, acutely observed, thoughtful, and, yes, wise; “great things” don’t always have to be “big things”, as these two, lovely little stories so aptly prove. With them, E.B. Jones establishes herself as one of the brightest newcomers to the indie literotica scene, and gives us hope for still more great things to come.

 

Kathryn O’Halloran: Desire  (short story collection) and Photos: An Erotic Short Story

The first impression one gets on entry into the erotic word-scape of Kathryn O’Halloran’s Desire, is of the sheer rhythmic vibrancy of her prose, the frenetic onomatopoeic energy informing structure even as it drives language. We feel it in the title story, as we spy on strangers making love in time to the incessant motion of a train; the herky-jerky momentum of acceleration and sex; the braking wheels squealing as lovers stifle their cries, metal against metal, a crackling burst of ozone, and the electric sparks of orgasm. The narrator’s memories of the recent past are visited, briefly, like the stops along the railroad line. In another tale, O’Halloran employs the manic motion of a rollercoaster at an amusement park to underscore the emotional struggles of her characters; translating the clack and whine of flanged wheels and groaning track into the roaring, full-throated cadences of erotic release.

Yet, there’s more than mere quasi-poetic gimmickry to this writing. Reading through the five wonderful short stories in this collection reveals a multi-faceted talent; from the structural tour de force of the title story, to the delicate, jewel-like impressionism of I Always Cry in the Rain:

From the bar he can watch her on the balcony. She perched against a table, the lights of the city rooftops behind her. She dresses like a wayward fifties bridesmaid—in red with a froth of petticoats swirling around her legs, a crimson rose punctuating her hair.

Outside the heat is like syrup, thick and heavy. He’ll stay indoors.

Inside is white and clean and crisp. Inside, everything floats on the surface.

He tries to ignore her, but she buzzes like an exotic insect at the edge of his vision. She is never totally still. He doesn’t need to be close to her to know: her teeth are stained with red wine, her fingernails tap to a tuneless song in her head; and she makes proclamations, swathing and caustic, and when she’s challenged her eyes gleam like a chastised child’s.  She turns through people.

Marvelous! Desire is not to be missed.

 

 

Somewhat lighter fare, Photos: An Erotic Short Story is a bit of a romp, set in a contemporary office. A young cubicle drone is delighted to find a strange trail of photographic “bread crumbs”, pieces of an intriguingly sexy puzzle.

It was a picture of a foot. Justin had never thought about feet before. They were just there at the end of your legs. This foot, though—the voluptuous arch cried out for a tongue around its fleshy curve, for a tongue working its way to that perfect cleavage between the big toe and its neighbor, slipping into that forbidden slit.

Again, O’Halloran’s instinctive command of rhythm shines through in a brilliantly fecund outpouring of words:

Suddenly her kisses become more urgent. She presses into him, fucking his mouth with her tongue. The fuzz of her woolen jumper sweeps against his skin, making his hair stand on edge. She overwhelms him, citrus-scented, whispering, taunting, velvet fingered, tickling, stroking, unbuttoning, peeling him bare, tingling, tongue flicking, warm bodied, cold handed, mint breathed, hard lipped, hot mouthed, musky, caressing, teasing, crushing, red-hot-flashes woman.

Here is writing that feels like a force of nature. O’Halloran is one of the best young erotic writers to come along in quite some time. She is a writer to watch, and, most certainly, a writer to read! 

Review of Donna George Storey's "Amorous Woman"

Reading Donna George Storey’s Amorous Woman is sheer unalloyed delight.  Intelligent, and yet highly accessible, the style is relaxed but never flip, the language fluent and flowing. Taking the form of an erotic memoir cum novel of education, part travelogue, part romance, this is a thoughtful reflection on the subtle beauty and sublime intricacy of one of the most fascinating cultures on earth.

“Japan was a perfect place for a cowardly Western rebel,” Storey’s narrator, Lydia, tells us, “You could break a dozen rules of etiquette in a day and get that bad-boy frisson without anyone really giving a damn, because the Japanese were expecting you to get it wrong anyway.” 

And Storey knows what she’s writing about, having spent some years living and working in Japan.  Now, she has given her readers a decidedly magnificent piece of fiction in which the authenticity of experience shines through, lifting Amorous Woman far above so many of those blandly “colorful” international romance stories with their cookie-cutter characters going through the same universal motions against some sketchily researched, vaguely imagined “exotic” background.

And so I told him how living in Japan will give him a leisure no mere tourist has to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. In autumn he’d see the persimmons glowing like huge, orange jewels on their bare branches, then winter’s dusting of snow on blue tile roofs. He’d learn why the old erotic pictures are called ‘spring prints’—because in that season the air is as soft as a lover’s whisper—and he’d sigh at the perfect coolness of iced barley tea slipping down his throat on a wilting summer afternoon. As the years passed, he would become part of it. The neighbors would stop staring and start to nod a greeting, and one day the tiny old lady in the gray kimono at the snack stand would wrap up his regular order of red-beaned-rice-balls before a word was spoken, and she’d flash him that first gold-toothed smile, and he’d be happy all day. It’s like someone’s given you a whole other life, I told him, an extra life to live for a while.

In this case, blonde, blue-eyed gaijin, Lydia is the exotic element of the story. Not exactly an innocent abroad, and certainly not an innocent broad; intellectually curious, sexually voracious, always craving new experience, she comes to Japan as an instructor of English conversation, her clientele mostly business and professional men. There is a certain irony in being employed to teach the niceties of Western etiquette in a society so richly—some might say severely—steeped in ritual; layer upon layer of prescribed complexity, which few outsiders ever manage to penetrate. And, especially where sex is concerned, the American faces a bewildering set of seemingly contradictory taboos and proscriptions that make the simple black-and-white dualism of the West seem positively laid-back.  Through Lydia, we explore this “floating world”, a kind of erotic parallel universe, “the neon-lit world of dreams and desire”.  

If I have any complaints, it may be that Amorous Woman is somewhat over-long. There is, perhaps, too much time spent on Lydia’s erotic coming-of-age at home in the States, which is not wholly essential as backstory. This is a common pitfall of memoir form, in which there is often a nagging personal temptation to include “everything”.  But for all that is intriguing and inspired here, everything is not equally interesting, and the pacing might well have benefitted from a few strategic cuts. Still, this is in no way to denigrate what is in its totality a superb literary-erotic achievement.  

Originally published in 2007, and only recently released in e-book form, Amorous Woman is enthusiastically recommended in either format.  

 

 

 

 

 

Things to come

Those who check into this site from time to time may have noticed that things have been rather slow of late. This is due in no small part to my ongoing battle with clinical depression. I have been dealing with Bi-Polar II and PTSD for many years now, and sometimes the struggle can be very wearisome. In endeavoring to manage these conditions without the aid of antidepressants (which turn me into a complete zombie incapable of doing ANYTHING), I have to accept that sometimes there will be rather deep valleys to traverse. Thus it has been through most of March. But, as spring draws on, I hope to find my way back to a more conducive place, a temperate plateau somewhere between dark depression and blazing mania. Once there, those authors to whom I've promised reviews will have their write-ups. Please be patient.

Here are the books I will be reviewing over the next several months, Inclusion on this list already means I'm recommending the title; the reviews will offer greater detail and insight as to why.

Donna George Storey: Amorous Woman

Ashley Lister: How to Write Erotic Fiction and Sex Scenes

E.B. Jones, short stories: The Composition Book and Twenty-Four Frames per Second

Kathryn O’Halloran: Desire (short story collection)

Sam Rosenthal: Rye

I.J. Miller: Sex and Love (short story collection)

P.M. White: Volksie

Jeremy Edwards: The Pleasure Dial

Also, please note that updates to The Erotic Writer's Thesaurus continue to appear on this site once or twice a month. This is a fun project with no set quotas or deadline for completion, though I would like to have an e-book version with full internal navigation ready for publication sometime soon. Suggestions for new emtries and additional synonyms are always welcome. And, of course, I would love to hear from people about their user experiences with the page.

cheers

TAS

Review of James Wood's "Paula’s Place"

Paula’s Place by James Wood

Part 1. Seduction

Part 2. Surrender

Part 3. Submission

Readers who enjoyed the storyline in E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey even as they held their noses at the writing itself, may now take a welcome breath of fresh air. With this new series, James Wood gives us an engagingly sexy BDSM romance framed in beautiful, elegant prose. No roaring inner goddesses here; no titans of industry working through their childhood traumas; no dilettante self-indulgence. Far from the synthetic grandiosity and hyper-inflated operatic emotionalism of Fifty Shades and its lemming-stampede of imitators, Wood’s settings and characters are pleasingly ordinary, down-to-earth and always believable.  Though the when and where of the narrative are kept intentionally vague, as if locked in a kind of Pleasantville time warp, this only adds to the sense of intimacy.  

The story is divided into three more-or-less equal parts; Seduction, Surrender, and Submission, each chapter tantalizingly brief on its own, comprising altogether little more than a very short novel.  (The three installments were published one by one over the course of several months, with Submission appearing in February of 2013. Each part is now available separately in e-book format, or can be found together in a single omnibus paperback edition.)

In Seduction, Wood invites us to share in his heroine’s journey of sensual discovery. Still hiding in her shell after the dissolution of a long and unfulfilling relationship, Paula moves back to her hometown to live with the aunt who raised her. We look in on the young woman’s unbidden fantasies, born of frustration and loneliness. We watch her growing fascination with a handsome neighbor, which soon takes on an innocently obsessive quality, manifested in voyeurism and, ultimately contact, capture and seduction.

Surrender ushers readers into an intoxicating, terrifying, sublime world of uncharted erotic intrigue, where lovers abandon themselves to the sheer joy of carnal novelty, eager to learn each other's secrets. The title itself takes on deeper meaning as Paula begins to discover her place in this brave new world; her deepening relationship with the handsome writer, Max Broekner, her initiation into his very genteel practice of ethical bondage and submission, a stylized theater of manners more apropos the Edwardian era than the early years of the 21st century. (Sufficiently intrigued readers may want to seek out Wood's The Doctrine of Venus, a sort of primer to the author's unique vision of the BSDM lifestyle.)

 

Indeed, Wood's language and style evoke earlier, more elegant times, though he is intentionally cagey about the exact when and where of this story. It seems to occupy a sort of alternate reality; a falsely remembered realm of nostalgia in which things exist as the author would wish, not as our own mundane existence might dictate. Descriptive passages are infused with a glowing appreciation of sensuous antique luxury, reveling in opulence and tactile wonder, when polished oak takes on its own strange erogenous power, the texture of fine Dresden china the stuff of fetish, and the aroma of old books becomes an aphrodisiac in and of itself.

 

Submission delivers on the promise of the earlier chapters with a fittingly steamy climatic scene. The pacing throughout the series is subtle but effective, like the long line in a classical symphony, building cumulative momentum through the transition from idea to flesh, fantasy to reality; voyeurism to participation, all with a consistent well-calculated tension resulting in maximum impact.

This is a quick, pleasant read; an expertly crafted piece of erotic fantasy.  Sexy, genial, imaginative, well-polished, literate and likeable, Paula's Place is recommended to fans of BDSM romance, as well as all who romanticize the forbidden pleasures of the past.

 

 

 

Review of I.J. Miller's "Wuthering Nights"

Wuthering Nights: An EroticRetelling of Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë and I.J. Miller)

 

At first blush, Wuthering Nights seems more like a clever marketing concept than an authentic literary inspiration; yet another symptom of the terminal herd mentality infecting contemporary corporate publishing. Certainly, in the hands of a less-accomplished writer such an ambitious undertaking might have proven mediocre, if not downright disastrous, and, given the depressingly vast glut of second-rate, copycatted BDSM-centered erotic romance currently on the market, probably eluded notice altogether. But I.J. Miller at his best is no ordinary writer. In a respectable body of published work that includes novels like Seesaw and Whipped, as well as the very fine short story collection Sex and Love (soon to be reviewed here), Miller has demonstrated a talent for probing psychological complexity, often revealing the pain and poetry of dysfunction in surprisingly entertaining ways. If Wuthering Nights was to be published in any case, Miller was the logical—and, as it turns out, fortuitous—choice for the project.

Miller has taken a refreshingly intelligent approach to genre mash-up, referring to Wuthering Nights not as an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic classic, but as an erotic reinterpretation of the original material. Gone are the first-person raconteurs—Lockwood and Nelly—exchanged here for a single omniscient voice. The new narrator is able to go places and see things that Nelly could never have known—nor ever dared repeat. Many scenes have been specially tailored to accommodate this new, expanded perspective, altered or recombined to take advantage of the original story’s “erotic potential” (Miller’s words).

And if ever there was a novel with erotic potential, it is Wuthering Heights, that sprawling, soapishly addictive saga of passion and pain, unrequited love, misery, cruelty, madness and revenge. Brontë’s Heathcliff is probably one of the most ingeniously conceived, complex, and complete characters in all 19^th century English literature; the ultimate archetypal “meta-male”; virile, magnetic and implacable, handsome, dark and dangerous. Only Catherine can match him for impulsiveness and the sheer intensity of her passions; she is the great grandmother of all those quirky, headstrong heroines populating the Contemporary Romance section, cloned and copied a thousand times a month. Of course, in their day Victorian-era propriety, enforced reticence, and the society’s obsessive-compulsive need to moralize precluded any possibility of explicit consummation, a thing not even acceptably left to the reader’s imagination—until now. 

To some, seeing these familiar, well-beloved characters getting “down and dirty” may be akin to the discovery of one’s parents in flagrante delicto, a difficult thing to accept at first. One might experience mild pangs of distaste followed by a fevered moment or two of denial. But readers mature enough to understand the difference between innocence and ignorance—a distinction intentionally blurred by the Victorians and still muddied by their philosophical heirs even to this day—will be rewarded. Deep down, we’ve always been curious about Heathcliff and Catherine; Isabella, and even Nelly; daydreaming about “what really happened” behind Brontë’s straight-laced curtain of prettified euphemism.

But, while intentionally “sexing up” the story, Miller has retained each character’s broad biographical arc and unique psychological profile so that we may still care about them and feel with them as more than mere objects.  He has achieved this largely by keeping Brontë’s language and style intact. I jumped back and forth on my Kindle between Miller and Brontë from time to time, finding on the whole a near-seamless consistency. Here is a taste of the original, Wuthering Heights, excerpted at random:

The stolidity with which I received these instructions was, no doubt, rather exasperating, for they were delivered in perfect sincerity; but I believe a person who can plan the turning of her fits of passion to account, beforehand, might, by exerting her will, manage to control herself tolerably, even while under the influence. I did not wish to “frighten” her husband, as she said, and multiply his annoyances for the purpose of serving her selfishness.

(Nelly seems quite well-spoken for a country servant girl from 19^th-century Yorkshire, doesn’t she?) Here is a similarly reflective moment from Miller’s Wuthering Nights, related in the third person:

She (Nelly) knew better than to provoke Heathcliff when he was in this state, but Cathy was not so well educated to his demeanor. “Are you mad?” the lass exclaimed.

Perhaps so, thought Nelly, but if so, it was a madness peculiar to him that she knew too well, for he was one who took pleasure at invoking his physical presence to achieve his ultimate goal, which, as always, was having his way.

So far, so good. It’s when we get down to the details of the newly added “juicy parts” that things become a bit more problematic. How does one write explicit scenes employing vocabulary from an era best-remembered for its prudery? Doing so successfully requires painstaking attention to linguistic and historical detail along with engaged, thoughtful, erudite editing. Unfortunately, the language in these scenes has been colorized by modern genre convention, weighed down with careless anachronism (such as, among other things, repeatedly referring to “nickers”), and a tendency towards erotic hyperbole. Here, by way of example, is an excerpt from the scene of Heathcliff and Isabella’s wedding night:

Seductively he pulled back his shirt and revealed again the full manliness of his chiseled torso. He shook his long black hair out of his eyes, and it was with great willpower that she did not give in to this sensuous action and rush to his arms. He enjoyed her reaction to even his slightest of movements, enjoyed the power each part of his body held over eyes as they remained transfixed. He unbuttoned his pants, but hesitated. She realized she had been staring, frozen, at the bulge between his legs and did not look up until he laughed, causing renewed blush at her eagerness to feast her eyes on this grand rooster.

“You will learn to enjoy the pain.” He delicately cupped her full breasts, sensually kneading them with his strong hands, and she closed her eyes and swooned slightly. He licked along her earlobe, letting his hot breath brush against her neck. “Yes, my love,” she whispered . . .

“That’s it, Isabella. Don’t fight it. Give in to your body and more gratification than you ever dreamed of will be yours.”

Oh please! Must every detail of Heathcliff’s physique repeatedly be described as “incredibly” this or that, chiseled, long, huge, thick or what have you? Must Edgar always suffer by comparison, the Romance-genre stereotype “sweet guy” with a sensitive soul and a tiny dick?  And why must the intimation of female pleasure always be “like nothing she had ever known before”? One might expect this sort of tiresome purplish prose in any humdrum mass-market bodice-ripper; it’s lazy and it’s boring, and it undermines the uniqueness of these characters, reducing them, in the bedroom or dungeon, to carnal caricatures, one-dimensional automatons motivated solely by sex.

Yes, it’s a clever idea—if not much of a stretch—to turn Heathcliff and Isabella’s relationship into a freak show of D/s codependency, complete with public humiliation and a fully-accessorized dungeon in the cellar of Wuthering Heights. So why not describe it in a way that truly makes it feel “like nothing ever before”?  Miller is clearly capable of better. (One suspects his editor didn’t much care about correct vocabulary or authentic period detail so long as the manuscript came in on time with the requisite percentage of gratuitously sweaty beefcake and damsels swooning at the sight, fingers firmly planted on throbbing quims. Still, whether this kind of mediocrity was due to commercial or temporal constraint is beside the point.)

Where the sex scenes are overly stylized in much of the book, they virtually disappear towards the end. Things cool off considerably in those latter sections dealing with the relationship of the cousins, Cathy, Linton and Hareton. The explicit content is noticeably toned down, the sexual tension slackened. By comparison with what has gone before, the last quarter of the book feels positively chaste. (Due, perhaps, to the publisher’s squeamishness about “incest” issues, though, ironically, no such qualms seemed to have affected the early Victorians.) 

At times, the narrative is bogged down by a need to explain each character’s motives; often in torturous, blandly obvious detail. This may be Brontë’s doing as much as Miller’s; but, when attempting to retell the story from a new, unabashedly erotic point of view, such quaint sermonizing simply kills the mood.

“For you see,” she continued, “you showed that true repentance is when the inner soul recognizes the path to true redemption and acts accordingly. Until this happens the person will be blind to all opportunities.”

Ultimately, the loose ends in the plot are tied up quite well. In some ways Miller’s ending is more satisfying than Brontë; it is certainly more melodramatic, and he even manages, at the last, to out-moralize the vicar’s daughter from Haworth. 

Not recommended for sticklers, pedants, prudes, perfectionists or those skeptical of high-concept marketing techniques. But for everyone else, especially those craving a more refined approach to erotic romance, Wuthering Nights should make for an agreeably seductive divertissement, and is well worth a look.

 

 

 

Review of V. Moore's "Youthful Indiscretions" series: "Ten Reams", "Nude and Tattooed", "Illustrated Woman"

Ten Reams

Nude and Tattooed

Illustrated Woman

 

V. Moore and her generation should give us all hope for the future of humanity. A promising newcomer, this self-described alt-girl has re-choreographed the traditional mating dance for a new century, and while not exactly reinventing sex itself, brings a refreshing open-mindedness and casual maturity long lacking in many so-called “adult” discussions of the subject. Sex among today’s youth is not some tortured metaphor for life, nor is it some dirty little secret to be euphemized and talked around, set on some ineffably sacred pedestal, closeted, hidden or compartmentalized from the rest of existence. It is what it is, a normal aspect of being, seamlessly integrated into the fabric of everyday reality, to be spoken of as naturally as one speaks of the weather. This trio of short stories—surprisingly good, ultimately rewarding—offers a furtive glimpse into the erotic minds of contemporary twentysomethings—and we are the richer for being allowed to look.

Moore’s stories are understated, realistic, and straightforward. She effectively occupies the minds and bodies of her characters—both male and female—to reveal authentic emotion and internal conflict without resort to florid simile or pretentious homiletic asides. These three tales are loosely interconnected, populated by an extended circle of acquaintances, friends and lovers, easily referencing one another. Each story is a little slice of life, a sharply focused vignette depicting the most seemingly mundane moments of workaday life, mined for their erotic potential. A young man buying office supplies fantasizes about the cute clerk who waits on him (Ten Reams). Another guy waits nervously in a coffee shop for a meeting with his ex (Nude and Tattooed); and later, the ex gives us her side of the story Rashamon-like (Illustrated Woman).  

 

At its best, Moore’s writing is taut, weightless; unburdened by superfluous ornament. The narrative is succinct and well-organized, flowing with a pleasing natural rhythm. At times though, the texts are troubled with a number of glaring editorial flaws, and the careless bandying about of stale “porn-o-centric” clichés.  (Why must every mention of bodily parts come with the same gratuitous adjectives? Why repeatedly modify anatomical description with words like huge, long, fat, thick, round, throbbing, hot or wet? Why not allow the reader to use some imagination every once in a while?)  

 

Such easily-fixable concerns aside, after reading each story several times, I must confess myself thoroughly entertained, enlightened, impressed, and pleasantly turned on. Who could ask for better?

TAS 

Review of Andre SanThomas' Sensual Submissions series

NOTE: The following reviews first appeared on Amazon in June of 2012. Thought they might be fun to revisit just in time for Valentine's Day 2013. Enjoy! TAS


Pursuit

Andre SanThomas is a talented writer with a decided gift for descriptive prose. She is rapidly establishing herself as one of the brightest new voices in erotic "crossover" fiction; combining elements from different--often seemingly disparate--genres to create new and interesting sensual fantasy worlds. Her excellent Realm of Janos series cleverly hybridizes High Fantasy and classic tales of bondage and submission. This title, Pursuit is the second entry in her contemporary Sensual Submissions series, an artful mélange of erotic romance and BDSM epic.

By all appearances, Garrett Wilkins is one of those romance-story demigods; older, magnetically attractive, über-wealthy and hyper-confident; a guy who always gets exactly what he wants, no questions asked. He sets his jaundiced eye on Botany, a struggling young college student, aimless, diffident, lovely, if vaguely rough around the edges. Garrett quickly insinuates himself into Botany's life, surprising and upsetting her with a dazzling gift--the sort of extravagant high-end bling she doesn't feel right accepting. Here, she tries returning it to her admirer, only to be seduced:

"Try it now. Let me just see it on you. Isn't that fair? I went to quite a bit of trouble to get it, don't I at least get to see if it's as perfect as I imagined?"

She was wavering. He pressed the button and the box opened in front of her. He picked it up delicately by the chain, holding it before her. "Try it for me Botany. Let me see if it measures up to your beauty or not."
He stood and came around her. Just like last night, she didn't protest, didn't pull away. He scooped her hair from the back of her neck, pushing it to the side. He draped the necklace against her throat, letting the fine stones rest against her sweater. He leaned close, his breath touching her skin. He brushed his fingers over the nape of her neck then secured the clasp. His touch lingered on her, teasing her before he whispered in her ear.
"You're a masterpiece, Botany. Don't ever forget it. I won't forget it. Ever."

Obviously, there's much to like and enjoy in this writing. SanThomas has an eye for the intimate, and the best parts of Pursuit are in its discrete episodes; individual scenes, interesting vignettes that feel like embryonic short stories; visits to a sex-toy shop, a bizarrely bespoke jewelry store, and a piercing salon; a wrestling match between two "subbies;" truly tantalizing. But beyond these lucid flashes of atmospheric brilliance, nothing really animates the narrative as a whole. It is as if a composer set out to write a full-length symphony with themes better suited to small-scale chamber music; a painter with far too broad a canvas and not enough variety in her palette to cover it convincingly. In fact, we are led to wonder if this aspiring novel might have worked better as a series of loosely interconnected short stories. As it is, there are some serious problems with structure, pacing, and characterization.

The novel adheres too rigidly to genre conventions, often at the expense of tension. Much of Pursuit is choreographed like a mainstream Romance; the girl playing coy; the guy trying to keep her off balance; it is the familiar ritual mating dance reduced to fossilized formula. Romance requires love; but here, love seems to come out of left field, almost as an afterthought, the heroine "talking herself into it" some four-fifths of the way into the book, and even then not wholly believable in the context of these people's relationship.

The characters themselves are robotic and one dimensional, shallow constructs; their roles rigidly defined by genre archetype-casting; their psychologies superficial and largely unexplored. Garrett is a selfish a-hole; but even a-holes have some self-doubt from time to time; some inner conflict; some redeeming contradiction and paradox to lend depth and interest. (If not, what we have is a sociopath to whom no self-respecting woman would ever willingly submit. Just because you play at BDSM, doesn't mean you're sick or perverted!) And if Garrett always gets everything he wants, using his wealth to overcome any and all obstacles while Botany's submission is inevitable; where's the story?

Botany is too weak a character to be an effective foil for Garrett; she is often too passive; too easily dominated; too willing to go along with whatever her "master" demands, even when he is overtly sadistic and uncaring beyond the definition of their game. In retrospect, the seduction is too easy, too pat; drained of drama. Where's the uncertainty that makes the tale worth telling--that compels readers to keep turning pages? Where's the conflict--the pursuit?

And where are these characters' backstories? We are told little of Garrett's past beyond a few of his own disparaging references to an ex-trophy wife and a disappointing daughter. In fact, forty per cent of the way into the book, we know more about his servant's home life and backgrounds than we do of his. (The weirdly casual, almost incestuous relationship he has with the servants tends to strain credulity. How did such a relationship develop?) What, beyond his fabulous wealth, formed his rather banal, predictable tastes? If Botany has dreams, we don't learn about them until near the end of the story, and by then, they seem to have appeared spontaneously out of nowhere, glued on like craft-store glitter. What is her "ruling passion" (as James N. Frey would call it); her central motivation; the thing she truly wants? For far too long, we simply don't know--and that's a problem.

This story could have benefitted from more overt action beyond the bedroom and the dungeon. There were several intriguing missed opportunities for dramatic story-telling. If Garrett is portrayed as such a controlling jerk, why isn't he also jealous? I kept wishing for a good fist fight to break out over some misunderstanding about who is and isn't allowed to touch or talk to Botany; but the green-eyed monster never reared its head--not once. Alas.

In sum; not a terrible or bad book; but it could have been considerably better. Andre SanThomas clearly has the talent to do something better--even brilliant, and I sincerely hope she will with her next offering.

Driven

With Driven, Andre SanThomas has given her fans an interesting new world to explore, populated with realistic, recognizably modern characters. Another clever mash-up of genres; this one melds contemporary romance with BDSM epic, and does it quite successfully for the most part.

SanThomas' language is, as always, lovely and evocative, a considerable cut above the dismal norm of so much recent erotic writing. Here's a good example, taken from her first chapter

Honestly, he didn't think such things were real. Greg assured him they were though and now here was the proof. The house was a mansion secluded with security gates and gorgeous landscaping, trickled over the hillside with spectacular views. It rose two stories in the front with a huge picture window perfectly situated to take advantage of (the) beauty of nature. Instead, tonight at least, the naked beauty of nature was on the other side, held in a web of hemp and illuminated by the spotlights hidden in the foliage.

The two well-drawn main characters are likeable and sexy, engaging and believable. Cerena is a magnificent creature, imbued with beauty, verve and humor; a willing submissive, but never a pushover. She embodies the spirit of the ancient Greek hetaera, the Japanese geisha, and the Gorian slave girl, all in one delightfully vivacious package. For Cerena, the thrill of bondage and submission is the comfort of unconditional belonging, the certainty that transcends pain.

Alec, Cerena's lover and a first-time "master," is portrayed with just the right amount of self-doubt and uncertainty. He is the kind of sensitive, romantically-inclined male many women claim to look for in a relationship; and he must overcome his doubts; his reticence; his initial reluctance to inflict "loving pain" on the woman he adores, even as she begs him for it.

So what happens to these people--apart from their having a lot of fantastic, mind-blowing sex, that is? A good novelist gets her characters into trouble early and often. Throw a villain into the mix, and we have the makings of an intriguing dramatic plot. The first inkling of conflict comes at exactly the right moment in the story. The villain, Cerena's loutish ex-master, Hal, wants her back. His off-stage machinations cast a shadow between the two lovers, and haunts them throughout the story.

Unfortunately, the villain is more talked about than seen; we are told a great deal about what a lousy excuse for a human being Hal is, but seldom shown how in terms of real action. This almost feels like gossiping behind someone's back--a guilty pleasure, to be sure, but lacking the more satisfying adrenaline rush of direct confrontation. The author's consistent use of a third-person-limited point of view works well when alternating between the two main characters--avoiding the common pitfall of "head hopping"--but does, in fact, limit our understanding of the other characters. We never get into Hal's head, and that could be incredibly interesting or unbelievably scary and probably both. Instead, we miss out on a great deal of potential insight.

Readers might also benefit from more backstory in order to understand the events and motivations leading up to the climax of the novel. Again, we are "told" that Cerena's family disapproves of her lifestyle, but there's not enough detail or substance in these oblique references to make what happens seem wholly plausible in the end. Characters have a tendency to pop up as needed, whack-a-mole-like out of nowhere; but it would have been so much more suspenseful to have seen them coming from at least a little ways off. Far too many interesting things seem to occur out of sight, ultimately related to the reader as hearsay, and explained after the fact.

Still, all things considered, this is a fine effort and well worth a look. As with all her previous titles, Andre SanThomas' Driven is cleverly imagined and deftly written, helping to fill a new and growing niche in contemporary erotic fiction. Her fans will not be disappointed, and this might very probably gain her a few new ones as well.