Thursday, June 28, 2012

Review of Fulani's "The Museum of Deviant Desires"

Discovering the erotic writing of Fulani was a sheer, unalloyed pleasure. I left this review on Amazon a week or so ago. Here's a link to the page:

Fulani: The Museum of Deviant Desires

And here's the review:

"What I need" the narrator of Fulani's "Burnout" tells us, "is some startling image that comes from nowhere and burns itself into my brain, my desires, causes instant addiction. What I need is a new mythos of erotica. . ."

I love the way this guy thinks!

Fulani is one of that rare, as yet officially unclassified species of erotic writer, the "meta-sexual;" a delightfully self-referential species noted for its uncanny ability to pleasure open-minded readers with intense multiple "brain-gasms." And there are many to be enjoyed in this collection of short BDSM-centered fiction, informed by everything from Roland Barthes and Stanislaw Lem to Nu Fetish, industrial bondage; flash fiction and on-line piracy; underground music festivals, and those pulpy sexploitation magazines of the 50s and 60s with their lurid cover paintings and thick black "censor bars" redacting all the naughty bits in the grainy photos accompanying the articles.

The eleven very-short stories in this collection are sexy and cerebral; breezy, thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny and utterly addictive. Like a big heaping bowl of literary-erotic Lucky Charms; you can't get enough. The multi-colored marshmallow shapes are irresistibly delicious, but the oat-cereal part is actually good for you--who knew? Fulani strikes just the right balance between light fluffy diversion and crunchy intellectual substance, letting his horny inner nerd come out to play the most scintilatingly kinky games; whimsically creating new words and worlds even as he establishes fascinating new paradigms for the next generation of erotic fiction.

There's beauty here, however unexpected; the language can be lyrical even as it educes degradation and pain; the poetry of domination and submission set amid dystopian landscapes of industrial decay and urban blight. We wonder if this is what sex will be like in the future. But as the narrator of "Something Different" reminds us;

"Once you know it consciously, it's impossible not to see how the whole of society, economy, psychology is a dense network of sexual signifiers."

It's true. Fulani's stories draw their inspiration from an astonishingly diverse cosmos of commonplace artifacts; vacuum cleaners, toasters, plumbing supplies, burned out autos, melted plastic forms, all weirdly apt when turned to the author's singularly amusing purpose.

Entertaining, sexy, hilarious, often self-effacing, "The Museum of Deviant Desires" is a trenchant critique of contemporary erotic literature with its finger firmly on the g-spot of popular culture; a tasty treat, not to be missed.

Terrance Aldon Shaw

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