Here
we have twenty-two well-crafted short stories by some extremely talented women
who prove that erotica is very much alive and well as the new
century enters late adolescence. Thriving, in fact, and thrillingly diverse,
pitching a big tent (pun intended) resounding with many voices. Still very much
among the quick in spite of all efforts to pronounce it dead. Brash, defiant, alive
and kicking—licking, kissing, sucking, touching, feeling, fondling, fucking . .
.
And
thinking, too! Rather a lot, as it
turns out. These aren’t the braindead crayon-scribbles one used to find in
cum-stained plain brown wrappers. There’s no bad writing here. It’s all good—and
a surprising percentage of it is also very
good, understatedly original, quietly trenchant, colorfully curious,
probing, poignant, powerful, from Valerie Anderson’s Demimonde—an engagingly superb evocation of debauchery and kink in
buttoned-up late-19th-century New York, to A
New Canvas by Tara Betts and Drawn by
Nic by Heidi Champa, both breathing in their cool inspirations from the gritty
world of contemporary street artists. Jade A. Waters’ Ophelia the Second takes readers into the mind and heart of an
infatuated understudy, while Starstruck
by Lazuli Jones takes a similarly delightful journey into the mad-rushing
thoughts of a fortysomething fan-girl at last meeting the object of her hottest
teenaged fantasies—one hero, it turns out, who does not have feet--or anything else--of clay!
There
are little one-act erotic romances (The
Ropes by Elise King, The Wolf at His
Door by Deborah Castellano, The Assistant by Tiffany Reisz), flights of fantasy made
arousingly real (Date Night by D.R.
Slaten, Flying Solo by Rachel Kramer
Bussel, Matilda’s Secret by L. Marie
Adeline, Alvin’s Night by Elizabeth
Coldwell), salacious vignettes conjured from slightly-unconventional premises (Scents and Sexuality by Doriana Chase, Restitution by Ria Restrepo) and
straight-up, no-frills sex-capades (Revisiting
Youth by J. Crichton and H. Keyes, Out of the Ordinary by Rose P. Lethe, Two Doms for Dinner by Dorothy Freed).
I
like those stories best whose authors seem to have done a bit of extra ‘interior
spadework’, digging deep to the roots of character and emotion: Tabitha Rayne’s
Enter Me, in which a woman, rendered
deaf by a terrible accident, endeavors to
reconnect with her lover and the sounds of the past; Jessica Taylor’s The Altar of Lamented Toys, redolent
with nostalgia and regret in a dystopian, post-pandemic world without
batteries, Theda Hudson’s Lighting the
Pyre, a treasurable snapshot of life in
which a cancer survivor goes in for a tattoo to cover the scars and finds a way
to re-engage with love and passion again, and Rose
Caraway’s The Carnalarium, a simple,
sympathetically drawn story of letting go in more ways than one. Perhaps
most pleasantly surprising of all was Waiting
to Pee by Amy Butcher, a story in which diverse characters are so acutely,
thoughtfully observed, yet so thoroughly, stealthily, unpretentiously
entertaining as to catch the reader happily off guard. Magnificent!
Highly
recommended!
