Review of "Phantom: The Immortal" by Mitzi Szereto and Ashley Lister

Phantom:The Immortal is a slick piece of light erotic entertainment, playing out with a certain pulpish predictability, yet competently crafted and consistently enjoyable—beach readers take note! Mitzi Szereto and Ashley Lister’s stylishly steamy homage to The Phantom of the Opera at last brings the sexy essence of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 Gothic potboiler overtly to the surface in a way no other previous adaptation has dared—and it’s about damned time, too!

There have been so many versions of this story over the last hundred years: from the 1925 silent-film classic with Lon Chaney Sr. to the 1943 Claude Rains vehicle, and the 1962 Hammer films production, not to mention that giant, cloying, sugary “musical” detumescence of Andrew Lloyd What-the-Fu—sorry, I just threw up in my mouth.

All these versions treat the heroine as a kind of damsel in distress, a virginally un-self-aware airhead to be menaced by the Phantom and rescued by the handsome hero. And, one has to admit, titillation—far more than redemption—has always been a big part of this story’s appeal, the seething undercurrent of sex, bubbling sluggishly just beneath the action, calls to something in the deep subbasement of our psyche. We want—whether we’re willing to admit it or not—to see Beauty stripped naked before the horny Beast; we want—oh please!—to see Julie Adams carried off to the lung-man’s lair beneath the Black Lagoon to be shown how it’s done, her screams of terror turning to cries of salacious delight; and we really really want Christine to toss aside all that prissy vestal-virgin-on-a-pedestal pretense, and get jiggy with the Phantom. At least in this latter instance, readers can at last be satisfied.

She found herself staring at his lips. She wished she could lean forward over the table to catch them between her own, drawing them into her mouth and tasting the wine on his tongue. She wondered how they would feel against her skin, where he would kiss her, and if he would kiss her in that special place she most wanted to be kissed. She imagined him parting her thighs, his breath a hot mist against her folds.

Classic grand opera—what we automatically imagine when we think of opera—is, in essence, a ritual of elaborately sublimated eroticism. Sex is always—always—the dark singularity around which the story takes shape, from Massanet’s Thaïs and Bizet’s Carmen to Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde all the way to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly to Berg’s Wozzeck and Hindemith’s explicit, hyper-erotic Sancta Susana. Gounod’s Faust, is certainly no exception, grand opera at its most grandiose, chastity is not one of its virtues; Faust’s satanically-assisted seduction of the pure Marguerite is central to the whole vast elaborate undertaking, and it was not by chance that Leroux (and, by extension, Szereto and Lister) employed Faust as the scaffolded superstructure of their story.

Phantom: The Immortal mines the melodrama of the source material for all it’s worth, yet never strays too far from its more down-to-earth erotic ambitions:

“This is how you make me feel. That’s what I’m trying to show you.”

He considered the remark and decided it was too obscure. Shaking his head, taking another sip from the brandy glass and drawing briefly on the cigar, he mumbled an apology. “I am sorry. I do not understand the connection.”

“You’re enjoying your favorite pleasures: the cognac and an Oscuro, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sexually excited, aren’t you?”

“I am pleased you noticed.”

When she next spoke, he could hear the delighted blush that colored her voice. “You’re enjoying those pleasures that make your life special. You’re enjoying the ultimate stimulation of your senses and your spirit, yet you’re still sitting in the dark.”

Understanding dawned on him, but, drawing again on the cigar, he said nothing.

She darted her tongue against the swollen dome of his glans. The teasing touch was so insubstantial it could have sprung from his imagination, but the gossamer lull of her breath told him it had come from a more substantial source. . .

Good, light, frothy, sexy diversion, not particularly deep or thought-provoking, this may yet open up a few long-locked synapses and set off a tingle or two. Recommended.

Announcing new releases from TAS

A Song for the Girl with the Almond Eyes (A Novel)

Now available in paperback at:

Amazon

Createspace Direct

coming soon to Barnes and Noble and all other retailers worldwide (on request).

E-book editions release Friday June 3, 2016

$3.99

now available for pre-order at: 

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(enter discount code QW79D on checkout to receive the special price of $1.50 (62 percent off).
This coupon will be good through August 1, 2016)

also available for pre-order at:

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Ben Bohring’s life gets interesting, taking a dark detour into obsession when he meets beautiful May-Lin Song during a summer week of teenage debauchery at a lakeside cabin. The vivacious young woman’s combination of classic Asian beauty and all-American attitude is more than Ben can resist, and he vows to have her some day in spite of the odds.

Ben’s quest propels him on a series of amorous, sometimes-violent misadventures, where unsettling secrets about the past are revealed and hard truths about the future learned at painful cost, ultimately leading to someone who may hold the key to questions that have haunted the young man his whole life.

ALSO NOW AVAILABLE:

newly revised and updated perma-free Smashwords editions

Turn Me On--Tell Me a Story

Turn Me On Again--Tell Me Another Story

Turn Me On--Tell Me a Story 3

Review of 'Blue' by L.N. Bey

There’s much to admire in Blue, L.N. Bey’s promising debut novel that draws its inspiration from some of the great classic BDSM narratives while remaining uniquely true to itself. An ambitious effort, the story is believably scaled, avoiding the credulity-straining grandiosity of so-much half-baked escapism, or the pretentious plot convolutions of would-be epics, which tend to collapse under the sprawling weight of their own inanity. Not that there isn’t a great deal of very imaginative, even fantastical storytelling here—this isn’t some drab novel of manners or cloyingly pointless foray into domestic realism—but everything here is decidedly to a purpose, and almost always to the point. The novelist seems to have learned the lesson some of her characters struggle with throughout the story: sometimes the greatest expressive freedom lies within a narrow set of well-defined limitations.

In essence, Blue is a novel about the pursuit of artistic vision, about the struggle to express one’s genuine self—or, perhaps more accurately, the search for a medium through which one may express that vision—be it film, photography, performance art, or, possibly. something a good deal more personal, subtly sensual and secret. The main characters, each in their own way, are driven by an ideal, and must find their own way ultimately to achieve that ideal.  

Young—thirtysomething—attractive, recently divorced, Janet has always been drawn to the stylized BDSM of ‘trashy’ erotic novels, though she remains hopelessly naïve about what goes on in real life, her experience of sex disappointingly vanilla and reflexively hetero-normative.  Her first introduction to the Lifestyle is not promising, and, yet, she is spurred on by curiosity, a disquieting realization that somewhere deep down, she got off on it,  was powerfully turned on in spite of the humiliation, aroused by the pain, but even more profoundly moved by a sense of belonging and at long last drawing near to knowing her place in the scheme of things.

In some ways, it’s possible to see Blue as a sort of sunny, secular reimagining of Pauline Réage’s  The Story of O—one of Bey’s cited inspirations. Where O’s introduction to bondage has the feel of a quasi-religious experience, a kind of mystagogic initiation into some ancient, esoteric mystery cult, Janet’s experience seems practically prosaic, almost commonplace in a world where very little remains to shock or scandalize. The action is transposed to the suburban American Midwest—the place feels very much like Kansas City, in fact—and there is an unassuming ordinariness about the characters and their settings. Yet, like O, Janet ultimately finds herself transformed to the very essence of her being, approaching an understanding of herself more complex and affirmative than even her most famously self-martyred predecessor.

None of this is to depreciate the novel as a work of erotic entertainment—far from it! When Janet meets Dmitri, an auteur of singular and disturbing vision, the results are nothing short of seismically arousing. (I do wish the author could have done more with these characters’ personal sexual  relationship.) Some effort has been made to add variety to the predictable patterns of power-exchange, which is not always an easy thing. Bey very skillfully explores the erotic possibilities of everyday activities, as when two men watching a basketball game, give a penitent slave a lash for each point scored—brilliant!—or a scene of abject humiliation beneath the gaze of security cameras in a liquor store.  And so much more!

The author avoids most of the pitfalls commonly besetting the frosh novelist, those tangent superfluities and preachy, self-indulgent digressions that are more about showing off one’s own cleverness than telling a great story. There is still a tendency towards excessive repetition, rehashing the same already-established plot points via the heroine’s seemingly endless fugue of self-doubt—a device right at home in a romance novel, but a tad tiresome here—and a few of the scenes feel like pale carbon-copies of each other—like déjà vu for the terminally incurious—although, this could be the author’s way of imbuing the narrative with a cyclic quality, rounding things off and tying it all together. I would have preferred more subtle recapitulations, and a good deal more variation throughout.  Some of the chapters were overlong and would probably benefit from being broken into two (or even three) shorter, more manageable units.

Still, not bad on balance. Not bad at all for a first try. The writing is assured, but never cocksure, the author’s vision broad but not overreaching. The story is sufficiently interesting to inspire curiosity about what happens next, the rising action is skillfully controlled with a clear sense of dramatic momentum, and the whole thing draws to a logically satisfactory, un-open-ended conclusion, without the pretentious promise (or would it be threat?) of an unnecessary sequel.

With a first novel like this, one can clearly look forward to great things in L.N. Bey’s future. In the meantime, Blue is recommended. 

Review of recent fiction by Deborah Harkness, Cari Silverwood, and S.J. Smith

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Wicked Ways by Cari Silverwood
Peeper by S.J. Smith


A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

The first installment in Harkness' best-selling All-Souls Triology, I picked this up with great anticipation after hearing Maureen Corrigan's glowing review of the third volume on NPR. What I found was a rather tired, overly-conventional romance narrative that fails to inspire on virtually every level. Harkness' characters are little more than second-rate understudies right out of central-stereotype casting. Matthew is a brooding, moody man of mystery, tortured, often volatile, yet--so we are told--oh so irresistible, while Dianna is the fungible stock heroine; beautiful, spunky, independent athletic, in this case a dedicated historian and reluctant witch, and--of course--a woman who has not done much to explore her vulnerable, girly side, hence her potentially fatal attraction to a vampire. Their story is unbelievably dull, weighed down at every page-turn with a thick oily sediment of unnecessary detail: do we really need to know every thought that flits through the heroine's head as she contemplates what to wear on a date, every torturous aspect of meal preparation, or, for that matter, her reaction to every bite of food, every slosh-gurgle of rare wine or drop of cheap tea that happens to touch her lips in every restaurant and dining room in Oxford? 

There is some genuinely amateurish writing here, especially in the awkward, clunky way the author introduces new characters (out of the blue with a heavy freight-load of bewildering, mostly pointless backstory that neither enlightens nor endears). Poor pacing, gratuitous repetition, and a maddening narrative inertia make this virtually unbearable.

While Harkness endeavors to create a new paranormal mythology, she fails miserably at elucidating the real inner lives of her characters or endowing them with any great depth. Would it have been so difficult to do a little research into the very real and genuinely interesting aspects of contemporary Wiccan religion and ethics, the actual theory and practice of magic, as opposed to trying to force atmosphere simply by populating the story with a gaggle of "supernatural" beings? Are we supposed to be dazzled in this day and age by the mere presence of witches, vampires, or demons--even witches and vampires who attend yoga class and go punting on weekends? I've often criticized Anne Rice for some of her later self-indulgent tendencies, but I would gladly re-read all 1,000 pages of The Witching Hour, notwithstanding its cloying repetition, sprawling pointlessness, and ultimate lack of meaningful closure, than ever again bore myself to tears with a book like A Discovery of Witches or its sequels.

Wicked Ways by Cari Silverwood

Cari Silverwood has the makings of a great, entertainingly transgressive tale here. Wicked Ways is, at root, a dark, twisted re-imagining of the standard erotic romance, including all the familiar plot elements--everything from the earth-shattering, "like-nothing-she'd-ever-known" sex to the heroine's de regueur chronic plague of self doubt. All the stock players make their expected appearances: Zorina (Zorie) Brown is a strong, confident, self-sufficient and (of course) beautiful young woman, a university lecturer, not particularly sexually self-aware. . . that is, until she falls victim to the handsome, melodramatically villainous Reuben, a "mesmer" with the psychic ability to control the minds of susceptible women. Reuben and his entourage of sexual sadists draw Zorie into an orgiastic demimonde, repeatedly using her for their paraphilic kicks before quite literally tossing her into the trash. As she waits to be summoned again, the heroine is torn apart as much by cognitive dissonance as her fear of physical abuse, forced to admit that she enjoys what's happening to her, even as she fights, however vainly, to resist. Meanwhile, another mesmer, the enigmatically magnetic Mr. Black assumes the role of anti-hero, drawing Zorie to him with the idea of using her as a weapon to eliminate Reuben--and then, simply using her. (By far and away, the scenes with Zorie and Mr. Black are the most compelling in the novel--would that the author had taken greater, more imaginative advantage of this, and mined their powerful, complex relationship for its full dramatic potential.) There's even a 'sweet guy' in this troupe of romantic archetypes: the sensitive, caring Grimm--a librarian, no less!--who is willing to do anything for Zorina in spite of her seemingly erratic behavior and ultimate indifference. 

The author successfully puts her heroine into a state of sexual and psychological peril, and keeps her there, for the most part, throughout the story. This is not an easy thing to do; if handled ineptly, the heroine's response to conflict might easily betray her as a weakling, a crybaby or a pushover. The tension that Silverwood creates, however, is wildly uneven, going slack far too often to maintain a consistent interest. Her use of alternating POV characters from chapter to chapter should, theoretically, add a panoramic quality to the storytelling, as perceptive yet still more intimate than a conventional third-person narrative. Alas, the device here comes off as lazy, feeling like a sloppy attempt to avoid head-hopping, or, possibly, the desperate resort of a writer who can't decide which point-of-view to use in the first place. Where alternating POV ought to provide a richer sense of the individual characters' interior dynamics, Zorie's inner monologue seems to consist largely of shopworn phrases like "Damn him!" and "The bastard!" Ultimately, the author's attempt to tell an original story is hampered by the fact that none of her characters seem to have a single original thought in their heads.

Yet more unfortunate, for all the story's rich possibilities, the execution is muddled, bogged down by writing that is often simply awful, a clumsy, earthbound prose, frumpishly indifferent to style, weak, unpolished, dully conventional, enervated by the author's apparent addiction to the easy cliché. Too much of the book has the feel of an apathetically edited second draft. (When I find myself repeatedly screaming at a book like an exasperated Muppet, there's definitely a problem!) A catalog of missed opportunities and simplistic choices, the author ties things up with an annoying--and ultimately rather insulting-- coincidence. The story that might have effectively explored the difference between the romantic fantasy of the 'bad boy' and the nightmare of the truly 'bad guy' is diluted, melting into abject silliness, its potential for page-turning drama simply pissed away. Such a waste!

Three stars for the ghost of a good story. Sadly, not recommended.   

Peeper by S.J. Smith

If I was annoyed by Cari Silverwood's Wicked Ways, I was thoroughly pissed off by S.J. Smith's Peeper. 

At first glance, this is an homage to that particular vein of hard-boiled detective fiction in which the flawed hero must embrace his own inner darkness in order to overcome the very real evil that confronts him. The great American detectives almost always take the morally ambiguous route, with sexual temptation lurking in cheap hotels and dark alleyways, seldom more than a few short steps beyond the garish glow of the streetlamp. It is this inner conflict--this moral tension--that makes the detective more than a mere pulp-fiction construct, but a bona fide literary character--universally compelling.  

Jenks, the would-be peeper of the title is none of those things. An average Welshman of no extraordinary achievement or particular ambition, a man, perhaps on the brink of midlife crisis, Jenks has nothing better to do than emulate the hard-boiled heroes of his daydreams. Rushing in without a clue, he takes a case involving the retrieval of blackmail photos, only to find himself made a chump, entangled in a sordid web of intrigue with--what else?--an impossibly beautiful woman at its center. Jenks' moral compass spins wildly at times, though, always--tiresomely, boringly, predictably--returning to the True North of the 'beautiful, adoring wife' who waits for him at home, a character who seems simply too good--and far too accommodating--to be true.

The story is 'fleshed out' with a good deal of decidedly hot sex, which seems to be the whole point of the endeavor--not that there's anything wrong with that. Yet, in the end, what promised to be a darkly clever mash-up of detective fiction and erotica turns out to be little more than a practical joke at the reader's expense, a silly, juvenile, elaborately-contrived 'twist' rendering all that went before meaningless. Frankly I have NEVER read a novel that made me so angry, or left me feeling so manipulated or so cheated. (Who's the chump now?)  In the still-red glare of retrospect, this story has the feel of a petulant wave gift, and--far worse--a waste of time.  

Listen! If a writer is going to embrace the darkness and explore the transgressive, than they fucking well need to go all in and embrace the darkness! None of this cowardly, amateurish  backing out at the last minute--"Oh, sorry guys! I didn't really mean it . . ." Go all the way, hold nothing back, put your characters in genuine peril and keep them there until they figure out a way to overcome their conflicts. Otherwise, the exercise is about as worthless as a bowdlerized Dick and Jane story.

Smith's writing is competent--not great--clunking along like some rusty, superannuated family car that barely manages to get readers from point A to point B. Yet there are too many times when it feels as if the vehicle is taking us in circles, repeatedly covering the same bumpy terrain, always going right, never left, driving past the same landmarks, rutting up the same mundane, unnecessary details.  It all becomes extremely dull after a while. 

Yet another title I cannot recommend. 

Great review of TAS' 'The Moon-Haunted Heart'

An absolutely smashing review of The Moon Haunted Heart:

https://emmanuelledemaupassant.com/2016/04/04/moon-haunted-heart-a-revie


You can get the book here:

paperback:

Createspace Direct

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

e-book:

Smashwords Edition

Kindle Edition

Nook (Barnes & Noble)

Review of 'Cautionary Tales From the Edges' by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

Cautionary Tales From the Edges 

This extraordinary collection of short tales is, at once, a celebration of the simple beauty of language, a colorful and sometimes terrifying glimpse into the grimly fatalistic heart of Slavic folk culture, and a highly satisfying work of sensually charged entertainment. These twelve stories range pleasingly in mood and atmosphere from the mysterious and macabre—reminiscent of Angela Carter’s treatments of traditional folk and fairy tales—to the broadly humorous, bawdy romps in the spirit of Boccacio, populated with loutish peasants, dirty old men, promiscuous milkmaids, and horny demons in varying degrees of malevolence, ghouls, ghosts, vampires, elemental sprites, and throngs of things that go bump in the magical night.

Yet, as the collection's title suggests, no story here is without an overt moral component, an appropriate comeuppance for bad behavior, just desserts for greed, lechery, and deceit, unfaithfulness, cruelty, murder—the whole catalog of sins, mortal and venial. The tales are narrated with the occasional poetic aside by the souls of the dead, collectively observing the realm of the living, commenting on human folly, sometimes with sadness, more often with a sort of wearily superior resignation as if to say ‘we see it all so clearly, yet the living make the same foolish mistakes again and again, and we, poor spirits, not wholly beyond care, can only watch, having forever lost the ability to intervene.’

Emmanuelle de Maupassant’s language is elegant and direct, never simplistic or condescendingly obvious in spite of occasionally meandering towards preciousness, at times a little too dainty—at least to my taste. The style is consistent—very important!—concise and to the point without venturing off on tangents. Throughout, I was happily reminded of those wonderful—and wonderfully old-fashioned—fairy tale collections from the earlier years of the last century (are there any readers here old enough to remember the original Childcraft series?) genuine literature that never patronized or talked down to its intended audience, never insulted the reader’s intelligence or dumbed down its content to accommodate the attenuated attention spans of addle-brained TV addicts.

The author has done a great deal of research into Slavic folkways, customs and cuisine, and clearly loves the material she is working with—an affection that shines through on every page.

Recommended.

Story from TAS' "The Moon-Haunted Heart" in this month's "Lightpole Magazine"

check it out:

http://www.syeopub.com/lightpole-magazine/