Review of short-story collections by I.J. Miller and Sharazade

Sex and Love by I.J. Miller

Transported: Erotic Travel Tales by Sharazade


“Show, don’t tell!”  What the hell does it mean anyway? The phrase has taken on the musty stench of dogma in the dark satanic mills of English pedagogy; repeated and echoed like a sacred mantra in junior-college lecture halls, extension night classes and continuing-education seminars wherever “creative writing” is supposedly being taught. “Show, don’t tell” we are told again and again, though seldom shown a reason why. In Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Browne and King insist that “thanks to the influence of movies and television, readers today have become accustomed to seeing a story as a series of immediate scenes . . .

Narrative summary no longer engages readers the way it once did.   Since engagement is exactly what a fiction writer wants, you’re well-advised to rely heavily on immediate scenes to put your story across. You want to draw your readers into the world you’ve created, make them feel a part of it; make them forget where they are. And you can’t do this effectively if you tell your readers about your world secondhand. You have to take them there . . .” (2^nd edition, 2004, pp 8-9)

I suppose it’s true that once you’ve seen Star Wars Episode IV you can never again abide the pedestrian pacing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, let alone those long drawn-out stretches of silence in the genuinely silent vacuum of space. Still, have readers really turned into such slack-jawed, mush-brained, dull-witted, attention-deficit-suffering rubes over the last several generations? (I realize this may be the wrong question to ask in light of the seismic success of Dan Brown, Dean Koontz, Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, not to mention ratings for Honey BooBoo or the latest Kardashian-infested “reality” show.)  Sorry, I don’t buy it. It’s bullshit. If we’re going to have a catch-all dictum for effective fiction-writing, it should be “Damn the dogmas! Engage the reader, anyone you can.”

And how does a writer go about engaging his readers? How does she effectively draw them into her world and keep them interested?  Clearly there is more than one way to do this, as demonstrated by two recent collections of well-crafted short erotic fiction from I.J. Miller and Sharazade.  

What I look for in any successful anthology is variation and contrast. Each story should be unique, with different characters speaking in their own distinctive voices, from varying points of view; diverse settings, shifting tempi, new and unfamiliar conflicts and struggles. Without some creative attempt at “mixing it up” a story collection can feel like a concert in which every song is played in the same key at the same tempo; each song may well be lovely in its own right, but eventually, the subconscious gets tired of hearing the same old key in the same ol’ same ol’ time, and goes into sleep mode.  The beauty of any anthology—or well-programmed MP3 player—is  the freedom users are afforded to dip in here and there, casually at any point, picking and choosing stories that look good like desserts at a smorgasbord, leaving whatever may not suit their tastes at the moment. If I have any complaint that may apply equally to Miller’s Sex and Love and Sharazade’s Transported, it is that both suffer from too little variety and too much same-ness of tone and timing.  This is in no way to say that there’s not a lot to like in both collections—both are warmly recommended—potential readers should simply be aware of what they’re getting into.

 Sex and Love

In the twelve short stories featured in Sex and Love, I.J. Miller tells a good deal more than he shows. Nonetheless, there is some very fine, imaginative writing here, and the author always trusts his readers’ intelligence—something increasingly rare and refreshingly welcome. One hears endearing echoes of John Cheever in the way Miller presents his characters’ backstories; the way their rather conventional aspirations are explored, the very ordinariness of their dreams. Cheever’s style may seem dated nowadays, his reliance on secondhand narrative as quaint as his ‘50s suburban-middle-class sensibilities; yet his insights still ring universally, poignantly true, and Miller has learned the older author’s lessons well. The most revealing human truths; the most compelling drama is often discovered within the commonplace; the most seemingly ordinary moments in our lives in which the deepest understanding is born. Throughout Sex and Love, Miller demonstrates a talent for probing psychological complexity, often revealing the pain and poetry of dysfunction in surprisingly entertaining ways.

Highlights of the collection include the first two stories, Lonely Man, a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow ourselves to be led by the “little brain, and Cell, perhaps the best of the lot, an imaginative depiction of a thoroughly modern seduction. Things We Shouldn’t Do takes us into the head of an assistant manager at a Caribbean resort, who accidentally discovers his wife’s dalliance with a co-worker, and finds his life infected with cancer-like doubt. Cyberslut is a fascinating look at identity and self-perception in the surreal world of on-line sex chat; The Bachelor, a Rashamon-like rehash of events that may have happened or might still occur after an encounter in a strip club; Tennis Pro, most Cheever-esque of the stories ends on a touching but deeply gratifying note, as does Husband and Wife an authentic reflection on how marriage changes a couple, with an entertaining, satisfyingly sexy ironic twist at its climax.

There’s much to commend here, even if the language isn’t always as fluently adept or finely finished as we might have wished. At times, it feels as if the same narrator has insinuated himself into each successive story, so there isn’t enough contrast to keep things as interesting as they could have been. Still, on balance, Sex and Love is an admirable achievement, offering abundant rewards to the serious reader.  Sample the stories at random, take your time, and enjoy.

[Note that the longest story in this collection (as well as its weakest link), Single Woman, has also been published separately under the title, Climbing the Stairs.] 

 

Transported

In Transported: Erotic Travel Tales, Sharazade employs a very different method for engaging her readers, namely, by bringing them directly into the stories as characters themselves.  Seven of the nine stories in this collection employ a “shared first-person” point of view, with the author referring to herself as “I” and to the reader as “you”.  This lends a certain immediacy to the proceedings; an added layer of intimacy and excitement that many readers will find compelling in small doses. (The convention does tend to get old after reading a few stories one after another.)  The author’s style is relaxed and informal, in an easy-going vernacular, engagingly explicit but seldom off-puttingly vulgar. Each story revolves around a different destination or mode of travel, lending a nice unified feel to the compilation as a whole.

I was particularly impressed with the second story. Flaws is a masterpiece of sensual-literary craftsmanship (or would that be craftswomanship?) almost perfectly structured, with a pleasing and powerful erotic payoff at its climax. The narrator, traveling by train to a job interview in Chicago, reflects, obsessively about her physical flaws; only to forget them during a torrid encounter in a narrow sleeping compartment. (Flaws employs a conventional first-person point of view.) This story is alone worth the price of a download.

Other highlights include Sales Pitch, in which a twentysomething sales clerk in an airport “travel store” enjoys a steamy encounter with a customer; Just Browsing, relating an anonymous—but all the more arousing—encounter in the art section of a bookstore. As the narrator peruses a book of shunga (classic Japanese erotic prints), a stranger looks over her shoulder, and soon the two of them begin to act out the stories depicted in the prints.  Shore Leave colorfully evokes an early-morning sexual encounter on a beach. Onsen tells the story of a lovers’ weekend at a hot spring hotel (onsen) in Japan; this story is considerably more detailed, and delves more emotional depth than any of the others. (I was happily reminded of a similar episode in Donna George Storey’s Amorous Woman, which is, in itself, quite a recommendation.)

Transported is a quick and easy-to-read collection that may be just the thing to while away a few dull hours on a long layover or sit up with through the night in coach on a train. (Be careful, though; you never know who might be looking over your shoulder!)  Readers in the mood for well-written, simple sexy escapism won’t be disappointed.

Review of "Rye" by Sam Rosenthal

Sam Rosenthal is very much a writer on a mission. Rye is an erotic novel of ideas with unapologetically didactic aspirations, at times as infuriating as it is deeply moving; luminous, disconcerting, playful and richly enlightened. With this, his second novel, Rosenthal has given us interesting issues to explore and extraordinary characters to care about.

 “We identify as genderqueer,” the narrator tells us, “GQ isn’t about who I fuck or my sexual orientation but rather my gender identification. Rye and I each see our genders existing somewhere along the gradation between male and female, somewhere outside the gender binary. Having a boi like Rye as my lover somehow feels right.

. . . Many people want there to be only one or maybe two choices . . . like male and female . . . but that’s a societal construct of the domination culture designed to reduce our options, limit our thoughts. . .

I like the way Rosenthal’s characters relate to one another; the feelings they inspire in each other; the very natural way they banter and play together—at least when they’re not obsessing about process.  It’s true. Smart people want the same thing as everybody else; we just insist on going on ad nauseum about meta-everything while getting it. Subsequently we complain that we are unhappy, other people think we are boring, and life is passing us by. Tracing chains of causality; working back to first principals; it’s the surest way I know of inducing a migraine while putting my party guests to sleep.  And so I was at first taken aback by the characters’ constant retreat into the metacognitive ether; it felt like bad narrative non-fiction or an overly preachy film documentary—the author makes little attempt to disguise his “evangelistic” motives.  But after a while, I relaxed and accepted that this was simply the way these people talk to each other—and what they say can be quite fascinating.  

“I’ve thought a lot about that word ‘queer,’” I say. I’m still getting comfortable with it. It was a slur when I was a kid.”

“But there’s been a change in how people use it.”

“I know, hear me out. My interests are queer in the original eighteen-forties sense of the word. ‘Strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint. Freakish, unusual. I’ve always been attracted to people outside the mainstream. But when you get to the more modern ‘effeminate, unmanly.’ Then I start to bristle. Why do things have to be classified as manly or unmanly? You know there’s this Buddhist monk named Thrugpa, I really love his writing. He says ‘true reality is hidden by the labels we use. Things are, and then our mind tells us about them.’ Right! Can’t things just be? I’m just a guy. . .

This feels good. What does it mean? What does it matter? Why do we need to label things? Why? I was raised to think in classifications. Deliniations, Categories. Divisions.What went where and what wasn’t allowed to go where. Not just about sexuality, but about how to interact with the world. About the traits boys needed to hide and traits we were meant to emphasize. What would the neighbors say? I learned it is correct to be tough and insensitive, and never show you really care. Or cry. Or that you miss your pop. Or that there are things that turn you on that some unspecified ‘they’ say should not. I’m not afraid of getting fucky with men. I’m afraid of how the world will judge me if it finds out I like getting fucky with men . . .  I like being genderqueer. It’s vague. I wish I wasn’t concerned with definitions. No labels. Life would be easier . . .

Rosenthal’s prose is serviceable; not great or exceptional, and might, in spots, have benefitted from a more aggressive (or, at least, a less solicitous) editorial hand. The book is over-long, inflated by too much that is simply beside the point. The author has an annoying habit in narrative passages of remarking unnecessary detail—material that should have hit the cutting room floor on a first or second pass—dallying with banal arcana like a third-rate juvenile diarist. Especially in the novel’s second half, some of the sex scenes have the tired, warmed-over feel of superfluous reprise. The constant exchange of clichéd text messages does very little to advance the story or deepen our understanding of the characters, and becomes increasingly boring as the book wears on. Some artful narrative compression might have helped keep things focused—did we really need to hear about how Rye slept on the train from New York to Washington, and then slept some more on the return trip? Better self-editing could have enhanced word-flow; chopping redundant scenes could have given some portrayals a less artificial feel along with much greater emotional impact.

Readers who want to explore this world should naturally check their inhibitions at the door, along with any inflexibly prejudiced notions of what is and isn’t sexy. (Personally, I try to keep an open mind, especially when reviewing; I don’t judge anybody for their particular kinks, even if I am viscerally repulsed by some types of ritual humiliation, certain portrayals of group rape play, and pretty much anything involving Golden Showers or scat.)  Of course, we all bring our own personal set of hard and soft limits to any story we peruse; one’s earth-rending turn-on may well be another’s gorge-rising gross-out; the question is; do we allow our hang-ups to get in the way of an otherwise interesting and valuable learning experience? The irony is that many of those who would most benefit from the ideas presented in Rye will probably never read it, or stop reading at the first foray beyond their narrow comfort zones. More’s the pity.

While Rye certainly has its flaws—what book doesn’t?—it is a work of unique vision; the product of a serious passion; one of those unusual efforts that genuinely transcends the sum of its parts. Well worth a download.

 

 

 

 

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.