Review of "Scary Old Sex" by Arlene Heyman

This collection of seven longishly-belabored literary stories disappoints as often as it pleases: after slogging through to the end, I cannot escape the impression of a blandly competent author, seriously out of their depth. In tone and style, the stories in Arlene Heyman's Scary Old Sex have the feel of superannuated student exercises, assignments turned in for some late-sixties undergraduate creative writing seminar, aping the modishly arch nihilism of the day, every detail, no matter how trivial, unfailingly observed, with a cold clinical detachment and precious little sense of direction or purpose, Many of these pieces seem to have been taken out of mothballs, the hopeful typescripts dusted off after decades, lightly revised to a minimum standard of editorial presentability—whatever the hell that means in this post-FSOG day and age—and published to great fanfare, no doubt along with the percussive popping of half-a-dozen self-congratulatory champagne corks.

The project as a whole has a suspiciously cynical, mercenary pungence about it. Why should anyone be bothered to give a flightless fuck about yet another aging star-schtupper cashing in on her youthful relationship with a famous literary figure? It is no secret that Heyman, as a 19-year-old student at Bennington College, carried on a two-year affair with her professor, the middle-aged Bernard Malamud. No secret at all—in fact, much of the publicity for this collection centers on that relationship, a drably fictionalized version of which comprises the second story in the book. It might be one thing if Heyman’s writing was in the least bit inspired—it is not—insightful or profound or even remotely interesting—most of the time it is none of those things. Apparently authorial success is a matter of who you know—or, at least, who you once knew in the Biblical sense—and, having once caught the eye of the Great Man, every amateurish pecadillo is now effectively washed away in the blood of the lamb, and the “critics that matter” fall over themselves to hail a major literary event.  (Perhaps I’m growing cynical or senile in middle age, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the New York critical establishment is easily titillated.)

Even in the two stories I came close to liking--Night Call and Artifact--there's little or no emotive range in these narratives. Bitterness and ennui are Heyman’s go-to emotions, and she goes to them with tedious frequency.  The female characters, whether young, old, or middle-aged, seem to have nothing better to do than break down and cry at the drop of a hat, or complain shrewishly about the lack of sexual satisfaction in their all-too-ordinary lives.  The men are emotionally clueless, shallowly articulate, and indifferently characterized—current husbands always coming up short against former dead ones. Children are the ever-present bringers of chaos, either too good or too stupid to live. Conflict amongst these ‘types’ too often feels forced and over-effortfully imagined.  Everybody has a torturously-detailed backstory that ultimately adds nothing to the reader’s understanding. Amateurish head-hopping, inconsistent point-of-view, lack of narrative direction or coherent structure, downright foolish attempts at getting into the heads of characters the author clearly knows or cares nothing about—in the end creating a soggy non-critical mass of who-the-hell-gives-a-healthily-introspective-termite’s-turd.  

What disturbs and disappoints me most as someone who cares deeply about great erotic writing, is Heyman’s stultifyingly conventional approach to sexual subject matter, especially where ‘old sex’ is concerned. Where the hype has led readers to expect something revelatory, daringly paradigm-shifting in the literary exploration of geriatric eroticism, what we get is the all-too-familiar horror and disgust at the prospect of physical decay and declining performance, still measuring everything against the insipidly narrow, bourgeois vision of youthful health and beauty. In this regard, at least, the title of the collection is apt: as Heyman would have it, sex is scary—old sex is even scarier.

What a crock of crap!

Books like this suck all the air out of the room for serious writers who care about quality and sincerely desire to explore new erotic frontiers. Use sex to sell something second-rate like this, and no one will give a truly worthy book a second look, no matter how genuinely mature, inspired, thoughtful, well-crafted, and brilliant that book may be.

Not recommended!!!!!

Now available everywhere: TAS' "A Song for the Girl with the Almond Eyes" (with excerpt)

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

E-book release, Friday June 3rd, 2016

Available at
Smashwords (all platforms)

(enter discount code QW79D on checkout to receive the special price of $1.50
(62 percent off the regular cover price of $3.99).
This coupon will be good through August 1, 2016)

Also now available at

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble Nook

And in paperback at 

Amazon

Createspace Direct
Barnes and Noble 

and all other retailers worldwide (on request).

from Chapter 2:

Laughing and belching, we trooped across the street for a round or two of miniature golf—the perfect game to play when you’re drunk, or have no athletic ability even when sober. We picked up our clubs and paired off: May-Lin and Chris, Heather and me. That left Erin odd woman out, though not for long. A big guy in a brown fishnet body shirt and a Coors baseball cap started following her around like a lovesick pit bull. Not exactly her type, he looked like a redneck version of The Thing from The Fantastic Four comics, or maybe the Incredible Hulk’s trailer park-dwelling lookalike cousin without the smart alter ego. Not that it mattered to Erin. She was in one of her expansive, fun’s-where-you-find-it moods, even more flirtatious and frisky than usual—and a lot less picky. She played the ditzy redhead for all it was worth, flaunting her magnificently articulated body to stunning effect, a living, breathing Vargas girl in Daisy Dukes.

“Here, lemme show ya!” Brownshirt bent over and guided Erin’s hands on the club, the oldest, sleaziest trick in the book, except this guy wasn’t even trying to be subtle about where his hands went. Subtlety probably wasn’t part of his repertory to begin with, and Erin wasn’t helping any. As he leaned over her, she shoved her ass back into his crotch, giggling like a middle-school airhead at her first mixer, which seemed to be about this guy’s usual speed.

And so it went, with The Thing taking every opportunity to cop and grope and grab whatever he could get his hands close to, and Erin not seeming to take the whole thing too terribly seriously at all. Only once in a while, he’d go a bit too far, Erin would give a playful squeal and skip away, laughing at him, “Naughty, naughty!”

“C’mon, Legs, let’s go some place private—” Brownshirt scratched his crotch “—let’s you ‘n’ me lose these losers and have ourselves a party.”

“Maybe some other night,” Erin said. “I just decided I’m on the rag right now.”

“So what? I don’t mind it a little sloppy. ‘Sides, I ain’t got me a rubber. You can get down on your knees and suck, can’tcha?”

“Not like you,” Erin muttered. Her critical faculties seemed to be coming back online. She kept on for a while, deflecting the hulk’s cumbersome come-ons with jokes and jibes, but the effort was clearly beginning to tell. After a while, she called over to us. “Hey guys! What time’s it getting to be?”

“About time to go,” Chris said.

It was the only cue any of us needed. En masse, we headed out, turned in our clubs, and made our way towards the parking lot, moving as quickly as we could without looking scared.

“Get back over here you cock-teasin’ cunt!” It had only taken a second for the big guy to come after us.

“Excuse me?” Chris was cool as a Zen cucumber.

“Not you, punk! I’m talkin’ to the birthday girl, the redhead with the legs—the ten-cent slut!”

“You wanna rephrase that?” Chris said.

“Yeah!” Erin put her hands on her hips. “I’ve never charged less than fifty cents in my life.”

“Real fuckin’ funny, Legs. Who’s this guy, your boyfriend?”

“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t;” Erin said, “but he’s a helluva lot closer than you’ll ever get.”

“I see three cunts and a pair o’ peckers. Looks to me like you’ve got a surplus of pussy, buddy. Maybe that’s more pussy than you can handle.”

“Oh, like you could?” Erin made the L-for-loser sign on her forehead.

“Let’s not piss him off too much,” Chis side-muttered.

“You got a problem sharin’ the wealth?” Brownshirt gestured towards May-Lin and Heather.

“No,” Chris said, “but I do have a problem with loud-mouth assholes who think I should pimp for them.”

“Asshole? Hey, that slut was comin’ on to me. Big-time. Promised she’d give it to me, and I’m holdin’ ‘er to it.”

“Jesus! Get over yourself,” Erin said.

“You lyin’-mouthed whore!”

“I think you should apologize now,” Chris said.

“What’re you gonna do if I don’t, shithead?” Brownshirt took a menacing step forward.

“This.” Chris stripped off his belt in a move so deft and fluid and blindingly fast that it still seems unbelievable. Quicker than you could say Raiders Of The Lost Ark, he was putting the belt to good use, lassoing Mr. Big around the leg, and pulling him off his feet. The whole thing took less than a second. When it was over, Brownshirt lay sprawled on his back in the gravel of the parking lot, cursing and spitting, trying to get up, but not having much luck, seeing as how Chris’s foot was planted firmly in the middle of his chest. “Now, shall we try this again?”

“You cock-suckin’ bastard! I get up, and you’re a dead man!”

“Wrong answer,” Chris said. “Believe me; I can stand here all night if you’re not willing to work on your attitude.”

“She was comin’ on to me! She owes me. Ask her!”

Chris did.

“Is this true, Erin?”

“He wishes. OK, maybe I was flirting a little, but you know me, Chris. I flirt with everybody. Only an idiot would be taking it seriously.”

“I think the shoe may fit in this case,” Chris said.

“Well I sure as hell didn’t promise him anything.”

“That’s a fuckin’ lie,” Brownshirt howled. “She said she’d show me ‘er tits.”

“Boy, some people should never play miniature golf,” May-Lin giggled.

“Get back in the van, you guys,” Chris spoke evenly. “We’re leaving. You too, Erin.”

“I’m gonna follow you,” the troglodyte growled from the ground. “I’m gonna find out where you live, and then I’m gonna come for you.”

“Not a wise plan,” Chris said.

“You, I’m gonna kill, faggot,” Brownshirt said, “you and your limp-wristed butt-fuckin’ buddy over there. Then I’m gonna party with your girls, startin’ with the chink. Hear that, Legs? I’m gonna fuck your little gook friend right in front of you. Then I’m gonna bend the tall one over and do her up the ass. That’s before I start messing you up. When I’m done, you ain’t gonna have nothin’ left t’ tease with.”

“You’re not a very nice man,” Chris said. “You’re also not very smart. Or didn’t you notice? You’re the one with your ass on the ground.”

“Why don’t you let me up and see if you can pull that fag belt trick on me again?”

“Tell you what,” Chris said, “I’ll let you up, you apologize very politely to my friends, we’ll leave, and you promise not to follow us.”

“Or what? You kick my ass?”

“Well, maybe I did get lucky the first time. Maybe I caught you off guard, and maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky a second time. You know the old saying? ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, yada yada yada.’ And it could be you’re not the kind of guy who can be fooled twice, I don’t know. It’s possible I wouldn’t be able to do it again, and if you want to take that chance, I’m cool with the outcome, whatever it turns out to be. I always try to play by the rules.”

“Lemme up. Lemme up now!”

“OK, I’m letting you up. Sure hope this means you wanna play nice.”

Chris removed his foot from Brownshirt’s chest, quickly stepping back a pace. The hulk rose to his feet, grunting and groaning and swearing disgustedly under his breath, brushing the gravel and dust from his clothes. He turned his back and started to lumber away, leaning over to pick up his Coors cap.

Chris was ready for the sucker punch when it came.

Brownshirt pivoted on his right foot, aiming a broad left hook at Chris’s jaw. For so big a guy he could move pretty fast, and against anybody other than Chris, he probably would’ve done considerable damage. His aim was dead on.

But Chris’s face wasn’t where it was supposed to be when Brownshirt’s fist arrived. He’d ducked and danced out of the way with the speed and grace of a skinny white Muhammad Ali. Before the jerk knew what was happening, Chris had gone all Indiana Jones on his ass again, flicking the belt with expert wrist action, catching him around the neck like a lizard snarfing a bug with its tongue.

Brownshirt winced, the momentum of his missed punch still propelling him leftward. A quick turn of Chris’s wrist, and suddenly the big guy was hurtling in the opposite direction, wrenched off his feet. His head cracked into the side of the minivan with a dull thud. The girls let out a sharp collective scream, but nothing else happened.

The big guy stood there for a long moment, face glued to the glass, with a look of pure imbecilic surprise. It was the kind of “oh shit!” expression Goliath must have had when he realized the shrimp with the slingshot had made him his bitch.

May-Lin gasped. “Holy shit, Chris, have you killed him?”

“Naw, he’s fine. Might have a helluva headache for a while, but, hopefully, he won’t remember anything when he wakes up.”

“Hell,” Erin said, “now I almost feel sorry for the jerk.” She slid out of the driver’s seat, making her way back to the window. “Hey!” She tapped on the inside of the glass, making sure the big guy was paying attention. “Hey! Is this what you wanted?” Erin lifted her shirt, flashing her boobs for a half second or so. Apparently, it was enough. Brownshirt’s legs buckled, and the rest of his body followed, collapsing slowly along the side of the van, leaving a trail of drool on his way to the ground.

“Holy—” Erin said. “Let’s get the hell outta here before he wakes up.”

Heather hadn’t spoken a word through all of this. I’d kept my arms around her and May-Lin like a protective older brother, and we’d all climbed into the back seat together when Chris told us to move. But between the unfolding drama of the fight and the erection-inducing thrill of May-Lin’s trembling body so close to mine, my whole attention had been drawn to the left, and I’d completely spaced anything even remotely Heather-related. Suddenly, I became aware of my girlfriend’s hand, squeezing mine so tightly that it had begun to hurt. I willed myself to turn to the right. The expression on Heather’s face was like an emotional multiple-choice exam where the correct answers keep changing without warning. Anybody with even a smattering of “female-ese” could have told me what this meant. Roughly translated, she was saying “pay attention to me, you stupid blind jerk!”

But I wasn’t paying attention. In fact, I hardly gave it a second thought. Everybody was experiencing their own personal catharsis. May-Lin and Erin were all pumped up like hot-to-trot groupies at a rock concert. Chris was leaning back, eyes closed, totally calm and relaxed, silently recharging his batteries. I figured Heather was dealing with things in her own way and if she wanted something she’d ask for it. Obviously, I knew nothing about women. It wouldn’t be long before my insensitivity came back to bite me on the butt.

In the meantime, I soaked up as much of the older girls’ vibe as I could.

“That was absolutely amazing, baby!” May-Lin gushed. “I’ve never seen anybody keep their cool under pressure like that before.”

“Cool’s what it’s all about,” Chris said. “In a situation like that you never wanna get to where you see red. That’s the first thing that’ll get you in trouble. You need to get cold in a predicament, not hot. You need to calculate and observe like a computer, and let the other guy make all the mistakes.”

“Well, I’m just glad you’re on our side.” May-Lin leaned across me to meet Chris with a congratulatory kiss.

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: 

Smashwords (all platforms)

(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:

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble Nook

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


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