Amanda McIntyre: The Diary of Cozette

From the back of the book-

True, I am but a mere maidservant from a great house, snatched from a wretched existence of poverty and desperation to serve noblemen of wealth and privilege.
And yet...
While I am indeed of lowly rank, I am also a young woman who allowed herself to sample life's greatest pleasures in the hands of these titled men. My tales overflow in this journal, penning my journey to becoming a woman of power of the most base, yet stimulating, breed.
Unmarried and twenty, yet betrothed to no man, I would be considered a spinster by most, yet this is of my own ardent intention. With my unabashed lushness and wisdom regarding a man's most vehement cravings, I am not lacking for suitors or proposals given in the heat of passion. No, I have yet to meet the man who will challenge me, satisfy me in all ways, not only of the flesh.
For where passsion and desire are fleeting, my heart continues to
beat...

In order to read this one has to come to accept the ideas that a low ranking ninteenth century woman is literate, articulate and willing to consciously break all of society's sexual conventions. If you can clear those hurdles then you have to face the story line which seems unrealistic and relies heavily on coincidence to achieve its happy ending. I refuse to suspend my disbelief just because this is an erotic novel.
The very thing that attracted me to this book (the presentation style of short diary entries) also made it very hard to connect with the characters in any meaningful way. We get only the briefest of glimpses into their world and very little insight into character motivation, the focus being instead on the sexual exploits of the main character. Of course, that's only to be expected in an erotic novel.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that I didn't like this novel but in fact I didn't mind it. The author writes well enough but the story is let down by no real sense of time and place, essential in an historical novel of any kind, and its superficial characters, really inexcusable in a diary.
I did like that the heroine got a happy ending even if it did feel contrived. So often the sexually independent woman comes to a bad end, it was good that wasn't the case here.-Lynn

Pride/Prejudice - Ann Herendeen

Charles always knew he'd one day need to take a wife, but he never dreamed he'd find a woman who would catch first his eye and then his heart, until he met Jane. This distresses Fitz, had never been attracted to a woman, intellectually or sexually, until he met Elizabeth. And Elizabeth enjoys her intimate romps with Charlotte more than anything she could imagine doing with a man, though glimpsing Charles and Fitz together makes her feel curiously faint and flushed.
As the title indicates, Pride/Prejudice is a slashy reworking of Jane Austen's most loved novel, that incorporates much of the original plot, characters, dialogue and events, but adds a new and significant dimension. Taking place before and between the scenes of Austen's novel, Pride/Prejudice seeks to uncover a truth universally ignored - that the two male leads of this most well read of literary classics has a clear but unseen subtext. In Herendeen's reimagining, Charles Bingley and Fitzwilliam Darcy are enthusiastic lovers, the latter more so than the former, who's ready to move forward into a more adult (ie heterosexual) relationship.
When Lizzie goes to Netherland Park to tend to her incapacitated sister she not only falls out with Darcy but also spies a rigorous tryst between him and her sister's love interest. The scene distresses her, for she loves Jane and wants her to be happy, an outcome Lizzie considers unlikely given Bingley's otherwise directed interest. But Lizzie is also a little captivated by what she sees...
And that's where I left Pride/Prejudice. Perhaps it was just that I read it a little to soon after Phyllida, perhaps I'm just over the obsessive love of Pride & Prejudice, or perhaps I just wasn't in the right head space for it. Whatever the reason, I had the strong sense that, like Phyllida, the action would in all senses focus on the men, that the male relationships would be more complex and rewarding that those with and between the women, and that Lizzie's main role would be to support Mr Darcy doing as he desired while she was content with the scraps of their relationship. I may well have been wrong - that, after all, is the down side to halting only part way through a book. But I'm not unhappy with my decision. - Alex

Poppy Z. Brite: Love in Vein-Tales of Vampire Erotica

From the back of the book-

Beyond fear, beyond horror, beyond temptation, there is a realm of the senses that only the boldest may enter. An acclaimed master of the dark fantastic, author Poppy Z Brite has brought together the genre’s most powerful and original writers to reinvent the literature of the macabre and give it a distinctly erotic spin.
A shameless celebration of unspeakable intimacies, the stories within explore out most sinister and irrepressible hungers, those that even lovers are forbidden to share.

The fact that it has taken me ten years to complete this collection of twenty short stories says more about what I think of them than any words could.
To be fair I have only vague memories of the first part of the collection but I didn’t find any of the offerings piqued my interest enough to follow up on any particular author. The same can be said of the final third of the collection which is fresh in my mind.
I think part of my disappointment in this book comes from the liberal definition of vampire. I was hoping for the traditional blood sucking monster, however, here the term vampire is used to describe any parasitic feeding from a human. While it’s not unheard of to use the term in this way it still skewed my expectations and lead to disappointment.
Also erotica, like humour, is personal and while I wasn’t surprised or offended by this collection, neither did I find it titillating. It simply wasn’t to my taste.
For me this was a ho-hum anthology that left me just a little flat.-Lynn

The Mammoth Book of Women’s Erotic Fantasies – Sonia Florens (Ed)

In 1973 Nancy Friday published a groundbreaking text, My Secret Garden, a collection of women’s sexual fantasies that revealed women could be as daring, surprising and explicit as men. Over the next two decades she followed this up with three more collections, two of women's fantasies and one of men's. In all four cases the fantasies were presented thematically, biographical data was provided (including age), there was often an attempt by the narrators to explain or analyse their fantasies, and sections were interspersed with Friday’s analysis of the fantasies and fantasists.
This noughties revisit to the ground explored by Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking books skips straight over the clinical, objective phsychological analysis and interpretation of the writing and goes straight to the good stuff. The women represented come from Canada, the US, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Germany and Puerto Rico, with no further biographical information given.
Rather than the somewhat brief and fragmented scenes narrated by Friday’s research participants, that sometimes included more than one scenario, or which described an outline of the fantasy rather than the scene itself, these women also seem less compelled to explain or justify their fantasies, and the scenarios are lovingly and completely described. In most cases each entry runs over eight pages, with one as few as six, and a few going for more than a dozen pages.
While themes including light sadomasochism, domination, lesbianism, power play, men with men, exhibitionism, and group sex are present, the more taboos elements present in Friday’s collections (including bestiality, rape, underage and incest fantasies) are absent from this more mainstream work. There is, however, likely to be something for most people, and I certainly found a few of the works particularly well written, well imagined and effective. – Alex

Emma Holly: Prince of Ice

When a disgraced royal demon scheming to regain power by bearing the emperor a child, dies before her plans come to fruition, the daughter she leaves behind is raised alongside a young prince. That is until his affection for the girl starts to worry his parents who turn her out of their house.
Prospects are not good for the unwanted orphan, so when she is given the opportunity to make her fortune as a courtesan she takes the chance.
Her first protector is none other than her childhood friend. But he is no longer the sweet boy she remembers and she is no longer the carefree child she was all those years ago. Not only that, but their stations in life are greatly changed and their interaction is governed by a strict code of behaviour. The two fall in love and as a result face charges of treason and potential death sentences. But the girl’s family blackmail the emperor into accepting banishment rather than execution and the couple leave the isolated world they know to carve a future together in the human world.
I picked this book up because it was supposedly set in the same alternate Victorian universe as The Demon’s Daughter but while the story is set in the same universe, it takes place entirely in the isolated demon world. For all intents and purposes it may as well have been set in the Far East. Everything from the characters’ names and interests to the social structure scream eighteenth century Asia. The technology was entirely modern and while I knew this aspect of the demon world, I was disappointed that the steampunk elements that so attracted me to the first book were missing here.
There is plenty of Holly’s trademark erotica to be found within the pages which is technically well done but I feel wasn’t quite up to her usual standard. The ruling class genitalia and hormone cycles seemed both unnecessarily complicated and unbelievable (the royal males are physically different to common males but status is at the whim of the emperor-hmmm?).
Overall, not a bad book, particularly if you are a fan of the friends-to-lovers storyline, but certainly not what I had hoped for.-Lynn

Nancy Warren: By The Book

A woman’s fantasies about her hot neighbour are doused when she discovers he’s got a ‘how-to’ manual about pleasing women. When he asks her to assist with the couples exercises she reluctantly agrees. Little does she know that he wrote the book and intends to investigate its validity using her as a test subject. The two hit it off, in every sense of the word, and end up falling in love.
This book from Harlequin’s Blaze imprint is pretty much what you’d expect-sexually detailed without becoming too explicit.
The storyline is reasonably believable, the characters have some personality and the sex is plentiful, if not particularly imaginative.
More romantica than erotica it focuses on the developing relationship between the partners and the sex scenes are threaded with emotion rather than just a vivid description of the physical act.
While this is not the best example of its genre that I’ve ever read, neither is it the worst. It’s an inoffensive love story with a mild erotic element. I’m not completely sold on the Blaze line but I would try another if the storyline appealed.-Lynn

Emma Holly: The Demon's Daugher

A society very similar to Victorian England has made a pact with a race of Demons. The outcasts of demon society are free to live amongst humans in exchange for the use of their advanced technology. But the deal has a dark side. Demons can, and do, feed from human energy, though supposedly only with the consent of the humans in question. Both governments turn a blind eye to the practice but secretly acknowledge the power differential by the employment of police officers, who have been enhanced with demon technology to give them greater strength and speed required to keep rowdy demons under control.
When the bastard daughter of a renowned courtesan is discovered to be half demon-a situation thought to be impossible-both governments want her for their own nefarious purposes. It is up to the prototype enhanced police officer and her demon father to save her from a terrible fate.
This they manage to do, all while avoiding diplomatic disaster, learning to accept themselves and each other and of course, discovering the many meanings of love.
Emma Holly is best known for her erotic romances and this story does have more than its fair share of erotic scenes, many of which do not further plot or character development. Having said that, they are for the most part, well written and varied, and not used as the only attraction between the main couple, making them welcome additions to the story-something other authors have not managed to carry off with anywhere near this level success.
I quite like steampunk when it’s done well and here the world building is excellent. So subtle that much of the mores of both societies must be inferred from background information and behaviour, yet detailed enough to make that inference easy and believable. The extracts from various texts presented as quotes at the beginning of each chapter serve both to assist with world building and to add a touch of humour to the story. I enjoyed many of these asides almost as much as the main story.
Romance, erotica, fantasy and intrigue: The Demon’s Daughter works on a number of levels. I am delighted to have discovered this book and pleased that Ms Holly has set at least two other stories in this fascinating universe.-Lynn

Pam Rosenthal: The Edge of Impropriety

A widowed countess, left impoverished by her husband’s first family, turns to writing popular novels to make ends meet. For publicity purposes she fosters an image, not entirely false, of hedonism that boarders on scandalous. Blackmailed by a former servant who knew her when she was young, wild and trading on her beauty, she must keep her past a secret from society if not to ruin her career.
The release of her latest book coincides with her meeting a retiring scholar and antiquarian with whom, against all odds and expectations, she has a torrid affair. Wanting nothing more than a fling with a mystery lover that will set tongues wagging and sales soaring, she is shocked when her feelings for him take an unpredictable turn (she has never taken a lover for longer than a season before). But if she is to have any hope of winning the love of her current paramour he must not find out about her past.
Discovering the direction of her affections, the blackmailer threatens to tell all, unless she bestows her favours upon him in addition to her monthly cash payments. She can’t go through with the deal and writes a Dear John letter to her lover detailing all of her colourful past and makes plans to run away to the continent before the truth of her history is widely known.
Against a background of break-ins, thefts, and questionable deaths the lovers manage to sift through the many, many obstacles in their paths and accept each other for who they are, not were or might have been. While not expressed a happy ending for the two is heavily implied.
As an historical romance I found this book to be no better, or worse, than others of its kind. Its novelty was in its erotic nature. The premise for the affair was believable, as was the affair itself. In spite of the characters wildly different natures their paring seemed quite natural. The writing was sensual, giving erotic detail tastefully. The plot held its own and was not merely a vehicle for tying together a series of sex scenes.
I would read more of this author’s work should it cross my path.-Lynn

The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica – Lawrence Schimel (ed)

Published in 1998, Gay Erotica gathers short stories from the previous fifteen years, with the intention of incorporating a broad cross section of the genre – restricted only to contemporary and living male authors, across a variety of nationalities (stories come from the UK, Canada and Australia, as well as the US), the editor aimed for “a celebration of gay men and gay sex, in all its complexity – from the delights of the flesh to anxiety about disease, from ephemeral anonymous encounters to long-term relationships. But each is unquestionably and unapologetically the story of desires between men.”
A large number of women enjoy reading gay porn or erotica (“a distinction based on marketing rather than content or quality, per se”), and I am one. I know from talking with gay male friends that, though there’s overlap, different audiences look for different things. I won’t go in to what it is I look for, except to say that I didn’t find it in this collection.
There have been significant changes in the gay community over the past decade, a fact that is true even though the phrase “gay community” makes it sound as though there’s a homogenous clump of gay men, which is of course not the case. With more, cheaper and better antiretroviral drugs, HIV/AIDS is more often a chronic disease than the imminent death sentence it once was, and the spectre of death less frequently haunts gay men. Ten years ago the effect of HIV drugs was beginning to be felt, but for many men too many friends and lovers had already died, and it’s wholly understandable that this is present in the collection, that those relationships be honoured, and the impact of the disease be acknowledged. Indeed, the earliest story was first published in 1982, before most of the world, including the medical community, had even heard about the disease.
However, death and dying aren’t erotic, or at least not to an appreciably large audience. When I’m reading erotica I’m more interested in being titillated than I am in literature, a distinction not shared by many of the authors. I’m also not thrilled about the heavy drinking and sustained drug use that is frequently present in the collection; I know it accurately reflects reality, but I’m not reading the collection to enhance my understanding of the lived experience of gay life at the turn of the century.
All of that’s fine – no collection will be all things to all readers, and the disinterested can skip over the bits that don’t appeal to them. But I was actively distressed by the inclusion by no fewer than three authors of strong and frequent references to the protagonists’ mothers. Take, for example, “John,” by G Winston James, where the narrative of a man leaving his therapist’s office and seeking anonymous sex in a gay porn theatre is interrupted frequently by flashbacks of his abusive mother, a past lover, and other unidentified characters. It might be interesting in a psychological portrait but I found it the antithesis of erotic. - Alex