The Annex Reviews, June 2003
6/22/03 Chosen Love (Gryvon); A House in the Woods (Shakes Peer2B); Dear Bill (Smilodon); The Prize is Tight (Bert Prefect); Horny High School Freshman, Part 1 (D.F.); Nightmares and Visions (46-50) (Monocle); The Bondage Perils of Supergrrl (expanded version) (FastFist); Curiosity (Ryric); The Box (Thndrshark) 6/29/03 Triad (walt9899); Ponygirl (drewwlong); Escape from Chattel Acres (Not An e-maouse); Bearded Man, Bearded Lady (Hypatia Kosh)
6/15/03
Marco is a hot-blooded blue-collar stud, the object of many a woman's secret fantasy. Jennifer Masterson is the trim, athletic wife of his boss. When Mr. Masterson leaves some paperwork at home he tells Marco, his chauffeur, to drive home and get it. Which he does, and he gets Mrs. Masterson too, in one of those semi-rape scenarios where the upper-class wife is secretly attracted to the rough-trade underling, but has to be thoroughly ravished before she admits to it, or starts enjoying it. In the middle of the sweaty bedroom stuff comes a phone call from Mr. Masterson, who listens keenly as his wife shrieks things like "Oh my GOD! You're KILLING ME! FUCK MY FUCKING ASS MARCO!" as he has his sexual encounter with his secretary:
Again Marco rolled her over from the missionary to doggy position. He savagely penetrated her from behind, her slick sex offering no resistance as he quickly reached the bottom of her tight cunt. She screamed out. He did it over and over driving Jennifer into agony and frenzy. Her ass fucked back at Marco, bucking like a rutting animal. Her tits bounced in sympathy with his animalistic thrusts... Blaine looked down at his now shriveling penis and realized he would never make his wife cum again.
Guess who set the whole thing up... and has a secret desire to be sexually humiliated as well? I ordinarily wouldn't like a story with this subject matter, but the descriptions of rough sex were good slutty fun ("Jennifer shook in orgasm, her pussy spraying them both with her thick cum") and the initial interplay of animal sexual attraction between wife and chauffeur was well handled also, and believable even if the rest of the story descended into cartoonland. The author does need to work on his or her POV, though -- there was too much switching around between wife, Marco, and boss, which was confusing, and more structure in the plot department was needed as well. There's a lot of promise in here, though, and I'll be keeping my eye out for more from this author.
The Subway [A]
This story seemed to be a private fantasy inspired by the summer heat and the alternately peaceful and violent rhythms of a NY subway ride. The unsuspecting protagonist is hanging onto the strap in a semi-erotic daydream when a strange man starts feeling her up under her skirt ("This is too exciting. Sandra feels the man's hand sliding under her skirt, pushing her panties aside, touching the soft flesh of her pussy.") The other passengers stare and give away varying reactions on their faces, but, being New Yorkers, they don't involve themselves. Soon the protagonist is being handcuffed to the gripping bar, then blindfolded, after which she is assaulted by a vibrator, spanked, fucked, and eaten out by men and women, teens and adults. This was a very hot, enjoyable fantasy. My only complaint is with some of the language: euphemisms like "love-muscle" for cunt, and giggle-producing descriptions like "his bulging love tool pumps her pussy full of thick, manly cream." Now that's something to ask for the next time you go to Starbuck's. Iced mocha with a double shot of thick, manly cream, please! It made me laugh, but the story really could have done without it. Recommended, especially if you live or have lived in New York.
Debbie's Job Interview, Part 1 [A]
The author says of this story "Debbie came in IRC one day trolling. I decided to find out a bit more and got this fantasy. I'm not sure if Debbie was genuine or not but whatever the case I thought it would make a story." A very funny story, I'll add.
Apparently written through a series of role-playing IRC chat sessions, the story details the adventures of Debbie, a clueless ingenue who is about to interview for a position as a product tester at KSD Enterprises. Unfortunately, she does not know exactly what kind of products KSD Enterprises makes. However, we do, and when Debbie is instructed to put on a corset (described by the receptionist as a "piece of safety clothing") which later must be manually adjusted (by a polite elevator attendant in the world's slowest-moving elevator) and given a studded leather collar to wear as an identity badge ("We're just trying these out. They're more
fashionable then the boring old security tags and
easier to see") things become very kinky, and humorous, indeed, not the least because the naughty elements are given such mundane explanations. Given a ballgag-shaped cup in which to sip her gin and tonic, Debbie protests to the bartender as thus:
"It's a new type of cup. We'll all be using them one
day. There's no spillage and it leaves both your hands
free to have other things done to th... err to do
other things."
Debbie frowned at the barman.
"Here I'll show you." The barman took another 'cup'
and filled it with water. "Musn't be drinking on the
job eh?" he winked. The device consisted of a
cylindrical canister which held the drink. A tube
extended from the lid and ended in a rubber ball with
straps on.
The barman put the rubber ball in his mouth and tied
the straps behind his head. He pushed a button on the
canister and stood there smiling at Debbie drinking his
water. He waved his hands around showing that indeed
he had use of both of his hands.
Debbie looked at the barman and although he looked
kinda ridiculous she could see some advantage in the
new type of cup. She remembered all those times she
when she was studying at university and she could have
been writing notes instead of having to pick her mug
up for a drink.
The adult-toy awkwardness, in fact, reminded me of SaraH's excellent "Plain Brown Wrapper" (in the 2/21/03 Reviews) but this story played the element less for mind control and more for the real Debbie's particular "kink" (which according to the brief IRC transcript beforehand, was "I go to a job interview as a "products tester" and it turns out to be testing bondage gear including punishment devices... what makes me heaps excited is that I don't get forced but bribed and tricked with things like fake pics of my friends doing it and pics of it in a classy magazine (faked)... but it all has to be done like a proper interview not a "now I have you" sort of thing.") God bless you Debbie! Otherwise we never would have had such a romp. I'm looking forward to Part 2.
Cycle [A+]
This story was described by the author as "a deliberate attempt to play at the edges of a forum's rules about a certain subject." He also likes to write about "abduction, non-consensuality, and other fun things" so put the two together and you know you've got something controversial. It's dark fiction more than horror (dark fiction being horror's classier cousin) of the type Kathe Koja or Joe R. Lansdale might have written in the heady small-press days of the late 80s/early 90s. Like Bradley Stokes' "Freedom in the New World" (9/10/02 Reviews) this was a sex story written not so much to make you horny as to explore the authorial statements that might be made through sexual explicitness. The narrator and his wife are the parents of a young school age daughter they want to protect more than anything (and they want also to protect the image of their seemingly normal middle-class life) and so, when the narrator admits to having predatory sexual thoughts towards her, the wife coolly suggests they kidnap a substitute so the child can live a "normal" life. The substitute is a prostitute specializing in child role-play; she's kept tied and drugged in a cubbyhole in the basement, her Achilles tendons cut by the nurse wife so she can't escape. The daughter never realizes a thing, as the substitute is brought out only when she's at school. It's harsh, severe, shocking stuff, but it's not played for eroticism. Instead, it's uncomfortably *real.* A thought-provoking story that makes you wonder if the cure is worse than the disease, if maintaining an illusion of middle-class security is worse than being a criminal, and if children really must be protected at all costs.
I am Zero [A-/B+]
Brittany and Me [A-]
Stopless [A]
Ardent Bane! : Intergalactic Amazon Hunter [A]
Rachel Ross is a new author who recently made a big splash on my radar. In a one-week period in May she must have posted twenty individual stories to the ASSM newsgroup. All of them, like the Samarkand story above, dealt with darker themes: snuff, murder, BDSM, incest, and the like. It's a prodigious, varied output of erotica for such a young writer (I'm guessing she is college age, or a few years out of college) and, since I like dark, unusual stuff, I decided to sample a few. A Seattle resident from her comments (Seattle being the birthplace of grunge and, though not central to it, a vital part of the riot grrl and DIY music/art movements) she clearly has a Courtney Love compulsion to wallow in the darker side of life, a compulsion birthed of the early 90s when it was fashionable for young women to dress and act simultaneously victimized and empowered (through baby-doll dresses and Doc Marten boots) kicking boys' butts while crying to your therapist about the repressed memories of some male relative who diddled you at age seven. So 1990s, I can almost taste the mosh pit sweat. (No, I'm not exaggerating. I've lived in Seattle since the late 80s; I know whereof I speak.) The stories were also interesting because the author is representative of the younger generation of netfic authors. Writers my age (first-wave generation X) have been influenced by traditional means of publication: you craft your pieces for printed magazines, anthologies, books, forging them in isolation while hoping to catch the eye of an influential agent or editor who will take you under their wing. But writers of the later gen X wave, gen Y, have been raised on the net, practicing their craft through blogging and forums, self-posting archives, IRC chats, and IMs; they're more interactive, more communal, more into using their art to please themselves and their friends. A reflection, in fact, of the writing communities of slash/yaoi writers, about which I have written extensively. These younger writers are also unafraid to explore hard-core porn and erotica, and seamier subject matter like snuff and incest. Which, depending on how much of a moral watchdog you are, can be a good or bad thing. I found all of these stories were worthwhile reads, though they could hard to take for more sensitive stomachs. In "I am Zero" the worshipper of a strange god who kidnaps a girl by the same name of the author, taking her to the deserts of southwest Washington to be raped and sacrificed to his "god." It's the weakest of the four I read, and one of the earliest of the author's -- a story that might have been written for a class assignment. It contained some nice descriptions of that part of the state but didn't quite come together (why would the girl be so zonked out by a rape she wouldn't notice spikes being driven through her hands and feet?) But thumbs up anyway, for writing a story that could have been inspired by the Soundgarden video "Jesus Christ Pose" (a young Chris Cornell stomping around the desert, shirtless and in combat boots, interspersed with shots of a zombielike girl with lilies in her hair nailed to a glowing neon cross.) "Brittany and Me," on the other hand, is about the author's hatred for a certain pop star you can guess by the name; I suppose she changed the spelling to avoid libidinous attention. Hatred so strong the narrator hires a perky "Brittany" impersonator, hangs her from a hook in the ceiling, and tortures her, slicing her nipples off at one point. Very strong stuff, and I would have liked it to go further, but the story got derailed when the narrator's father, with whom she has an incestuous relationship, comes home unexpectedly and they both go at poor "Brittany" and each other. A nice try, but I think the point about the supreme hateability of this pop star and the effect she has on young females who hate her got lost somewhere. "Stopless" was the best of what I read: a debauched Las Vegas hooker picks up a teen runaway and offers to introduce her to the biz, wavering between guilt for ruining the girl's life and a "So what?" fatalism. It's not a glamorous biz either: instead of neon-lit casinos and high rollers' luxury suites there are horse-booking lowlifes, endless cheap beers, squalid back rooms and chauvinistic, indifferent pimps. Warning, there's a twist at the end, a shocker.
"Ardent Bane!" finds the author in a humorous mood. Manly-man Ardent Bane! goes to the planet of Sappho IV to capture the renowned monkeygirls in a live trans-space broadcast:
The front and sides of their bodies are smooth taut flesh, usually a lighter color than their fur. They have breasts which range from small and firm to large and firm. Saggy breasts have never been reported on a Monkey Girl of Sappho IV. They seem to lactate continuously and the milk from their breasts is a sweet wine-like liquid which is about 30% alcohol by volume. The genitalia of the Monkey Girls of Sappho IV are lightly furred and very small. The surrounding tissue though is loaded with over 10,000 tiny muscles!! which enable the Monkey Girls of Sappho IV to accommodate virtually any sized male organ with ease. They also have a thin membrane, similar to a hymen, which grows back over a period of 24 hours if it's broken. Amazing huh?
I wasn't quite sure what was being spoofed here (The Crocodile Hunter? Buck Rogers?) but the story was very funny in parts, and interesting in that it seemed to be the author's private giggle, not one out to please by parodying more conventional targets (such as the SF pulp cliches of Wersgor and AfreshSto.) All in all, interesting stories, interesting writer. Worth a look.
6/22/03
Sometimes slash is profound, sometimes derivative. Sometimes, like here, it's just plain... silly. Airynn is a... well, it's hard to figure out, but he is a male, and soon to be given in a goddess-mandated marriage: "Airyn knew little of the other man beyond his name and profession. Laers Ghelan, Blademaster from the Sakano village of Khyden in the Eastern Hills." I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto. As it turns out Airynn is a faradhim, "a man who turned away from the warrior lifestyle to live as a woman" and he's therefore as nervous as any blushing bride in a prudish pagan society, concerned about his husband's violent temper and whether he will be pretty enough to please him. The rocky road to wedded bliss proceeds from there. I like slash, and some kinds of trannie fiction, but this combo was pretty hard to swallow, even though it's not unheard of for some men in primitive societies to live as women (e.g., the Sissy Men of the Lakotah.) Specifically, I just couldn't swallow a cross-dressing man that acts and emotes exactly like a Romance-novel heroine, right down to the choreographed blushes and sidelong peeks at his tall and handsome "groom." It's like the author cribbed a chapter from any one of dozens of romantic action/adventure fantasies written for female tastes, and switched the gender of the female lead. Silly, very silly, but if you like slash and like the idea of this, go to it... the author wrote it very well, and it certainly delivered the goods.
A House in the Woods [A]
College students Katy and Josh pull up to the backwoods home of a lifestyle dom so he can train Katy in the arts of submission. Katy, not having been informed of this by her boyfriend, balks, and the dom, sensing an injustice (and perhaps a dislike of smug football-player frat boys) stuns poor Josh with a taser, making him the victim in this classic BDSM scenario, while innocent Katy is invited to watch his training.
This was an excellent BDSM kidnap/slave training story,
with a twist in that the young girl winds up being the
top, and enjoying it. Poor Josh is taken to the dungeon
and suspended, caned, pierced, and all that other good
stuff while being raped at both ends by his honey and
his captor (and later, two dogs.) It's rare to find a
bisexual dungeon story, and the dom also gives Katy some
sage advice:
She looked at me quizzically.
"Josh is just discovering his own true sexual nature. It's
hard on him because it goes against everything he's been
taught to believe about himself, but by the time you two
leave here, he will have realized that he NEEDS to be under a
woman's heel. If you want him, you can enslave him for as
long as you like."
I enjoyed the story, but I did think that Josh's conversion to the joys of subhood could have been more convincing -- I half expected the couple to go their separate ways after the ordeal, instead of uniting in their new roles. But the "happy" ending did charm, if a slave-training story can be said to charm.
Dear Bill [A]
Steve writes a casual letter to his friend Bill: "Thought I'd drop you a line to let you know how things are with me. You may remember Jessica, that girl I was seeing? I think you met her when last you came down for the weekend. Well, the simple truth is, we're not together anymore." And why not? A serious of sexual escapades gone wrong, each played for laughs: "No, things stared to go wrong when she introduced the whipped cream and strawberries. She put on about ten pounds in a week and I got so drained I swear my cheeks were hollow." This was a short but amusing story by Smilodon, an author I've been meaning to read for some time now, but whose posted stories were just too long for a reviewer with limited time. A nice combo of fetish and low-key humor.
The Prize is Tight [B+]
This story was a spoof of the old daytime game show staple "The Price is Right" with perpetually perky, geriatric host Bob Barker. I don't know if it's still on TV, but it was a mainstay of the sweltering east coast summers of my youth, my precious days of unschooled freedom spent slack-jawed in the dark cocoon of air- conditioned living rooms, forced to watch this dull, cheesy show because there was nothing else on (this being the BC days -- Before Cable) and going outside was like walking into a polluted Turkish sauna. Yes, I have no small amount of hate for this show. The author spoofs it in the obvious way here (you can tell by the title) with host Big Porker, and male -- and only male -- contestants with manly-man names like Rob, Rick, and Ryan who try to guess the price of various prostitutes' services. The prizes are sexual access to young high school girls, porn stars, and ever-ready female anuses lubricated with Anis-all, commercials for which are repeated at every station break. The concept was amusing for the first quarter of the story, but then became tedious. Like a feature-length movie spawned from a SNL sketch, it went on too long. The author's anal sex and schoolgirl obsessions also got tedious and made me wonder just what kind of person he was. Which you shouldn't when reading a spoofy sex story designed to be humorous; you're supposed to be concentrating on the laughs.
Horny High School Freshman, Part 1 [D]
Every so often I like to review a story that shows just how far we've come from earlier days on the net when the quality of writing was often low. Of course, you can tell right away by the title that this isn't Shakespeare, or even M1ke Hunt. The story is more like someone's idea of a story, a someone with very limited imagination and experience, and even fewer writing skills. The freshmen of the title are two "well devolped young girls" one of which has a pair of sentient, domineering buttocks ("She also had a rather large ass, which made her wear thongs by seventh Grade") and the other a boyfriend whom she services ("John ripped his pants off and she started to give him head through he boxers." -- Hmm, guess she likes the taste of wet lint). The story ends with the immortal kicker: "She decied she couldn't wear her thong home, it would be to obvious. She toot it off and went commando home." My suggestion to the author: Toot it off and go commando home.
Nightmares and Visions (46-50) [A-]
Monocle has been posting a series of short stories he says are "strange, short e-mails from anonymous addresses by parties unknown." They're more like vignettes, female fantasies in the purest sense of the word, as they concentrate on the sensations of the female body and feelings of shame, exhibitionism, and forbidden pleasure. All are dreamlike, disquieting, yet keenly erotic. In #46 the narrator is attacked by a series of candy- colored ghost men who ravish her, turning her into a ghost like themselves; #48 has a spread-eagled woman on a rack who watches as her body causes men to masturbate wildly against a glass partition, then is ravished in turn by a strange machine that pumps her full of cum. In #50, the ravisher is a mirror that sends out silver pseudopods. Numbers 47 and 49 were less interesting as they didn't contain any novel elements, focusing on pure sensation; while well written, they didn't say anything new to me. Different from the usual sex story, and intriguing enough to read more. I wonder how long these unknown writers can keep the series going.
The Bondage Perils of Supergrrl (expanded version) [B-]
Curiosity [B+]
The Box [A+]
There's a very small subgenre of mummification fiction (which in turn is a subgenre of bondage fiction) that, for lack of any other term, I'll call entombment fic. These stories center on a fetish of being embedded alive in substances like plaster of paris or cement, like the unfortunate workman who's said to have fallen into the wet concrete at Hoover Dam, and remained there to this day. There aren't many writers working in this genre and they tend to be scattered, some on the bondage or mummification sites, some on ASFR sites. FastFist wrote one of the all-time great entombment stories with his Supergirl (now wisely retitled Supergrrl) series which featured all sorts of fly-in-amber, or girl-in-amber, embedding scenarios. The story has been expanded since I reviewed it last but has degenerated badly. Once a grand, apocalyptic tale of a supervillain's conquest of the world, and the types of revenge she gets on the good guys (and the decadent form of governance she installs) it's petered out into round-robin series of random fetish ficlets, with nary a superheroine to be seen, or any sort of overriding plot or conclusion. Too bad. On the same site, Ryric's "Curiosity" deals with the sad story of Chrissie, who lets curiosity get the better of her when she peaks over the estate wall of a deranged sculptress. The artist sports a tattoo of a cement mixer over her pussy -- a spooky touch -- and it turns out her concept art consists of capturing female slaves, training them, then covering them in concrete... in one memorable scene revealing a series of beringed nipples and clits protruding from a wall, all that's to be seen of her former proteges. In the end, the poor protagonist is entombed alive in a pit in the floor. Not much of a story, but the concept gives it an interesting Stephen King flavor.
Thndershark's "The Box" also deals with entombment but
in a more conventional BDSM sense. His stories have
severe torture and degradation themes -- the enslavement
and bodily modification of young attractive females, who
most often go along with it out of anomie or a lack of
alternatives. There's an element of jerkfic (explained
in the 4/30/03 reviews) in this writer's style as well,
as the female victims are usually presented as fresh-
faced subs out to fulfill their wildest fantasies, only
to get more than they bargained for when those fantasies
become real. In this case the sub has asked to be
shaved, pierced, bound into a painful hogtie, then
buried alive in a steel box that is filled with cement.
I could almost imagine the writer smirking as he writes
passages like:
The box is then buried again in a pit of concrete, only
the slave's feeding and waste elimination tubes
connecting her to the outside world. She's to be
maintained for a while (the other female slave gleefully
administering electrical tortures via remote control)
but eventually, in the ultimate act of indifference,
This jerkfic tone was not very morally appealing to me as a person, in fact it right angered me, but I do admit it fit in well with the story's theme of sexual horror and excess, if it wasn't as two-dimensional and likeable as Toran's and Jenny's similar entombment fic "Do You Want to Continue?" It's also the shortest of this author's stories, and the most succinct; which makes it the best of the bunch, as its particular thrills aren't belabored -- they're short and sharp. An A+ for going way, way out; if you like sexual horror, give this a read.
6/29/03
Anna is a college student spending her semester break in
a town by the sea. A conservative girl in real life, she
somehow winds up with not one, but two, summer lovers,
one a rugged, bearded bartender, the other a slim,
artistic leatherworker. She enjoys passion with one, and
then the other, until the night when both men surprise
her in her apartment, revealing that they have found out
about her double life. And that far from being angry at
her, they are intrigued... and that each wants to learn
the particular sexual skills the other has, as they
advance on her together:
She felt Kevin's breath in her hair, his hands now
tweaking her nipples, and Sean's hands closing around
the inside of her hips, and said, "I can't figure out
what I'm thinking at the moment."
One of Sean's fingers slid up the inside of her leg and
got where his tongue had been unable to get: inside her.
There was no teasing at the entrance, no exploratory
nicety, just the sudden welcome penetration of his
supple, leathercrafting finger slipping inside her to
the last knuckle.
"Oh," she moaned softly, and Kevin's fingers worked her
nipples as Sean's finger worked inside her.
"The reason I ask," said Sean softly, "is because your
pussy is so wet."
Later there's an outstanding scene where one man tutors the other in the perfect cunnilingus technique using the protagonist as his teaching tool. I felt the story was A work up to that point -- excellent without being outstanding -- but that passage pushed the grade towards an A+. The writer has such a good hand with sex scenes that I was surprised (and delighted) at his or her skill, which doesn't happen too much these days, as I've read so much of this stuff over the past seven years. The story didn't have any silly humor, wicked satire, whips and chains, slimy aliens or barbarian warriors, but it was intelligent and adult, a realistic -- but not so realistic as to distract us with the author's eye for realism, if that makes sense -- tale of contrast between two different lovers, from a female point of view. In fact, it was one of the most female stories I've read -- by which I mean a female would gain the ultimate reading enjoyment from it. Which is quite an accomplishment if the writer is a male, as he seems to be from the name.
Ponygirl [B]
I usually dislike "You are there" stories, the ones that
are told in second person ("You are beginning to feel
very wet. His fingers touch your pussy and you moan")
but every once in a while I find one that does a
reasonable job of getting me hot without making me
cringe in embarrassment or laugh out loud. In this story
the "you" is the sub female of a D/s pair in an 18th
century European state, and she goes out for a night on
the town with her master:
The local color was very good for one of these stories, which tend to be on the dull side, with evocative descriptions of carriage rides, silk stockings, and decadent nobles. Everything was going well until the middle, when, out of the blue, the "you" is handed over to a hastily introduced countess to serve as her ponygirl, with nary a peep of protest from the you or her dom. The charming 18th century flavor was lost (one of the characters even says "OK" -- for shame!) and the writing declined in quality too, so I'm guessing another writer either took the story over, or embellished on it. Too bad, as the first part had a lot of promise.
Escape From Chattel Acres [A-]
Back in the 3/23/03 reviews I did a crit of "Chattel Acres," a newsgroup story posted back in 1999 about captive females treated as cattle. It was a supremely dystopic slave fantasy where nothing good happened (the females were pierced, branded, milked, and eventually slaughtered for food, or entertainment) that was nonetheless very readable. Perhaps my review sparked some interest in the series, because this author has written a sequel that seems to be a female response to the extreme chauvinism of the original (described by the author as "Grizzly stuff!") The heroine of the story is a failed sharpshooter, gymnast, sometime model, and actress who falls into cowhood through a phony job offer. Feisty and cranky (and also annoying) she is treated the same as all the other captives, who are too passive or browbeaten to question their fate. But when it comes time for the protagonist to be slaughtered, she has an ace up her sleeve. I'm not going to reveal it, though it was unbelievable unless the victim had a penis the size of a cocktail wiener. Nevertheless, she's quick-thinking and resourceful, eventually escaping the slaughtering barn and flagging down a news helicopter that just happens to be flying overhead. I was pleased that someone took the time to write a sequel that redressed the injustices in the original, but to my taste it lacked the grandeur and scope of the first. Which I suppose is a problem in trying in redress an original: it's just not the same. A darkfic has to stand alone. It loses its power when things are turned right in the end, no matter how much a reader would wish otherwise. Still, a good try, and someone had to do it.
Bearded Man, Bearded Lady [A]
I haven't paid much attention to Trek fics in the past few years. Younger writers, the ones who have the time and energy for the fast-paced world of net-based fanfic writing, are more interested in Buffy or Lord of the Rings, and the rise of IM, chat rooms, forums, specialized mailing lists, and self-posting archives have let even the more obscure fandoms come into prominence. Star Trek, I'm afraid, has been left a bit behind in the dust. Even the once-grand alt.startrek.creative archive site has been neglected lately, and the series itself is in decline. Nevertheless this was a short, well-written story that was more porn than fanfic, and you don't have to be a Trek fan in particular to enjoy it. It's about a young Deanna Troi's obsession for men with beards, and frankly, any SF heroine could have replaced her, or any real-life heroine for that matter. It's a fetish you don't see too often, from a female perspective that is; even in slash, the male love objects are shaved clean.
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