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However, the fantastic influence of the show seems to have extended only to the author's name, as the stories were rooted in the mundane world rather than the fantastic. Most were on the short, compact side (under 1,000 words) and written in a stream-of-consciousness way...slice-of-life, in other words, the erotic equivalent of a quickly taped "confessional" on a TV virtual-reality show. I picked six stories for my review, out of a catalog of 36. All had cryptic one-word titles. In "Pear" the narrator falls in lust with a co-worker with a taste for the juicy fruit, but she's more interested in fucking his cubicle-mate, while in "Evangelists" the narrator is obsessed enough with a girl that he joins her church. In "Arrogance" and "Vows" a woman wavers between her husband and another flame, in its gender opposite, "Hell," a man fucks the slutty daughter of a slutty ex-girlfriend he knew years before, and suffers for it. In "Tiger" it's a lobbiest's lust for a senator; trying to climb the rungs, she fucks his aide. If there's a theme to them, it's voyeurism, observation, and indecisiveness. The characters exhibit contradictory sexual behavior, but don't know why, and if you could ask them about it, they'd probably go "Huh? I do? Well, no big deal." The stories were an easy read, and I had the feeling they were dashed off very quickly. Though the writing was OK, they were missing a certain...something. The tone was straightforward, almost journalistic, but the characters had neither a plot or character development, and no conclusions were reached either by them or the author about the outcomes of their behavior. This made the stories ultimately unsatisfying for me; I found the sexy parts neither erotic (sensual description) or particularly hot (sordid, porny description). In fact they were rather flat, the style reminiscent of certain progressive 70s fiction where characters "ball" and "fuck" in a deadpan way to show us how cool and un-hungup they are. "Tiger" came the closest to being a fully developed story, but even that felt truncated, undeveloped...a sketch of a story rather than the story itself. To be fair the author called these "quick sketches to buckets of paint thrown large against a canvas...products of a deranged mind, where fantasy and reality, delusion and experience rip each other's clothes off and fuck in a giant orgy of uncontrolled primal lust or stare at each other, unrequited, across a crowded room" which means, I guess, that they are of a throwaway nature, but the fact that I read four of them two weeks before writing this, and had to look again at the printouts to refresh my memory as I'd forgotten them completely, doesn't bode well for being a writer who wants to grab people by the throat. In sum, the website was OK, competent but slightly disappointing. But if you want some quick reads you could do worse than this.
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