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Despite the pseudo-scholastic tone of the manifesto I don't think it quite gels, seeming, to me at least, to be a partial ripoff of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos (especially in the mentions of ancient gods and the Purple Book, which is all too transparently globbed from the Necronomicon and other imaginary tomes) yet the fiction is very good, a thinking adult's erotica. The author first showed up on my radar with "Taste of What You Want" (7/10/02 reviews) which, though it left me unsatisfied, inspired me to explore other stories by the author, and on their site I've found several gems that might, in fat, stand as classics of their kind. In "The Stroke Club" (patterned after Fight Club?) the narrator visits a swingers' club set up, like so many swinger's clubs, in an average suburban household on the edge of town, run by average, if slightly different, managers (a family of hard-working Native Americans.) The purpose of the club is for two men and two women to loll around on barcaloungers masturbating in front of each other, all the while noting each others' reactions. No touching is permitted, but the voyeurism aspect is satisfying enough for the participants. It's a whopper of a idea, and is beautifully detailed, the author having an excellent touch at portraying the sexual aspects of everyday life and giving them a slight turn that pushes them towards the bizarre. In other stories, the bizarre takes on the comfy aspect of the normal and mundane. In "Crystal Impalement" a woman recently broken up with her sex-addict boyfriend receives a beautifully fashioned crystal dildo as parting gift from him. The total inappropriateness of the gift, and her disgust with him, isn't enough to prevent her from giving it a test run, and what follows is the most erotic description of a glass dildo I've seen:
I parted my lips with my fingers and slipped the tip of the dildo into me. Good God, it was so thick! My lips stretched to take it in and I shuddered as I kept pushing. The dildo expanded me from the inside, pushing and filling me with a liquid smoothness that plastic could never compete with. Slowly I kept pushing it inside me and it was a guilty satisfaction I felt when I had pushed all of it inside me.
That's when I felt a pulse. It might have been from my stuffed pussy, clenching in tense delight. I didn't think it could have come from the crystal dildo because the thing was transparent and I didn't see any machinery inside it. All I know is that something pulsed once and the feeling had almost brought me to climax right there.
My fingers couldn't hold the dildo anymore because most of it was inside me. What I could do though was push at it with my fingers, and my natural resistance would push it slightly back out. It was only a slight movement but God, it was wonderful. I looked down at my pushed apart lips and wondered what it would look like from down there. Just seeing the small end of the dildo emerging and then returning from my pussy was driving me crazy.
I had never been filled so completely before and the crystal was as warm as flesh inside me. Little shocks were running through my body; exciting my nipples all the way down to my curling toes.
Later it comes out the dildo is magical, entrapping her, and events come to a head and end rather quickly. I usually rag on stories for being too long, but this is one case where more would have been better: three times as long, giving more setup, detail, and resolution to the tense situation between these two characters. The strongest of the three I read, in my opinion, was "What Bad Girls Want." Bad girls, the narrator informs us, "... glowed like brilliant stars to my eyes. These were whom I hunted. These were the women who searched for me when they tortured their husbands. These are the teases that leave their top buttons undone in the office. These are the women who refuse to swallow for their boyfriends but happily suck down the man next door." The narrator makes it his business to locate such nefarious females, seduce them, and humiliate them in a game of sexual one-upmanship to see which gender can be the most treacherous, the most conniving and erotically controlling. In the end the chosen bad girl victim is rode hard and put away wet, robbed, rendered half-naked, and cold-cocked (cold-cunted?) while the narrator goes about his merry way feeling he performed a public service. In spite of its brevity this was a very complex story, dwelling on sexual rage, sexual attraction to the taboo, and male-female sexual rivalry, all infused with a near-combustible erotic danger that made all of this a real turn-on. It annoyed me at first for its exaggerated notions of bad-girl behavior (that they systematically torture the male who "possesses" them by catting around with everyone else) until I realized the story was a sort of magic realism, a funhouse mirror that exaggerated yet reflected certain ugly truths. A very good, thought-provoking story that'll get an award this year. I liked all these stories a lot and rate them A+ for being memorable reads that will stick with me for a long time. To be frank, however, I don't quite think the overarching elements of the sex god and Purple Book were needed in any of them. The stories were strong enough to stand on their own merits, and though the mentions didn't really hurt, they did scream "HP Lovecraft pastiche!" at me every time I saw them. If this writer does intend to go pro -- and by the quality of the prose, he or she might -- I think they should be excised, as they weren't strong enough to merit a horror theme, or subtle enough to be throwaway mentions. For that matter, the different pseudonyms for each story aren't really needed either; they don't detract, but they add anything, either. They are also confusing for a reviewer such as myself (I credited the author's first story to its narrator and not the Purple Herald) a mistake that may be inconsequential now, but disastrous in the future when a publisher or editor comes a' knockin'. In sum, quirky, thought-provoking, and strongly recommended.
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