Celestial Reviews 159 - February 19, 1997

Note: I tried to post this through AOL, and they put it on the Newsgroup 
INCORRECTLY three - count 'em - THREE times - not one of them correct.  
Eli (of alt.sex.stories.moderated) has been kind enough to offer to 
repost it for me, and so I'll simply send this to him and ask him to 
repost it.  I regret the delays this causes.  It seems that AOL is so 
hung up on fixing its overload problem that the organization is ignoring 
this other problem.  Please continue sending correspondence to me at 
celeste801@aol.com.

Second Note:  Thanks to the help of a correspondent, I have rebuilt my 
database of stories and should be able to resume my regular review 
pattern.

Third Note:  I reviewed several "leftover seasonal stories" this week - 
specifically Christmas and Velentine's stories.

Final Note:  Remember that the authors of these stories may like to hear 
a word or two from you.

- Celeste

      "Radhika and Matthew" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (cross-cultural
            romance) 10, 9, 9
      "Dialogue" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (hot flirtation) 10, 9, 9
      "Teen Breeder" by ucclear (beating & impregnation) 7, 5, 3
      "Christmas Tale" by Frank Ashby (hedonistic reunion) 9, 10, 10
      "Stuck by Cupid" by Hotdog (fun-filled rape) 6, 5, 4
      "Christmas Carol" by Mark E. Dassad (teen gangbang) 5, 9, 8
      "Take 2" by Gregarious (blind date) 8, 9, 9
      "Skinny Dipping with My Maiden Aunt" by Day Dreamer
            (emerging adolescence) 9, 9.5, 9.5
      "Robin" by Mark Aster (moral dilemma) 10, 10, 10
      "Robin and Kestrel" by Robin Man (bb superhero sex) 9, 9, 9
      "The Little Elf, A Fairy Tale" by Milford Whittemore (fairy
            tale without sex) 9, 5, 5
      "Change of Pace" by  Mike Allegretto and Caitlin B. (sci fi TG)
            8, 10, 10

"Radhika and Matthew" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (mohanraj@mills.edu).  This 
is a brief but well-written story about an intercultural romance.  It 
contains no vivid sex scenes, and I suppose the main reason for 
including it in this newsgroup is because it is written by an author who 
has written so many vivid sex scenes.  

This is the sort of story after which I had to stop and think about what 
really happened.  As I neared the end, I said to myself, "This isn't 
really making sense."  When I read the last line, I said, "This makes NO 
sense."  Then I glanced back through the story and said, "Oh, yeah!  I 
get it.  Now it makes perfect sense."

Ratings for "Radhika and Matthew"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9

"Dialogue" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (mohanraj@mills.edu).  No actual sex 
takes place in this very short story.  The man and woman just make 
plans, but they are very hot plans.

Ratings for "Dialogue"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9

"Teen Breeder" by ucclear (ucclear@inetworld.net).  The girl thinks her 
mom is wonderful but her father is a jerk. When the daughter walks past 
the bedroom, she sees the father cruelly beating her mother with a belt, 
and this gives the girl her first orgasm. The old man's job is 
threatened, and Mom figures he can hang onto it by letting the new boss 
fuck their daughter.  Since the boss wants to have children by as many 
women as possible, the mother arranges for the daughter to take 
fertility drugs.  They date and have sex. Before the second date Dad 
beats the girl and then goes out with the guys; then Mom serves the boss 
a good meal; and then Mom stands by the parental bed and occasionally 
beats the daughter while the boss has sex with the kid during her most 
fertile period. Knowing how fertile she is, the girl can't help but have 
a major orgasm.  After the boss leaves, Mom beats the girl some more, so 
that she'll have some more orgasms to "soak it up" and make sure the kid 
gets pregnant.

I guess there are some sexy parts to this story.  Mostly, however, it's 
pretty silly.  I really don't think there are many normal girls who 
would respond this way to this kind of abuse, and there's no sensible 
explanation for her abnormality.

Ratings for "Teen Breeder"
Athena (technical quality): 7
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 3

"Christmas Tale" by Frank Ashby.  Frank and Gladys are hedonists.  I 
know this because instead of going to church on Sunday, they stay at 
home and fuck; and before the third enfuckment they discuss swinging, 
and Gladys gets so turned on that she's eager to take it up the ass.  By 
this I don't mean they are irreligious: the church people probably 
preferred that they stay at home, since they would have been distracted 
by all that fucking, especially the anal part, and especially if the 
sermon was boring or the choir was off key.  Anyway, Frank and Gladys 
sponsor a sort of secular version of the Waltons' Homecoming or 
Gathering or whatever their Christmas special was called.

The participants in the reunion are fairly normal people whose value 
systems and lifestyles differ somewhat from my own. I would say that 
they are like folks next door, but the folks next door to me go to 
church every Sunday, and I think they shudder at the very notion of anal 
sex.  The story is big on incest, but it's not the exploitive type of 
incest that many readers find to be distasteful.

The story is told by the participants themselves, as they remember it.  
There are four different parts, each told from a different perspective; 
and the details of their stories do not always agree. This is an 
interesting approach: the same incident can be remembered differently by 
different people, because nobody sees the whole picture.  Each person 
sees only that part of the scene that could have been seen from his or 
her perspective, and even that part may be remembered imperfectly 
because of emotions or subsequent activities.

The only minor weakness in the story is that it would have benefited 
from a good proofreading before going to press.

Ratings for "Christmas Tale"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

"Stuck by Cupid" by Hotdog (hotdog@who.knows).  I thought this was going 
to be a Valentine's Day story, but it's not.  It's a story about a horny 
guy who rapes a younger girl in the shower.  It's not really rape, of 
course, because the girl enjoys it and decides to go steady with the 
rapist.

The story has additional basic problems with verisimilitude.  For 
example, the narrator claims to attend a public high school that has 
22,000 students, with 4000 graduating seniors.  There ain't no such 
place.  Most states have only one or two UNIVERSITIES with that many 
students.  To feed that many students, the cafeteria alone would have to 
be larger than any high school I have visited or heard of.  

The following criticism may appear trivial, but it's not.  In the first 
paragraph, the narrator says, "I graduate in two weeks and have never 
been laid."  This is not true.  He should have said. "I WAS GOING TO 
graduate in two weeks and HAD never yet been laid."  It makes a 
difference.  It's important to use verb tenses in such a way as to help 
the reader understand the perspective from which the story must be read.

Ratings for "Stuck by Cupid"
Athena (technical quality): 6
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 4

"Christmas Carol" by Mark E. Dassad (Ole.Joe@poboxes.com).  The narrator 
is a unintelligent embodiment of high school swine who decides to take 
an unattractive seventh-grader to a Christmas booze and drugs party so 
that he can pop her cherry.  It turns out that he shares her with a 
bunch of other guys he hardly knows.  The girl doesn't exactly enjoy it, 
but the guy sure feels good about his contribution to society.

If it weren't for the overall illiteracy of this story, it would 
possibly be a very good story.  I don't think many of us would actually 
recommend gang-rape like this in real life, but the story is a vivid and 
realistic portrayal of a really shallow lifestyle.  If it were clearly 
written, the story could give us an insight into the mind of a bizarre 
pervert - like many of those whom we might find in the real world today.  
It's very difficult to write dialogue in such a way as to make the 
characters look illiterate without letting the story itself degenerate 
into benighted stupidity, and this author is not completely successful 
in his endeavor.  Nevertheless, I can't help suspecting that this might 
be a good story, if it were cleaned up.

Ratings for "Christmas Carol"
Athena (technical quality): 5
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8

"Take 2" by Gregarious (gregtorr@ican.net).  Keith gets set up on a 
blind date with Elena.  The date turns out to be wonderful, and so they 
head straight to her apartment from the jazz club and decide to make 
love.  They have a major focus on doing things for the "first time" 
together.  It was a good, sexy first date.

Ratings for "Take 2"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9

"Skinny Dipping with My Maiden Aunt" by Day Dreamer.  Because of his 
mother's job, the 15-year-old narrator of this story has to stay with 
Aunt Sue on Grandpa's farm just outside town. The main difficulty is 
that they have only two bedrooms, and so he has to sleep with Aunt Sue 
in her big double bed.  Talk about a transparent plot!  Actually the 
situation not all that difficult: Aunt Sue is beautiful and the narrator 
has a deep and abiding interest in losing his virginity as soon as 
possible.

In spite of sharing the bed with his aunt, Donny is initially virtuous, 
settling for simple wet dreams in which his imaginary partners look a 
lot like his bed-mate.  When they go swimming, they initially wear their 
underwear, but it's hard to hide a hard-on in a skimpy bathing suit, and 
Sue's panties, do not remain opaque when they get wet.  As I said, talk 
about a transparent plot!  Well, opacity having been eliminated, Sue 
decides that it will be OK to go skinny dipping if Donny would like to 
go swimming again.  Boy, would he!  And remember, we mustn't tell Mom.  
And, of course, there's a rule: "Everyone can look all they want, but no 
handling the merchandise."

I guess if the U.S. Constitution can be amended and if the Berlin Wall 
can come down, we should not be surprised that the Rules of Skinny 
Dipping can change; and they do.  It gets to be pretty hot stuff.  The 
New Rule is that touching and its concomitants should take place only in 
the pool at the creek, certainly not in bed, where they sleep and have 
mutual wet dreams together.  Eventually the New Rule gets modified with 
a simple codicil that says it will be OK for them to mutually take each 
other's virginity.  And maybe it would be OK to do it in bed if they 
were really quiet and didn't wake Grandpa, who seems to be pretty much 
deaf and senile anyway.  As the song says, "Life gets complicated when 
you get past fourteen...."  This is a very good story.

Ratings for "Skinny Dipping with My Maiden Aunt"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 9.5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9.5

"Robin" by Mark Aster (MyFrThAl@aol.com).  Robin first appeared with the 
Allen Sisters in this author's "At the Pool".  In this episode Robin is 
still working as a lifeguard, and she becomes romantically involved with 
another lifeguard named Jerry.  What we have here is a sexy build-up to 
a moral dilemma.

Ratings for "Robin"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

"Robin and Kestrel" by Robin Man. {This was listed as ROBIN4.TXT}. The 
two 16-year-old proteges of Batman work out together and get turned on 
by the physical contact.  Later Batman himself frolics with the guys - 
all sans costume, of course.  I enjoy ff sex much more than the mm 
variety, but it's easy to see that an mm fan would enjoy this, if a deep 
plot were not considered to be a necessity.

Ratings for "Robin and Kestrel"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9

"The Little Elf, A Fairy Tale" by Milford Whittemore 
(MilfordW@worcester.net).  This well-written fairy tale about an elf and 
a naked princess who usually wore a chastity belt but one day went for a 
walk naked in the forest has no moral and no real point.  It's one of 
the best pointless sex stories that's not worth reading that I have ever 
read.

Ratings for "The Little Elf, A Fairy Tale"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 5
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 5

"Change of Pace" by  Mike Allegretto and Caitlin B. 
(caitlinb@concentric.net).  Jack is a bit of a rationalist: he doesn't 
believe in magick.  But his mother is a white witch, which means that 
she can cast benevolent and humorous spells, like Samantha used to do on 
"Bewitched."  So she changes Jack into a person who looks just like 
Agent Scully from the "X-Files."  Actually, the transformation process 
continues in several steps in 15 minute intervals until he becomes 
totally female, but Mom doesn't tell him exactly what these steps are.  
In addition, there are several other rules that are explained in the 
story.

Since the change will be temporary (unless he requests that it be 
permanent), Jack decides to play along, to enjoy it, and to make mental 
notes that he can enjoy later.  After all, he has lusted after the 
Scully character for a long time, and soon he will be encapsulated 
inside her body!  There are several additional interesting twists and 
turns in this story.

Chapters 1-3 were written some time ago by Mike Allegretto, and  
Chapters 4-6 were drafted by Caitlin B., and finished by Caitlin B. 
after feedback from Mike Allegretto.  The two halves don't match up 
perfectly (the pace of the second half is different from that of the 
first, and the first three chapters develop at a more leisurely pace 
than the last three), and some proofreading would have been in order; 
but it's still a pretty good collaboration.

Ratings for "Change of Pace"
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

