A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Read for the local bookstore's Smut Club. Every month we read a book of our own choice in a set subgenre (cowboys, military, etc), plus a selected short, silly book like this.

I don't know what you would expect from a book with this title, but I was expecting a contemporary in which a modern woman goes on an Easter egg hunt and gets... you got it. Nope! It's set in a fantasy world in which our heroine, Lily, is in an unhappy marriage to an asshole part-God, flees when he throws a vase at her, and goes to the Valley of the Old Gods to request help from the Goddess Ester. Ester offers her a choice: freedom from her bad marriage, or freedom plus rulership of her asshole husband's kingdom... if she'll agree to bear Ester's son's baby and leave the kingdom to him when he comes of age. Lily chooses the latter, and goes off to fuck a God.

This was a lot more worldbuilding than I expected, and it was pretty cute. The true batshit doesn't kick in until Lily is transported to a nightclub (okay...) and told to go to a back room to meet Eeebie. Who turns out to be E.B. The Easter Bunny. Who also goes by Jack, presumably because Eeebie isn't sexy.

Jack is very vaguely described. He has rabbit ears and at least some white fur, but from the description, I was picturing a hot dude with rabbit ears and white chest fur.

Then I turned the page and hit an illustration. It's the only one in the book, and I had no idea there would be any, so it functioned as a jump scare.

NSFW. ( Read more... )

And then we get a long, loving description of his rabbit cock. It's pointy, like a giant pencil, and cums an enormous amount of liquid marshmallow fluff. Just what you want up your hoo-hah! You'd need a quick assignation with the God of Yogurt after that.

Jack gives Lily some magic chocolate eggs, she boots out her evil husband, and settles down to have Jack's horrifying monster baby and rule the kingdom in his name for the next eighteen years... with periodic visits to Jack. Who apparently lives in the back room of a nightclub.

Apart from the pointy dick, there's really not much monstery about the sex. If I'm into sex with a giant humanoid rabbit, I would want more rabbit descriptions. Maybe the rabbitfuckers are buying this solely for the art.

I am a dancer in the New York City Ballet. I wrote the pages that follow during one ballet season. I began on November 21, 1980, and finished on February 15, 1981. I was lonely; I was sad. I had decided to be alone, but I had never decided to be lonely. I started writing on a yellow pad. I wrote, and I smoked. Every page was covered with a film of smoke.

If you like that, you will like this book. It's one of those slim but pithy volumes that precisely captures a time, a place, and a state of mind.

I've always had a fascination with ballet, ever since my second-grade teacher offered a trip to see the Nutcracker Suite (it was at least ten years before I realized that the second word was not "sweet") to her top three students. I had no idea what that was, other than that it was clearly desirable, so I went all-out to make sure that I'd get the prize. I was sufficiently enchanted with The Nutcracker and the general air of specialness surrounding the entire experience that I begged my parents for ballet lessons, at which I lasted something like three sessions. I don't recall the exact problem, but based on my age I'm guessing that there was too much standing around.

After that I confined myself to reading ballet books, which was more fun that actually doing it. Had I tried when I was older, I might have stuck with it for longer. Based on Bentley book and everything else I've read about ballet dancing, it has an austere, stoic, boot camp, push your limits atmosphere that would have really appealed to me if I'd been three to five years older. And then I would have gotten my heart broken, because I am not built to be a ballerina.

Winter Season beautifully depicts the illusion shown to the audience and the reality experienced by the dancers, and how the dancers live the illusion as well. It's got all the fascinating details of any good backstage memoir, without bitterness or cynicism. Even as it ground down her body, Bentley never stopped loving ballet; she seems to feel that she was lucky to have the chance to live the dream, just for the opportunity to spend a few minutes every day being the perfect expression of her body and the choreographer's art.

...and if you read my review of her next memoir, The Surrender, you will find how after she left the ballet, she found another way to experience her ass body.

I SWEAR, Winter Season is really well-written and lovely and controlled. I guess after all that control, maybe she needed to write one of the most bizarre books I have ever read - a work which stands out, after nearly forty years of reading the weirdest shit I could lay my hands on and also after writing plenty of freaky erotica myself, as the most let's just say memorable piece of sex writing I have ever read. And that includes stuff like Annihilated By A Gay Minotaur, The Human Cow Experience 2 - The Main Event (Fantasy Farms) and Pounded In The Butt By The Fact That It Took Less Time For This Book To Be Written And Published Than The Entire Length Of Tony Scarymoochy's Term As White House Communications Director.

This amazing book, I recently discovered, was made into a play which prompted this equally amazing bit from a stunned reviewer:

"On future anal sex: ‘I never let anyone else into my sacred backyard… what was once hallowed ground, now a tunnel of despair… filled with ghosts.’

HOT TIP FOR ASPIRING PLAYWRIGHTS: Never describe your asshole as a tunnel of despair filled with ghosts.

Finally, leaving us on an inspiring upbeat note, Toni tells us, ‘I had taken my ass back. He doesn’t live there any more. I live there now.’"

Yeah. Just as well I didn't persevere with the ballet lessons.

Brandon Bettleyoun left his reservation decades ago, driven by the message in his early life of “You’ll never be anything, because you’re Indian.” He cut off his braids and dedicated himself to success. […] When a college student from the nearby college comes to interview him, she begins to awaken in him feelings he had forgotten in his striving to be more than he believed he could be. Can this beautiful young woman from a small reservation in Idaho be the one to fill the emptiness he has endured for so long?

This erotic romance short story was was recommended to me in my post asking for recs for good self-published books as an antidote to all those romances with stereotypical Indians ravishing white women, usually with “Savage” in the title (and sometimes containing plagiarized material from, among other things, scholarly texts on black-footed ferrets.)

I did enjoy the story. It’s well-written, engaging, and sensual. I can’t speak to its authenticity, but the characters and setting felt believable. There are definitely no noble savages here. I can see why the reccer thought I’d like it— I particularly enjoy protagonists starring in genres in which they don’t often appear, and I have never before come across a genre romance (as opposed to a mainstream novel with romance in it) in which both hero and heroine are Native American. If you know of others, please comment to inform me.

But it’s tough to do a romance in a short story and not have it feel rushed— I think you usually need at least novelette length. It left me wanting more, in the “has Eagleday written anything longer?” sense. Alas, no. There are other short stories out, though. (Link NSFW – they’re erotica, several involving Native American traditional stories.) I’d love to see “Sioux Billionaire” expanded into a complete novel. But in the meantime, I did like it as a short. You might too.

Sins Of The Sioux Billionaire

Lady Elyssa Amaterasu Yamato Wentworth is a half-Japanese, half-elf, half-uncle thousand-year-old vampire queen who takes on Jacob, a bad-ass ex-vampire hunter, as her bodyguard/boy toy. (Her Japanese and elf heritage is mentioned but doesn’t really come up beyond that, which is probably just as well.)

Like many things sexual, this is completely ridiculous but also pretty hot if you’re into it, and solely ridiculous if you’re not. I like reading about sexually dominant women having creative sex with men who are personally assertive but sexually submissive, which, at least within professionally written erotica, seems to be very much a minority taste. In fact Joey Hill is the only writer I’ve found who writes that. However, I don’t actually read that much erotica, so there may be much more out there that I’m not aware of. (If so, please rec it. I plan to buy oracne's The Duke & the Pirate Queen and/or The Moonlight Mistress
on my next Amazon run - will those suit?)

While the cracktastic A Witch’s Beauty, the one with the male angel with two-colored blood, the tentacled demon mermaid whose trauma was being eaten by fish, and the zombie dinosaur apocalypse, was readable as a novel apart from the sex, this one is pretty much wall-to-wall sex: bondage, telekinetic masturbation, CBT (the kind that isn’t cognitive-behavioral therapy – I was squicked by that and skimmed madly), “you must have sex with my vampire pals’ female servants on top of the dining room table while we all watch,” three-second refractory periods, in a mall fountain, on a sofa, on the forest floor, onna stick, etc.

I wasn’t that into Jacob, though I did like Lyssa – but then I was much more into the mermaid than the angel in the other Hill book I read, so Hill may just be better at female characters. And while I can’t say that the prose would win any prizes, Hill at least did not write here that “desire festered in his balls,” which puts the prose a huge cut above that other book of hers, which did have that line on page three, and which forever prevented me from reading any further.

What can I say? This is porn, porn, and nothing but porn. But if you’re in the mood for porn, and this is the sort of porn you like, you could do a whole lot worse.

The Vampire Queen's Servant (Vampire Queen, Book 1)

I recently read and actually enjoyed an erotic novel, A Witch's Beauty by Joey Hill, in which the hero is an angel with Colgate-like red and blue blood, the heroine is a tentacled mermaid whose angst is that half her body was eaten by fish and her mom was raped by the Devil, the sex involves a kinky angelic dildo dagger, and the conclusion involves zombie dinosaurs.

(Don't vote if you already know!)

[Poll #1411613]