Tag Archives: erotica

Book Review of Eternal Samurai, by B.D. Heywood

I picked up B.D. Heywood’s erotic, M/M novel Eternal Samurai from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Tatsu Kurosaki Cobb, the last of an ancient samurai house, will not stop until he takes the head of the vampire that butchered his family. But his vow of revenge means he gives up on any hope for that once-and-forever love. Then he crosses swords with Saito Arisada, second-in-command of Seattle’s vampires and the most beautiful creature Tatsu has ever seen. The sexual chemistry between them is pure, hard, and undeniable. Unable to accept Arisada might be the killer, Tatsu begins a dangerous game. A game driven by the all-consuming thirst for blood that will force them to the extremes of love and hate.

Fukushū, vengeance. It is all that has sustained Saito Arisada for eight-hundred years. Sōhei monk turned vampire, he has searched for the returned soul of his lover who betrayed him and the Temple of Mii-dera. Arisada believes in only one thing—taking the head of the traitor. Yet, when Arisada sees that soul shining from Tatsu’s emerald eyes, his hatred shatters. He wants Tatsu in his arms and in his bed and in his heart. But Arisada’s samurai code of honor demands nothing less than Tatsu’s death. How can Arisada kill his unmei no hito—his soulmate?

From a bloody battlefield of feudal Japan to a world where humans and vampires fight for survival, Arisada and Tatsu must choose. At stake is not only love but honor.

Review:
I really quite enjoyed that, but I suspect it will have a rather small core audience. Because what it reminds me of more than anything else is a Yaoi manga. This despite it being a literary novel instead of a graphic novel. It just feels like yaoi in that strange, nebulous way of mental association.

You see, just as most fans of PNR or Urban Fantasy or even regular American M/M romance novels can often sketch out the basic shape of the plot most common to their genre of choice, this one follows yaoi’s established format in fairly recognisable ways. But you see, I like Yaoi, so I wasn’t at all put off by the similarities.

The association was undoubtably helped along by Heywood’s liberal use of Japanese terminology. No doubt my closet manga addiction and the two years I spent studying the Japanese language (which doesn’t get you very far, BTW) helped me out here. I suspect some readers would have appreciated that help, because though I knew enough to be able to pronounce the words and recognise all of the ritualised terminology (seppeku, kinbaku, kaishakunin, etc), some of the curses and a couple of the normal words (like daisuki), it felt like there were an awful lot more than was necessary. It tended to clutter the narrative at times, even when quickly followed by an English translation (which most, but not all were). If all those extra words had felt completely foreign, instead of just kind of foreign, they might have really grated on me.

Some of the English language did grate on me, if I’m honest, mostly during the extremely long sex scenes. You see these aren’t hearts and flowers, gentle, clean exploits. It’s often rough, dirty and … well, I probably can’t say realistic. It’s obviously not, but I thought the fact that things smelled, chafed, hurt, bled, and so on lent a real(ish) feel to it all. And while I appreciated this aspect of the story, some of the terminology used to create that same impression left me wanting–phrases like, piss slit or the liberal use of spunk–once or twice, fine, but over and over…not so much.

What I liked most in this story, and one more thing that reminded me of Yaoi, was Saito’s long standing, unquestioning, whole-hearted love for his unmei no hito (soulmate), regardless of the body it resides in. He pined for him for 800 years for gods sake. That’s what I call dedication and I found it to be one of the only sweet things about the story. Almost everything else had an edge of some sort.

On a side note, while probably not purposeful on the author’s part, because of the red hair and scarred cheek I couldn’t help visualising Saito Arisada as Rurouni Kenshin. I found this a little distracting.

All-in-all however, while not without faults and inconsistencies, I enjoyed the read and would be up for trying another of Heywood’s works.

Book Review of Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell

Sleeves, by Chanse Lowell came from the Amazon free list. (At the time of posting it was still free.)

A friend of mine said to me recently that he was beginning to think that bulging biceps are to women what lush breasts are to men. Hmm, maybe. But for me it’s a well-muscled back. Keeping that in mind, you can probably imagine that this cover appealed to me. I hardly even read the description if I’m honest, just grabbed the pretty picture and went with it.

Description from Goodreads:
Kel isn’t at all the animal locked in a cage that he appears to be. Secrets keep him there, hidden from those who hunt him. But what does a man do when he needs physical contact to survive, but can’t stand the burning pain that comes with another’s touch? He’s found a way to get a small fraction of his needs met at the nightclub, Sleeves. What happens when he lets in an unknown woman with a healing hand? Casey can see past the vulgar mouth to the affection-starved man hiding inside. When she does, all hell breaks loose, and the past finds him. Will he be able to avoid the agency, or will they add Casey to their twisted experiments? She entered the cage with him, and now it seems there’s no way out.

Review:
A previous review referred to this book as a ‘Hot Mess.’ And while Hot Mess isn’t a phrase that I’ve ever found myself tempted to use, I find it describes this book aptly. It’s not that it’s necessarily a bad book, it’s not, it’s just all over the place and full of holes the reader has to overlook to enjoy the story. They are overlookable, but it would be a little ridiculous to pretend they aren’t there.

To start with and probably most importantly, it’s never said but I’m gonna have to assume that Casey has some sort of preternatural power of super-empathy, because nothing in the book makes any sense otherwise. If she doesn’t then she just fell in love with a man who, in their single 30 minute interaction, forced her to jack him off in front of a crowd while calling her a slut, bitch, whore, cunt, and probably more I’ve forgotten. She in turn told him he was a beautiful, sweet man. (WTF!?) So unless she can magically see through his shit, to his kernel of true-self she is either really, really stupid or masochistic.

What’s more, her main strength seems to be in her ability to accept any verbal abuse thrown at her with aplomb and willingly offer up, “anything you need, baby.” Now, I get that this is supposed to show how much she loves Kel and maybe how brave she is. But what it mostly says to me is that she must be one of those women who is so desperate for a man that she will do, become and take anything without complaint. It makes me wonder if she really has any sense of self herself. And while we kind of find out what warped Kel (and I say kind of because it’s not a complete explanation) we don’t really find out what whacked Casey out. Which suggests that we’re not supposed to see her behaviour as inappropriate. (WTF!?) We do get a little of her sob story, but I couldn’t see how it would result in her willingness to accept Kel’s shit (and it is shit) so openly.

I did really like her ability to banter though. She didn’t have Kel’s foul language, but she had no problem slinging a one-shot back at him on occasion. This verbal sparring between the two of them was by far the best part of the book. And it’s good.

Kel in turn swung wildly from angst, clingy teenager to angry, dangerous alpha man with a tenuous grasp on sanity and back again, over and over. Now I’ll give you that when he was in his charming, boyish charm phase he was about as cute as they come. In these moments I really loved him. I even kinda liked his weird clingy, needy side. It was creepy as hell, but still kinda cute. Unfortunately his angry instability was truly scary and his inability to go two sentences without calling Casey some foul name often curled my toes…and not in a good way.

The thing is though, even though his language was deplorable and Casey didn’t deserve to be called all the names she did, it generally just boiled down to a whole heck of a lot of dirty talk. Because the actual sex was pretty clean. It never actually crossed into abusive, as his verbal description would suggest. Plus, even as he was playing Mr. Dominance he never failed to worship Casey and be honest about how much he needed/wanted her, which made it quite obvious that all of the mastery he held in their sexual relation was given to him by her. I found this dynamic damned sexy.

This book is in desperate need of a little world building. It’s set in 2023, so I accept that there should have been some social evolution and scientific advancements. But the reader isn’t ever told what these might be. Everyone did seem to accept the whole ‘a secret organisation experimented on me and is currently hunting me’ with awe-inspiring ease. Not a single person raised an eyebrow at the fact that Kel had some strange sensory issue going on and apparently displayed regular feats of strength on stage, not to mention some truly horrific social skills.

I also have to wonder if another thing that isn’t said, but must be true, is that people are…I don’t know, educated in their sleep or something. I mean Kel was apparently kept in a cage with a filthy, blood stained mattress and little else. So if his basic hygiene wasn’t worth taking into consideration I can’t imagine his education was either. But somehow he was a genius–able to create mysterious genetic cures and micro technologies. How did he learn these skills?

I think the best way to describe this book is what happily ever after would look like if two damaged nymphomaniacs found each-other. The actual sic-fi aspect of the story is a…well, a Hot Mess. It’s never explained what the secret organisation was actually trying to accomplish with Kel, for example, or what the mysterious ‘serum’ does to a person, or how the cure reverses it, or why Kel needs touch, or what will happen if he goes without it, or why it hurts, or why he treats women so badly. But the sex is a lot of fun, and for all their many faults, Kel and Casey are too.

Book Review of Sharon Page’s Erotic Vampire Novel, Blood Red

I grabbed a practically new (maybe even new) paperback copy of this book at the secondhand shop.

Description from Goodreads:
Take a bite of desire…

Althea Yates is a vampire hunter, skilled with the crossbow and the stake. But she knows nothing of a man’s touch—or how to control the unladylike dreams that haunt her sleep. That is when they come, two men of unearthly beauty who ravish her in sweet carnal games, taking her to the precipice of exquisite desire and unimaginable erotic pleasure. It is scandalous. Forbidden. Unholy. For her lovers are not men, but vampires—the very beasts she and her father have sworn to destroy.

It is only a dream…until the elegant carriage arrives at the inn, drawn by four black horses. Until Yannick de Wynter, Earl of Brookshire, alights, silver-eyed, determined, and hungry for something she cannot name. And suddenly, Althea is no longer certain whether she has had a dream… or a dangerously erotic premonition…

Review:
I’m gonna use a star rating here and go with three stars for this book. But that needs to be understood as three stars on the erotica rating scale. I’m not really suggesting there is a whole different grading system for erotica, but we all know to expect less plotting, character development and world-building from an erotica than from, say, literary fiction. So a three star erotica is still going to have less of all of the above and readers accept that as par for the course.

I can sum this book up in seven short words: sex, sex, sex,sex, and more sex. Yep, that’s about it. I realise I can’t reasonable complain about too much sex in an erotica and I’m not. But even by erotic standards the plot was pretty flimsy for a full length book. A lot was left unexplained, such as exactly what special skills Bastien had that was supposed to help him battle Zayan or what exactly vampire were. Somehow demons and Lucifer came into play and I never really figured out how.

So, you’re doing the math in your head, aren’t you? There wasn’t a lot of plot, but the book is 300 pages long. Wow, there really must have been a lot of sex, you think. Yep, and surprisingly the author manages to put enough variety in to keep it from getting too stale. (I admit that by the end I was ready to finish, but I never quite reached the ‘Oh, bloody hell, not another one’ stage.) There is M/F sex, M/M sex, F/F sex, M/F/M sex, a M/M/F/M/M/M orgy, and even a little light bondage, S&M and breeding thrown it. Having said that, some of it just felt a little ridiculous–as if Ms. Page was trying desperately to create situations to add something more. The orgy especially felt this way. You see it coming a mile away, and then just watch it unfold with a mental eye roll and move on.

For all the forced variety there was also a certain innocence to the book. Maybe it’s because it is a couple years old and the current publishing rage is questionable consensuality, forced seduction, heavy BDSM, dominate men and simpering submissive women. I really appreciated that every sex scene in this book is clearly consensual. Althea (what the hell kind of name is that BTW) may be a virgin when she meets Yannick, but she takes to sex with enthusiasm. I did begin to wonder just how much she could experience before she lost that same innocence that the twins love so much, but it’s hardly a point worth thinking too deeply about.

I could have done without the sappy, happy ending. But, all-in-all for a full length erotic novel it wasn’t too darned bad.