Adri Armstrong, $0.99, ISBN 978-0463845721
Sci-fi Erotica, 2021

The miserly old coot in me instinctively recoil the moment I open Adri Armstrong’s A Tentacle Encounter on my reader. I see seven pages as indicted by the reader, but only two and a half of these pages contain the actual story. The rest are filler materials like a page of trigger warnings (if a reader buys a story with such a title only to be triggered by what they get… these readers probably should get a less intellectually challenging hobby, like doing join-the-dot puzzles) and a teaser for the author’s titles.

Now, I know it is my fault not to know this from the word count displayed on the book purchase page, which is why I am not blaming the author in this, mind you. In this case, I blame myself for being a terrible gauge of how long a story is based on word count.

Here, we have a human having sex with, and I quote, a “sasquatch-sized squid” that comes with four fat tentacle-like appendages. One goes into the mouth, and three into the you-know-where.

Lucas shudders with delight at the sight of his own stomach, visibly swollen by the coiling girth of tentacles. His cock jerks at the brutal combination of visual and sensation.

Lucas is said to be human, so I spend a while trying to imagine what it is like to have a thick protuberance go down the throat and straight into the stomach. Let’s just say that I feel like calling up a gastroenterologist to sob piteously instead of going ooh-la-la.

How much ejaculate is Kahr pouring into him, that it’s somehow eclipsing even those beautiful tentacles?

He’s swallowing alien baby juice! Is he sure that alien squids won’t burst out of his chest in a few hours?

It makes sense that this super short story is priced at $0.99, when many other stories of this price tend to be longer than this. After all, it’s a niche kind of erotica. The author is less likely to sell a same volume of this story as they would if this one had been, say, between a dude and a werewolf or something more mainstream-friendly.

Sadly, for me, this one is anything but sexy. I’ve read tentacle erotica before, and found them pretty intriguing even when they went into extreme territory. Here, however, everything comes off instead like an invasive medical procedure going awry, and my sphincter is clenched tight throughout my reading for all the wrong reasons. I think it’s due to the dishonesty of it all.

Let me explain: pain and pleasure can be interchangeable especially in erotica, and the reader will know when something going on in the page is going to be excruciating instead of sexy. It will be up to the reader to be able to suspend their disbelief to roll with the fantasy. Here, what I am reading sounds excruciating as can be. The guy is choking on giant squid pee-pee going all the way down to his stomach, while three other giant pee-pees are going up his rear end entrance. I feel that the author should own this, have the protagonist experience agony beyond agony, and as an author of erotica, the author has the important responsibility of convincing me that this excruciating experience is an erotic one.

Instead, Lucas is like, ooh ooh so fun, so sexy, so much happiness. What, his entire body is made of Plasticine? That will explain the absence of gag reflex, I suppose.

Because of the huge disconnect between what I know the main character should be experiencing and what the character claims to be experiencing, this whole sexy fantasy is, at best, as fake as can be. At worst, I’m tempted to believe that the author should probably read up more on human anatomy.