Brava, $15.00, ISBN 1-57566-869-6
Contemporary Erotica, 2001
This is embarrassing. What happens when four authors get together to write erotic stories that come off… well, it’s like a bunch of over-imaginative schoolgirls writing “adult fiction”. Just imagine four Harlequin Temptations stuck together, and that’s what All Through the Night is.
On the plus side, there’s not that much silly sex prose. On the minus side, if the story is going to be skimpy on plot and characters, they better burn the roof off my house or else. Alas, the only heat I feel is the hot air from my mouth as I yawn.
Suzanne Forster’s story is Stranger in Her Bed. Kerry Houston is in love and getting all wet over a computer software. Yes, this is the ultimate robo-vibrator of the new millennium, surely. Unfortunately, our heroine is also the neurotic eeuw-eeuw-eeuw type. When her boss, the dead ringer of her un-vibrating vibrator program, shows up, she doesn’t know whether to go eeuw or oohhhh. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, the end. I yawn.
Next, Thea Devine’s No Mercy. Ex-wife and ex-husband get back together for he conquering her thingie. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Italics too. Some silly enemy subplot that doesn’t make sense and some ridiculous purple prose (“cream”… hello?) completes the big picture of me yawning some more and swatting away at flies trying to fly into my mouth.
Lori Foster’s Satisfy Me. It’s a sex shop plot thingie she has done before. Maybe she fished this one out of her reject bin. Neurotic me-no-want-sexy girlie Asia Michaels plays Truth or Dare with her coworker Cameron O’Reilly who walks around with a horrendous bulge in his crotch. Brrr, scary. Silly girlie needs sexual comforting, and sex sex sex sex sex ensues. I realize I can pretty much draw the lines on my ceiling out of memory by now.
Finally, Shannon McKenna’s Something Wild. Motorbike man Jacob Kerr meets this sexy woman one day in a bar, and starts stalking her until she gives in. This stalking takes place all across five states across the country. This is one sexy fantasy. Alas, heroine Annie Simon, nincompoop and burned-by-past-relationship before tool, demurs and demurs and goes all neurotic that I fall into a coma on my table.
This is one lousy one night stand, I tell you. I wake up with a bad headache and I can safely say I really can’t remember a thing in the morning.
