Aphrodisia, $14.00, ISBN 978-0-7582-4130-6
Fantasy Erotica, 2011
Spoilers are present in this review.
Elizabeth Amber returns to the horny centaurs in Bastian. This time, the hero is, of course, Bastian Satyr, the guy who oversees the search for a long-lost temple to Vesta in Rome. I don’t know how he manages to do anything else since he has sex at least five times a day… unless he’s a one-minute man, I guess, but the story insists that he can go on and on and on, so I don’t know. I guess things just happen, it’s so amazing. Meanwhile, he has a new girlfriend, Michaela, who is a fellow woo-woo, only she is an expert in manipulating men to fall for her. Bastian is too amazing, however, so she falls for him and, in the process, gives him her real name and hence loses her immortality. She doesn’t mind. She’s in love with him.
Michaela is not the heroine, though – her best friend Silvia is. Silvia is a Ephemeral – someone who can enter the body of a dying person and take over that body for a month. Unlike Michaela, Silvia takes her vow to Vesta very seriously – she is a virgin. Well, technically. She and Michaela are BFFs with benefits, and it is Michaela’s wish that Silvia would join her and Bastian in a happy household for three. Silvia is attracted to Bastian, especially after spying on him giving Michaela her five a day, but she’d rather concentrate on delaying Bastian’s search for the Temple.
Meanwhile, Bastian accidentally comes into contact with the invisible Silvia and apparently this contact allows the color-blind Pony Le Pew to see colors, ooh. When Silvia shows up in the body of a twelve-year old boy, he finds himself enjoying the boy’s company (in a non-sexual way, don’t worry), so in the end, it’s pretty clear that poor Michaela is so going to be the odd one out. Oh, the evil woo-woo guy the two ladies are forced to serve is a sex fiend who has a painfully engorged pee-pee – an unforeseen side effect of killing Priapus to steal his sexy mojo – and this villain needs constant… suction to relieve the pain. He seeks Bastian’s seed, among other things, because apparently pony semen can enhance the potency of another guy’s semen, and this villain really wants an heir, preferably one gotten from Silvia.
I know, the plot sounds like a gloriously trashy skanky-palooza, and for the first few chapters, it is. The sex is over the top nonsensical and exaggerated, it’s hilarious and entertaining. I actually like the chemistry between Silvia and Michaela – they genuinely adore one another, and it shows.
Unfortunately, Bastian kills my mood when it comes to this story. I flinch when he, fresh from boinking Michaela, discovers Silvia and tries to press her into having sex with him. Bastian has a creepy rape-at-first-date vibe that makes it hard for me to like him even a little. But worse, when Michaela is murdered and Silvia tells him that the poor darling gave up her immortality out of love for Bastian, his reaction is basically, too bad, he never loved her and he never asked Michaela to love him – can he boink Silvia now, he’s horny. That’s his reaction to almost everything in this story: he’s horny, can he boink now? When Silvia is hurting, he shows up wanting a boink. Silvia is hurting over Michaela’s death, he presses her to sleep with him. And so forth – this guy ends up cold and emotionless. Who would want to be with this guy for life? Worse, he expects his woman to service his brothers too, without even asking her whether she’s fine with it. Like I said, this guy emanates rape-at-first-date vibes. I don’t care how big his penis is or how long he can go – he’s loathsome, I’m more interested in how much of it I can chop off with my machete.
It’s a shame that Bastian is a total piece of dung here, because Silvia is an excellent heroine in her own right if I overlook her bewildering attraction to that dung-crusted dong. She can take care of herself, and, in fact, that’s what she does here since Bastian is always busy either pressing her for sex, trying to force her to be his sex slave, or getting drunk and coming up with all kinds of scenarios on how she has supposedly betrayed him.
Bastian would have been a far more superior book if it had been about Silvia or Michaela, or if Bastian had been a completely different character and they all end up in a happy threesome. This is because Michaela and Silvia are the strongest links in this story, while Bastian is basically an irritant most of the time. The author instead takes out one of the better characters and, worse, cuts the story short with an abrupt ending – all these end up downplaying the best aspects of the story in favor of the worst, the “romance” between Silvia and that loathsome thing. If you want to read this book, I suggest you just skip to the hot scenes and spare yourself the pain of being subjected to Bastian in all his feces-smeared glory.
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