Mercurial Avenue, $4.75
Contemporary Erotica, 2011

Dressing Up starts off promisingly. Skipper, a college kid, is trying on a Spider-Man costume for an upcoming party, and his crotch shows off the goods magnificently.

And then the whole thing begins.

Over the next thirty freaking pages, I am subject to a litany of painfully uninteresting whining. Skipper had an accident earlier, and was kicked in the crotch by an irate woman, so there is a lot of pained whimper about how his pee-pee is sore. He can’t afford the Spider-Man costume and almost bursts into tears. He has to settle for a Tarzan costume instead and spends the next five or so pages whining that his pee-pee and boo-boos can be seen. He doesn’t like women anymore but his old room mate made him suck that jerk’s pee-pee before breaking his promise to suck Skipper’s back. That jerk also won’t give him a loan despite Skipper having loaned him his own money plenty of times. Skipper is close to tears again. Oh, his bongos hurt. Here’s another ten paragraphs of him adjusting his family jewels.

God damn it, when is someone going to put those over-sized gonads to good use? That’s what I paid money for. I bought an erotic read, and I want the rumpy-pumpy stuff to start now.

Nope, there’s more whining once he’s at the party. Oh, that guy wants him and somehow this leads to more existential whining about this and that. That guy says this, and this triggers more angst, and then that other guy says that, and that also triggers more interior monologue.

Now, I don’t mind if Skipper were giving me interesting, funny, or raunchy head space expositions, but no, this guy is just some kind of blisteringly whiny crybaby who gets worked up disproportionately over trivial little details. I don’t know about anyone else, but if I were a gay dude, and I had his body and family jewels, screw it, I’m going to get laid as much as possible, and I would show up in that party wearing only a G-string and blue glitter, because I’d be the horny genie from Aladdin.

Maybe there had been a mistake, and this was supposed to be mainstream fiction for angst-laden emo kids, I don’t know. At any rate, I came here for erections and ejaculations, only to find exasperation and exacerbation. I guess it’s too late to exchange this thing for a real rumpy-pumpy read?