Samhain Publishing, $3.50, ISBN 1-59998-864-X
Contemporary Erotica, 2008
Twenty-year old Chelsea Becker, a college student and our heroine in Veronica Wilde’s Erotics Anonymous, is in an unusual position, literally. She’s dragged into the initiation rites of Erotics Anonymous, a bunch of erotic story writers who live out the things they write about. Hey, don’t these people already have a popular website called Literotica? Chelsea doesn’t offer herself as the human pinata for Erotics Anonymous for the heck of it, though – she’s hoping to hook up with Jonathan Danvers, the author of her favorite kinky reads who was an alumni of her college and will most likely attend her initiation ceremony.
I don’t know. I mean, I have seen some real life photos of people who write amateur erotic stories and I don’t recall thinking that there is even one of them that I’d want to see naked. Does Chelsea know what she is getting into?
She doesn’t, alas. The ringleader is a sexy French woman who teaches creative writing at Chelsea’s college and she has her own agenda in putting Chelsea through a series of erotic “tests”, but ultimately, Ms Wilde chickens out by having Chelsea and her true love denounce the whole Erotics Anonymous bunch as a group of weirdos led by a jealous bitch and they’d rather have fun playing exclusively with each other under the banner of true love. Kinda like all those fraternity/sorority movies where our main character is seduced by all those kinky benefits of joining until he or she realizes that the whole group are comprised of homicidal maniacs or other fruit loops.
I don’t find anything too memorable here about Erotics Anonymous, although I suspect I may change my mind if the author comes out and says that she’s lampooning real-life erotic story authors or something. There is a satirical quality to this story that I hope is intentional, because otherwise, there is really no reason for me to remember this story at all. The characters are bland and even stereotypical and Chelsea is really annoying as a rather dim-witted whiny heroine.
At least with adult film actors, you know how they look like before you go through the trouble of putting out to random strangers hoping to get their attention. And you only need to pay money to these actors and hope that they don’t show up completely high on drugs or smelling like they haven’t bathed in a year in order to get them in bed instead of going through the trouble like silly Chelsea did here.
