Total-e-bound, £2.49, ISBN 978-1-906328-37-5
Fantasy Romance, 2007
Lydon’s Exile is the second entry in CS Chatterly’s Sons of Olympus series. The series revolves around some illegitimate offspring of the randy Greek god Zeus finding love in modern-day Earth and this time around, Lydon Andrianopolis gets his story. He arrived on Earth in the last chapter of the previous short story Delos Descending but I don’t believe you need to read that book to appreciate this one.
Zeus’s wife Hera isn’t just not fond of her husband’s numerous illegitimate offspring; she actively sends her minions to go after them. Lydon is Hera’s favorite target until Zeus sent him to join his half-brother Delos in exile. Lydon doesn’t mind living among the vineyards of Napa Valley and he doesn’t even mind that he’s now a mortal. He spends his time in Delos’s Olympia Vineyard home idling around in his birthday suit and playing with himself. He’s especially fond of that time when he spotted Delos and Delos’ wife Megaira shagging in the bath tub. He hopes that Delos will find him a nice wife so that he and Delos can work out a schedule on which couple get to use the bath tub for such fine recreational purposes.
I have read many erotic stories at this point and I have come across so many where the authors try to be sexy only to have the story come off as crass and unnecessarily tawdry. Lydon pleasuring himself at the sight of his half-brother having sex with that man’s wife is definitely something that I will not classify anywhere near the definition of “good taste”. Is that even necessary, Ms Chatterly? Am I supposed to find such voyeurism sexy or am I to be shocked by it?
Our heroine Alexis Reynolds has become a friend of Delos and his wife and they allow her the use of their home to relax and unwind during the weekends. Naturally, nobody informs her beforehand that the said home is currently housing a naked lazy fellow who spends his idle time with his hands at all the wrong places.
There is a twist later on in the story and this part of the story is actually quite good as Lydon and Alexis connect slightly deeper than superficial at that point. However, the first part of the story has Ms Chatterly going on in a manner that I feel smacks of trying a little too hard to be outrageous. I don’t find the idea of a lazy hero rolling around naked all day in a state of drunken randiness appealing in any way and I can only hope the guy has used mouthwash as well as washed his hands and relevant parts of his body before he gets too close to the heroine.
For a short story, this one isn’t too bad, although I feel that the story only comes alive in the later half or so. The first half comes dangerously close to being a silly pornographic cartoon, which I feel is not worthy of the author’s abilities if the second half of the story is anything to go by.
