Ellora’s Cave, $7.99, ISBN 1-84360-931-2
Fantasy Erotica, 2004
From the title of the anthology alone, I’m sure you can tell that Manaconda is going to be what genteel folks would call “very rude”. The stories here, unfortunately, are part of the authors’ ongoing series and I am hard-pressed to say that the stories by Lora Leigh and Sherri L King can stand alone.
Sherri L King’s Sacred Eden is part of her post-apocalyptic fantasy series The Horde Wars. I am somewhat familiar with this series so I can get into this story pretty well, but I can’t vouch that other readers will feel the same. In this one, Obsidian or Sid and his wife Cady decide to take a trip to the surface. The war with the Daemons is over and it’s time for a new era of peace… or so they think.
This one is so disgustingly sweet and saccharine that it’s like watching a pornographic version of a Care Bear cartoon. Sid and Cady constantly repeat in this story about how perfect they are, how their love will never change, how they love each other so completely, and on and on until I can’t help wondering who these people are trying to convince so desperately – me or themselves. I’m quite relieved when the monsters show up to interrupt the constant gushing of love and supposedly perfect torrid shagging, but alas, these monsters don’t get to eat those disgusting one-dimensional “We’re so beautiful! We’re so amazing! We’re in love!” dingbats. Even the erotic scenes are full of ridiculous hyperboles and laughable superlatives. You may not be able to stop laughing once you read about how Sid, of a subterranean humanoid race, uses his apparently magical semen to turn Cady from human into one of his people. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life as a mole, ladies, make sure those Shikar fellows shoot ’em far away from the bullseye!
I am not familiar with Lora Leigh’s The Blood Ties series when I read Knight Stalker so yikes, I’m really lost when it comes to this one. Our hero Cadan Gaelan has fangs and, I quote, “the monster of his cock” which is “so thick he couldn’t circle it, even with his big hand”. I’ve never received the tiara that will mark me as a size queen, so when I read that, I wince and my legs automatically clamp tightly shut together. From creepy semen that will turn me into a mole to this, a baseball bat monster of a pee-pee – are these authors trying to put me off sex for good? Anyway, the dearth of information in this story has me guessing that Gaelan is a… knight-stalker? The first few chapters of this story deals with Gaelan using his monster pee-pee on some woman while arguing with… I don’t know, the voices in his head or something, while our heroine Bliss St Claire can only watch and drool in jealousy. There are something about special women who can be impregnated by our hero’s amazing sperm to create some magical baby or something, symbiotes, and plenty of body fluids splashing everywhere. I honestly do not know what is going on here. It’s like walking into a building expecting to attend a Buddhism seminar only to stumble upon the set of a pornographic movie shoot. I’m disoriented by the lack of background information as well as the abundance of all those stupefying descriptions of monster dongs and weird women who scream in berserk ecstasy when these monster dongs are applied liberally onto them.
It is with relief when I realize that Jaid Black’s Devilish Dot may be part of her The Trek Mi Q’an series but it can be read as a standalone story. The “Dot” in the title refers to Dorothy Araiza, our heroine who makes sex toys for a living. She is currently undergoing a dry spell where her love life is concerned, but ah, relief is at hand, so to speak. A car accident sends her into the brawny arms of Vaidd, the alien dude who has traveled this far to look for his “Bloodmate”.
While this one also boasts some weird physiology changes to the heroine once she has sex with the hero – this one in particular gives me flashbacks to those Alien movies for some reason (I think it must be the fangs) – but for the most part, this story is normal, for the want of a better word. The hero doesn’t have a twenty-seven story high penis. His semen doesn’t force the heroine to live beneath the ground. While there is the usual mate-mate-mate claptrap, the hero’s sexual obsession with the heroine comes off as normal compared to those in the previous two stories. And best of all, this one is funny. The heroine also has a distinct personality instead of being merely a passive blow-up doll permanently stuck in the legs-spread-wide position. Dot is a shy woman who nonetheless enjoys sex, but alas, the last time she tries to seduce a man, the man fainted when she rather unwisely showed him her favorite vibrator. She is so adorable, heh.
Needless to say, Devilish Dot is easily the most enjoyable story in this one. I have a strong inkling that I am going to experience some kind of bizarre and maybe even terrifying dream tonight, possibly one where colossal monster penises from outer space, with fangs and acidic exudate and more, try to destroy the world. Manaconda? I’m so not touching that thing.
