Wes Writing, $0.99, ISBN 978-1878774101
Contemporary Erotica, 2013

Is that a naked, hot man of God—or Allah, in this case—on the cover of Charles Harvey’s Minister Q? Oh my, how can I resist?

Wait, why is a Muslim preacher called a Minister again? Is that an American thing? The female members of the congregation are called Sisters, and again, I wonder whether this is an American thing because mosques don’t work that way in my part of the world, and I live in a country where the official religion is Islam.

Minister Q and Sister Gloria, our main characters, are part of a movement that is more of a cult with ties to organized crime than a mainstream mosque, however, so maybe that’s why this mosque operates the way it does.

Sister Gloria has had a checkered past but she has found a new zeal about life and, especially, the hot Minister Q after joining the New Nation, which is an offshoot of the Nation of Islam.

She absorbed every drop of sweat trickling from Minster Q’s forehead, every bead soaking his white shirt and exposing the deep muscles of his chest. Sweat soaked the waistline of Minister Q’s black trousers. She imagined the oily dew making his buttocks shine like onyx. She closed her eyes and inhaled the musk of his dangling sex deeply. Her lips parted.

Our darling certainly has a vivid imagination, but if Minister Q looked like that guy on the cover, I’m right there beside her, and we can both part our lips together.

Her infatuation grows to such a point that she embarks on an affair with the one of the Minister’s guards to get closer to our holy man. Unfortunately, she will soon learn that the fellow is not the perfect sexy icon of righteousness that she imagined him to be.

Now, I actually spent a while trying to decide what genre this story should fall into. There isn’t any actual sex scene between Sister Gloria and Minister Q, and while there is some crime element here, it isn’t enough for me to consider it a thriller or crime story in the conventional sense. So what is it?

Well, my instinct tells me this one would be right at home in erotica. This is because it works best to me in that sense.

You see, the appeal of erotica with a touch of religion is the apparent taboo that comes with the territory, taboo that naturally makes the whole thing even more fun. However, stories of priests and nuns rutting happily away don’t work because that’s just people role playing, or wearing costumes, if you ask me.

Let me put it this way. American Horror Story is not a show I find particularly entertaining or fun, but the second season Asylum gets one scene done perfectly right: Sister Jude, infatuated with the Monsignor Timothy Howard, imagines while they were conversing one evening of her seducing him. She dramatically whips off her cowl, shaking her glorious curls loose, before unbuttoning her suit to reveal a red slinky dress under. She straddles his lap as Pater Noster plays in the background, and he runs his hand along her arm and then her face as she puts her head closer to his. That’s it. No actual sex, nothing, but dang, that scene is hot.

It’s the same with Minister Q. Sister Gloria touching herself as she spies on the object of her infatuation, the way she degrades herself with other men because she believes it will only bring her closer to him… it’s all filthy, taboo, sickening, and all the more hot because the wrongness of all of this actually magnifies erotic aspects of the story. Nothing here is as explicit as a typical erotica, but some of the scenes here can be far more scorching than a rump-a-pump-pump scene in other types of erotica because this is religion and sex entwined in ways that Allah, Jesus, et cetera won’t typically approve of.

So, while I won’t normally consider this story particularly amazing—it’s too short, and the more plot-heavy aspects of the story are glossed over too quickly to work—I also find this a sensual trip down the mind of a rather deranged stalker of a woman that has a pretty twisted view of love, life, and sex. I won’t make the same decisions as Sister Gloria were I in her shoes—I’d blackmail him into being my good little horny doggy instead—it’s rather frightening how I can understand her point of view. Hot men can certainly drive any god-fearing woman cray cray, I’d say.

Minister Q—not exactly a great story, but it’s a kind of guilty pleasure that makes my world go round.