StarDust Press, $4.98, ISBN 978-981-05-7662-2
Fantasy Erotica, 2007
Okay, let’s see. Lust in Wonderland sees Alice, now 21, running down the rabbit hole to avoid being sent by her concerned family members into the loonybin and being reunited with the White Rabbit. Only, she now realizes that while her girlish mind pictured him as a rabbit, the “White Rabbit” is actually “a man completely painted in white” with “large, red eyes” that takes up apparently “more than half his face”. Alice is delighted at the sight of his “iron-hardness” and you can guess what happens next, I’m sure. The Cheshire Cat turns out to be a horny feline woman, and so forth.
It’s a pity that the love scenes clash badly with my own taste level because I find the love scenes often unnecessarily coarse and vulgar, as if author Isabelle Rose were trying too hard to shock me rather than to play to my senses with sensual love scenes. This is because Lust in Wonderland also offers an interesting possibility that Alice may be a truly mad person, like the Mad Hatter suggests, and everything is just a lovely delusion of hers. There is a lovely ambiguity about the overall premise of this story that fascinates me.
In Snow White’s Release, Snow White flees from her stepmother Queen Mirabel into the arms of seven brothers who turn out to be actually pretty… tall. They’ll take her in and give her food and shelter while in return she’ll take one of them to bed every night. She then falls in love with one of those brothers, Reese, which causes some complications as Reese gets unhappy with sharing her with his brothers. But then the Queen shows up with an apple and I’m sure you know what happens next.
This one isn’t as explicit as the previous story so I find myself enjoying it more. Again, Ms Rose has tried to do something more than mere sex scenes here, which I appreciate, with Snow White and Reese coming off pretty well given the length of the story as characters with some depths.
In Fairy Games, heroine Emma waits hand and foot like a servant to her biological mother Moira. Emma’s sole source of happiness is running off to dance naked in the rain in the middle of the forest. Don’t laugh, Ms Rose actually makes that come off as a “Aww, poor Emma!” thing rather than “Guffaw, guffaw, poor Emma!” While using a dildo on herself one day, she is come upon by an old man who tells her that he will give her the special ability to have a gemstone or a flower fall from her mouth when she speaks, provided she lets him have sex with her first. He turns into a cute elf and she agrees faster than you can say, “What a gullible twit!”
Soon, Emma is throwing up roses, gems, and what-not at the same time every time she speaks. That sounds terribly uncomfortable if you ask me. This leads to more sex with some bloke named Simon. I keep waiting for her to choke on a diamond since she’s lying on her back and you can bet her mouth is moving, but alas, all these diamonds and what-not keep “falling out” of her mouth in gravity- and physics-defying ease. Are we sure those are diamonds and not bubbles, Ms Rose?
Unlike the previous two stories, this one just goes on and on with the silly sex to the point of absurdity. Okay, even more absurdity than the previous two stories, which is saying something indeed.
That silly sex farce aside, Naughty Fairy Tales Volume 1 has some pretty interesting ideas. I am least impressed with the erotic aspects of this collection because when it comes to erotic scenes, Ms Rose tends to be more vulgar and coarse than she needs to be. I like what the first two stories in this collection could have been, but ultimately I feel that this collection would have been so much better as a straightforward fantasy collection.
