Samhain Publishing, $3.50, ISBN 978-1-60504-478-1
Contemporary Erotica, 2009
Saddled is like a textbook of ménage à trois clichés. We have two men, Bobby Blackhawk (sole distinguishing trait: the Native American) and Cale Yancey (sole distinguishing trait: the guy who is not the Native American) who like a woman they can both boink at the same time. Why? Just because. We then have a heroine in distress. Katherine Duvall demonstrates to the world that the stereotype about female drivers is true and she ends up getting some TLC from the two men.
That’s about it, really. After the perfunctory set-up in getting Katherine to become the meat in the sandwich, the rest of the story soon becomes an ode to the joys of the double whopper, including a charming scene of trying to fit two big fat sausages into the same burger, if you know what I mean. Ouch.
But hey, there are folks who enjoy that kind of scenes, so more power to them. For me, I’m actually quite appalled by the uncanny resemblance of this story to a piece of thin cardboard. The two men are nothing more than meatheads, with Bobby Blackhawk being the recognizable Native American only because he grunts things out in short fragmented sentences like a refugee from a bad Native American historical romance. The two men are also creepy in how they complete each other’s sentences, as if they are telepathic creepy alien twin brothers sharing the same thought bubble or something.
There is no credible psychology here. Katherine is all, “Yeah, yeah, I love you! Both of you! A long long time!” at the end to justify this story being marketed as a romance, but there is no romance here, just three meatheads having perfunctory sex to titillate the audience. While I have no problems with plot-less sex scenes if they are done right to entertain the reader, this short story is particularly painful to read because of the large number of fragmented sentences, completely zero characterization, and the whole dry and boring thing being passed off a romance to remember. It’s just some wham, bang, double bang-bang affair.
Read this, if you must, for the joyless sex scenes, because that is all this one has to offer.
